What the Early Church Believed: The Real Presence

The doctrine and the Bible

In the Eucharist Jesus is literally and wholly present, body and blood, soul and divinity, under the appearances of bread and wine. Many Protestants call this unbiblical, but the Bible declares it openly (see 1 Corinthians 10:16-17; 11:23-29), and most forcefully in John 6:32-71.

A historian's summary

The Protestant historian J. N. D. Kelly writes in Early Christian Doctrines that early Eucharistic teaching was "unquestioningly realist": the consecrated bread and wine were taken to be, and treated as, the Savior's body and blood. He notes that Ignatius used this realism against those who denied Christ's real body; that Irenaeus affirmed it in passing while refuting the Gnostics; that Hippolytus and Tertullian spoke of the Lord's body and blood; and that Cyprian warned against profaning the sacrament.

The Fathers in their own words (summarized)

• Ignatius of Antioch (c. 110) longed for "the bread of God, which is the flesh of Jesus Christ," and said heretics stayed away from the Eucharist because they would not confess it to be the flesh of our Savior.
• Justin Martyr (c. 151) wrote that Christians do not receive it as common bread and drink, but as the flesh and blood of the incarnate Jesus.
• Irenaeus (c. 189) taught that the bread and the mixed cup, receiving the Word of God, become the Eucharist, the body of Christ, which nourishes our flesh.
• Tertullian (c. 210): the flesh feeds on Christ's body and blood so that the soul may be filled with God.
• Hippolytus (c. 217) applied Wisdom's furnished table (Proverbs 9:2) to Christ's body and blood offered daily at the altar.
• Origen (c. 248) contrasted the manna with the true food, the flesh of the Word, citing "For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink" (John 6:55).
• Cyprian (c. 251) warned, with 1 Corinthians 11:27, that those who receive unrepentant do violence to the Lord's body and blood.
• Aphraahat (c. 340) said the Lord gave his body as food and his blood as drink at the Last Supper.
• Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 350): after the invocation of the Trinity, the bread becomes Christ's body and the wine his blood; do not judge by taste but by faith.
• Ambrose (c. 390): Christ is in that sacrament, because it is the body of Christ.
• Theodore of Mopsuestia (c. 405) noted that Jesus did not say "This is the symbol of my body" but "This is my body."
• Augustine (c. 405–411) taught the newly baptized that the bread on the altar, sanctified by God's word, is the body of Christ, and the cup his blood (see Matthew 26:26).
• The Council of Ephesus (431) confessed that Christians receive not common flesh but the life-giving flesh of the Word himself.