But the point I’m making – that religious experiences emerge from very specific, very long histories – could be made with most religious phenomena. I begin with a discussion of the Eucharist because my particular religious tradition is Christian. When I hear the words “This is my Body,” then, my mind immediately launches into a race to the evolutionary starting line, if you will. Based on the molecular clock, the last common ancestor, or LCA, of humans and Great Apes lived about 19 million years ago. Barbara Fruth, one of the study’s authors, told the digital magazine Sapiens that meal-sharing “must have its roots in our last common ancestor”. In fact, one recent paper even documented research of bonobos sharing food with bonobos outside of their own social group. No wonder so much mythological content is built up around the meal.”īut food-sharing even predates our Homo ancestors, and is currently observed in chimpanzees and bonobos. “The hunters feel proud to have done well and shared with their family those who prepared the food are recognised and appreciated everyone’s belly is getting filled and feeling good and so many positive social interactions are taking place.

“Think of uber pro-social hunter-gatherers having a meal,” one of my theology professors told me when I wondered about the deep evolutionary history behind the Eucharist. Neanderthals certainly pooled their resources, as did the several other Homo species dating back two million years. They’d already been in place since the emergence of modern humans, about 200,000 years ago.Īnd yet – Homo s apiens wasn’t the only species to discover the benefits of food-sharing. Seder, and later communion, were “taken up” theologically and liturgically, but the positive feelings around table-sharing were already in place. It is an act of table-sharing, certainly an important ritual in the ancient Near East. Any religious meal is, before it is anything else, a meal. After all, Jesus was a Jew, and so his act of breaking bread with the disciples reminds us of the entire history of the Jewish people, including their harrowing escape from Egyptian slavery and their receiving of the Torah at Sinai.īut we can go back even further. We can travel further back still, long before even the emergence of Christianity. We can also wonder about the historical meal on which the various Last Supper texts are based. Just how much past are Christians reminded of? Certainly the last two millennia, which, in addition to devout celebrations of the Eucharist, are rife with doctrinal disputes, church splits, episodes of violence, excommunications, papal pronouncements, and various metaphysical debates, all revolving around the communion meal.īut we can rewind further back, to the development of the oral traditions that got fixed into texts that were incorporated into the canonical New Testament. When Christians hear these words spoken in the present, we’re reminded of the past, which is always with us, which never goes away.

These words, recorded in the Gospels as being spoken by Jesus during the Last Supper, are said daily at Church services around the world before the communion meal is eaten.

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