Origin of the Eucharist Origin of the Eucharist Church teaching places the origin of the Eucharist in the Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples, at which he is believed to have taken bread and given it to his disciples, telling them to eat of it, because it was his body, and to have taken a cup and given it to his disciples, telling them to drink of it because it was the cup of the covenant in his blood. The earliest extant written account of a Christian "eucharistia" (Greek: thanksgiving) is that in the First Epistle to the Corinthians (around AD 55), in
Eucharist inward spiritual experience of their adherents over any outward ritual, Quakers (members of the Religious Society of Friends) generally do not baptize or observe Communion. Christian denominations differ in their understanding of whether they may receive the Eucharist with those with whom they are not in full communion. The famed apologist St. Justin Martyr (c. 150) wrote: "No one else is permitted to partake of it, except one who believes our teaching to be true..." For the first several hundred years, non-members were forbidden even to be present at the sacramental ritual; visitors and catechumens (those still undergoing instruction) were