Hi @swamidass,
You are entirely correct in your assertion that I don’t put forward an explanation of how belief in the Eucharist arose. As I wrote in my OP:
In an article titled, [Drinking blood at a kosher Eucharist? The sound of scholarly silence](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/014610790203200405?journalCode=btba)(_Biblical Theology Bulletin_, November 1, 2002), **Dr. Michael J. Cahill**, a former Professor of Biblical Studies at Duquesne University, comprehensively surveys no less than seventy scholarly sources on the question of the likelihood of the Jewish Jesus proposing the drinking of blood at the Eucharist, and concludes that the origin of the Christian Eucharist remains a profound mystery...So, how would a neutral historian evaluate the claim found in St. Paul’s writings and in Mark’s Gospel, that Jesus, on the night before he died, instituted the Eucharist, instructing his disciples to eat his flesh and drink his blood, and to continue doing so in remembrance of him, in the future (1 Corinthians 11: 25-26)? Despite its dual attestation, it’s a very tall claim, given that the idea of eating human flesh and drinking any kind of blood is utterly foreign to Judaism. While it is possible to suppose that Jesus had previously explained to his disciples what he was doing (see John 6:53-68), the mental leap required to get first-century Jews to accept this idea of eating their Master’s flesh and drinking his blood is a huge one. A fair-minded historian would judge it more parsimonious to assume that such an idea did not spring up overnight, or even over the short space of a year, but instead evolved gradually in the Christian community, in the twenty-odd years between Jesus’ death and St. Paul’s writings on the Eucharist, and that the institution of the Eucharist in its Pauline form was retrospectively ascribed to Jesus. In other words, a neutral historian would have to conclude that the notion that Jesus celebrated a meal which we would recognize as the Christian Eucharist on the night before he died is most likely a historical anachronism.
Now, is that what really happened? I don’t know. I’m just writing about what a neutral historian would conclude.
I’d like to finish by quoting from a passage I wrote in another thread:
I’m a Catholic, and I believe in the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. But the question of whether Jesus said, “This is my body … This is my blood” at the Last Supper is not an in-house question but a historical one, to which I answer: probably not, for reasons explained in my OP. I also quoted Catholic priest **Professor Robert J. Daly**, S.J., who [argues](http://cdn.theologicalstudies.net/66/66.1/66.1.1.pdf) that Jesus did indeed institute the Eucharist, but that it was not the Eucharist as we know it, and that it took many generations of guidance from the Holy Spirit for the Eucharist to reach its current form.I cannot see why this should scandalize Christians in general, or even Catholics. After all, the central dogmas of Christianity are surely the Trinity, the Incarnation and the Atonement. But it is widely acknowledged (and has been known since the days of the Jesuit scholar, Petavius) that the early Church Fathers were not orthodox on the subject of the Trinity: nothing like an orthodox position emerged until the fourth century. Why is it so difficult to accept that the Christian doctrine of the Eucharist underwent a similar evolution, over the first and second centuries?