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영어

The Eucharist is one of two parts of the Lord's Supper or the Lord's Table, and the other of the Lord’s Supper is the Agape as the Eucharistic Meal in a proper rite. The Lord's Supper has been regarded for a long time as a communal meal, the agape or as a different name for the Eucharist. Meanwhile, it has been assumed that the Eucharist is only a rite that Jesus institutes and wants to be celebrated, while the Agape might be just ordinary meal for fellowship and thus has been disappeared or rarely held in the Church history. However, the related biblical texts and some early Christian documents suggest that there are various Eucharistic traditions reflecting a community's historical and theological contexts. In almost all cases, the Lord’s Supper includes both the Eucharist as a sacramental rite and the Agape meal as an appropriate rite though sometimes the Eucharist seems to be woven with the Agape meal rite. Further, the Agape has been practiced in a rite unlike the supposition that the Agape was an ordinary fellowship meal in the Bible and Christian history. This article traces the origins of the Lord’s Supper in the Bible, Christian writings, and historical events, and concludes that we can reconstruct the Lord’s Supper as a whole, bringing the Agape a communal meal rite in or after Eucharist in sequence.