The Eucharist

Justin Martyr's First Apology, written around the middle of the second century, describes Sunday worship in terms a modern Orthodox Christian would recognise: readings, a sermon, common prayer, the offering of bread and wine, a prayer of thanksgiving, the people's Amen, and distribution — with provision carried to the absent and to the poor.

Justin is also explicit that the eucharist is not common bread and drink, and that only the baptised who hold the faith and live accordingly receive it. Ignatius, half a century earlier, says that those who deny the reality of Christ's flesh abstain from the Eucharist because they will not confess what it is.

The canons touch it repeatedly and practically: communion for the dying in canon XIII of Nicaea, and the order of who administers to whom in canon XVIII.

Follow this theme through the archive

• Justin Martyr

  A philosopher converted to Christianity who argued the faith to emperors and to a Jewish interlocutor, and whose description of Sunday worship is the earliest we have.

  Father or writer

• Ignatius of Antioch

  Bishop of Antioch, martyred at Rome early in the second century, whose seven letters are the earliest sustained witness to the Church ordered around a bishop, presbyters and deacons.

  Father or writer

• Canon XIII of Nicaea

  The dying are not to be deprived of communion; and any who recover are placed among those who communicate in prayers only.

  Canon

• Canon XVIII of Nicaea

  Deacons are to remain within their own order: they do not administer the Eucharist to presbyters, do not touch it before the bishops, and do not sit among the presbyters.

  Canon

• Worship and the Divine Liturgy

  The shape of Christian worship in the second century, and the shape of it now.

  Lesson