The Agapé and the Eucharist in the Early Church: Studies in the History of the Christian Love-Feasts

Keating investigation does not claim to have added largely to what was already known on the subject. The Eucharist has long been regarded as, if not, like Mary Queen of Scots, “the eternal enigma of history,” at least one of the obscurest of problems. Keating does not profess to have solved it. Nevertheless, he has sought to bring together illustrative sources that reference or allude to the Lord’s Supper or the Agape Feast in the early church and contemporaneous literature. Starting the New Testament, Keating examines the meal from its very origin in the Gospels and then works through history up to the third century before pausing to examine the Eucharist in the context of early church ordinances before continuing his survey in the fourth century and afterward where Christianity was institutionalized in the Roman Empire by Constantine.