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Four Accounts That Do Not Agree

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Four Accounts That Do Not Agree

The New Testament preserves the institution four times, in Matthew, Mark, Luke and the eleventh chapter of the first letter to the Corinthians, and no two are identical. They fall into two families. Mark and Matthew have Jesus say of the cup that it is his blood of the covenant, poured out for many; Luke and Paul have him call it the new covenant in his blood. Paul and Luke carry the command to do this in remembrance of him, and Mark and Matthew do not. Paul's is the earliest text to survive, written some twenty years before the first gospel, and he introduces it as something he received and passed on rather than as his own report, which makes it evidence of a liturgical formula already in use.

Luke complicates matters further. A group of early manuscripts gives a shorter text that stops after the first mention of the cup, and the longer text, with the bread given for you and the cup of the new covenant, is the one printed in most modern editions. Which is original has been argued for more than a century, and the choice changes the shape of the passage.

Every liturgy therefore begins by choosing. The Roman Canon, the Byzantine anaphoras and the Reformation orders each assemble a text out of the four accounts, with additions of their own: the Roman rite's for you and for many, and the Byzantine rite's take, eat, are pieces of that assembly. There is no single scriptural wording for a church to simply copy, and there never was.

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