Language Studies

Difficult Sayings

Blessing the bread
Matthew 26:26; Mark 6:41; Luke 24:30

"when He had taken the five loaves and the two fish, He looked up to heaven, blessed and broke the loaves..." (Mark 6:41; Matthew 14:19; Luke 9:16, NKJV)

"as they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to the disciples and said, 'Take, eat; this is My body'" (Mark 6:41; Matthew 26:26; Luke 22:19; cf. Luke 24:30, NKJV)

The KJV of Luke 9:16 says that Jesus took the loaves and fish and "looking up to heaven, he blessed them, and brake, and gave to the disciples to set before the multitude". Similarly, Matthew 14:19 in the NAS says that "He blessed the food". Finally, The Message in Matthew 26:26 says, "Jesus took and blessed the bread, broke it". Does it really matter? Well, yes. Adding the non-original words "it" or "the food" may aid our comprehension of the terse Greek and original Hebrew but they can also confuse our understanding.

In the Jewish worldview to bless "it", the bread or the food is anathema and against the idea that God created the world and everything in it as good. Man may have fallen and the earth may not yield so easily to man's toil, but there is nothing about bread that needs to be blessed before eating it. It is the Graeco-Christian view that the world is tainted and needs blessing and sanctifying before use.

The purpose of grace and blessings is to praise and acknowledge God as author and provider not to somehow sanctify and improve the quality of fallen food!

Jesus said grace, or rather a blessing, before and/or after meals (Deuteronomy 8:10; Matthew 26:26, Mark 6:41 and Luke 24:30; cf. the early Christan writing Didache 10.1). The object of the blessing was not the food but God. It was inconceivable that a Jew would bless the object and not the originator/creator. The traditional Jewish blessing of God for the food, rather than of the food, is:

"Barukh attah 'Adonai 'elohenu Melekh ha-olam ha-motsi lechem meen ha-arets"
"Blessed are You, our Lord God, King of the Ages/Universe, who brings forth bread from the earth"

It is an unfortunate aspect of Eucharistic history that 'eating the bread' and 'blessing God' has become 'blessing the bread' and 'eating God'. In churches, Catholic and Protestant alike, the bread and wine are blessed, and in Catholic ones the bread becomes the very body of Christ/God (transubstantiation). This doctrine of blessed bread and transubstantiation can be traced back as early as Justin Martyr (c. A.D. 150; Apology, 1.66.1-2) and Ignatius (c. A.D. 110; to the Smyrnaeans 7), although the strict term transubstantiation was not in use until the 12th-13th centuries. Transubstantiation was particularly odious to the Jews and to the docetists^F1 who would have no part of it.

For a Jew, to bless the bread itself would have been equally unthinkable. It was God Himself who was blessed. If one peruses the N.T. accounts of the Last Supper and of the miraculous feedings it is apparent that the text usually reads, "and X blessed [it] and broke the bread. . .", the subject of the blessing is usually added rather than originally present in the text itself. Thus, the 'it' could also be 'Him' or 'God', to a Jew this would be the most likely reading. In this instance the NIV and RSV offer some of the best translations of e.g., Matthew 26:26; Luke 24:30; Mark 6:41, the NASB, Phillips, KJV and NKJV are incorrect in their implied grammar resulting in the food itself being blessed rather than God. Acts 27:35 records Paul's continuing practice of blessing God before taking food, just as Jesus, both in accordance with Deuteronomy 8:10.

Part of the growing desire to bless and sanctify the Eucharistic elements arose out of Hellenistic dualism. This saw the world divided between matter and spirit, secular and sacred, unholy and holy etc. Thus the material elements of bread and wine, and indeed the vessels themselves, required sanctification and blessing to make them holy, according to the Greek view. This process later spread to all kinds of relics and religious objects but this has nothing to do with biblical or Jewish belief.

FOOTNOTES:
F1: An heretical early Christian sect from the Greek verb dokein ‘to seem to be’ wherein Jesus is imagined to have been God who only seemed to be man, as all bodily mortality was despised by docetists.

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