1 Corinthians 11:23-25

“For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, That the Lord Jesus, the night in which He was betrayed, took bread: 24. and when He had given thanks, He brake it, and said, This is My body [which is] for you; this do in remembrance of Me. 25. After the same manner also He took the cup, when He had supped, saying, This cup is the New Testament in My blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me.”

The for shows that the account of the institution, which follows, is meant to justify the various rebukes expressed in 1 Corinthians 11:22. First of all, Paul establishes on an immovable foundation the authority of his narrative. It comes from the Lord, and without any other middle party than the apostle himself.

The ἐγώ, I, is put at the head to give the readers an assurance of the truth of the narrative: This is what I hold, I from a good source, from the Lord Himself.

But it is asked in what way this account could have been delivered by the Lord to the Apostle Paul, who was not of the number of the Twelve present at the institution of the Supper. The usual answer is this: The apostle had knowledge of the fact from the apostolical tradition; and to prove this mode of transmission, reliance is placed on the use of the preposition ἀπό, which does not denote, as παρά would do, direct transmission, but which simply points to the first source from which the account proceeded. Thus, according to Reuss, “Paul here speaks of a communication made to him by older disciples, but not of an immediate revelation.” But the question arises in this case, what means the I placed first in the sentence: “ I, even I have received of the Lord”? If he is speaking of no other communication from the Lord than that which he gave as the author of the rite in question, or that which, through the apostles as its channels, conveyed this account to Paul, thousands of Christians, and hundreds of evangelists, might have said as much as St. Paul; and instead of saying: “ I have received,” Paul, if he was not to be guilty of charlatanism, ought simply to have said: “We have received of the Lord.” In the passage 1 Corinthians 15:3, where he is really summing up the apostolical tradition, he avoids using the pronoun ἐγώ which characterizes our passage. If the account of the institution of the Supper really came to Paul from the Lord, it could only be in the way of direct revelation. The preposition ἀπό, which strictly denotes the first origin, is not opposed, as is constantly repeated, to this interpretation; comp. Colossians 1:7; Colossians 3:24; 1 John 1:5, where the communication implied in the ἀπό is as direct and personal as possible. And if it is objected, that to express this last idea παρά would have been necessary, which specially denotes direct transmission, it is forgotten that this preposition is virtually found in the verb παρέλαβον, I received from. By using the two prepositions ἀπό and παρά the apostle brings out at once the purity of the origin and the purity of the transmission of his account. Heinrici quotes several passages in which the term παραλαμβάνειν is applied to initiation into the mysteries, for example in Porphyry: παραλαμβάνειν τὰ Μιθριακά, to be initiated into the mysteries of Mithras. This meaning would certainly suit here. The apostle then would say that the Lord Himself initiated him into the knowledge of this important act of his life. But we have no need of such a comparison to account for the choice of the term used by the apostle.

Bengel, Olshausen, Rückert, Meyer, de Wette, Osiander, have recognised that the only possible meaning of the passage was that of direct instruction given to the apostle by the Lord; comp. Galatians 1:12. It is objected that revelation bears on doctrines, not on historical facts, and it is asked what purpose such a miracle would have served, since Paul could know from ecclesiastical tradition the fact which he here relates. But we find in the Acts a revelation, containing at least the sketch of a historical fact (Acts 9:12), and several visions in which the Lord conversed with Paul, as friend with friend (Acts 22:17 seq., Acts 23:11). If these accounts are not mere tales, we should conclude from them that revelation may also bear on particular historical facts. Now in the present case such a communication was a necessary condition of the apostle's independence and dignity. For he was not a simple evangelist, delegated by men (Galatians 1:1), but a founder of Churches, the apostle chosen for the heathen world, as the Twelve were for the Jewish people, and consequently dependent only on the Lord; and when he instituted in his Churches a rite of such decisive importance as the Supper was, he required to be able to do so without appealing to any human authority, but supported, like the Twelve, by the Lord Himself. As we study the account immediately following, we shall prove the truth of this observation. The manner in which the Lord communicated this fact to him, we know not, and can only refer to Galatians 1:11-12.

The words: that which also I delivered unto you, guarantee the purity of transmission. The καί, also, expresses the identity between the accounts of Jesus to Paul, and of Paul to the Corinthians.

As he enters on the narrative, Paul adds to the title Lord the name Jesus, to carry back the thought of his readers to His earthly person, and so call up the scene of the institution.

If Paul mentions the detail, that it was night when Jesus instituted the Supper, it was no doubt to compare with that time the hour when the Church celebrated the rite. Every similar night which shall follow should reproduce the emotions of that original night, and borrow from it something of its deep solemnity. The sad character of that night is brought out by the words: in which He was betrayed. Nine Mjj., belonging to the three families, read the verb in the form of παρεδίδετο, which is adopted by Tischendorf. In fact, the later Greek writers tended more and more to assimilate the conjugation of the other classes of verbs in μι to the conjugation of verbs in ημι; or should we see in this strange form the imperfect of a compound of δίδημι (formed from δέω, to bïnd), a word which appears once in the Anabasis? The sense would be: “on the night on which they bound Him.” But neither the imperfect nor the preposition παρά agrees with such a meaning.

The article introduced by the Greco-Lat. reading before ἄρτον must be rejected. The word literally signifies a bread; one of the cakes of unleavened bread placed on the table.