Origin of the Eucharist the "Didache", "1 Clement" and Ignatius of Antioch provide glimpses of what Christians were doing in their eucharists. Later sources, Tertullian and the "Apostolic Tradition", offer some details from around the year 200. Once the Church "went public" after the conversion of Constantine the Great in the second decade of the fourth century, it was clear that the Eucharist was established as a central part of Christian life. Contemporary scholars debate whether Jesus meant to institute a ritual at his Last Supper; whether the Last Supper was an actual historical event in any way related to the undisputed early "Lord's
Eucharist in the Catholic Church highly lauded, purpose of adoring Christ present in the Eucharist. In the judgment of the Catholic Church, the concept of transubstantiation, with its accompanying unambiguous distinction between "substance" or underlying reality, and "accidents" or humanly perceptible appearances, safeguards against what it sees as the mutually opposed errors of, on the one hand, a merely figurative understanding of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist (the change of the substance is real), and, on the other hand, an interpretation that would amount to cannibalistic (a charge which pagans leveled at early Catholic Christians who did not understand the rites of