chapter 26

). In all of these meals the amount of food required was considerable, and providing it naturally entailed real expense. To supply this food, consequently, was a meritorious act, which not only satisfied the needs of the brethren but enabled the church to hold a liturgical service, at which the food was placed in the midst of the congregation and “blessed”.[165] Hence the various foods were naturally called “offerings”, and from this it was only a short step to calling the service itself a “sacrifice”.

The word first appears in Didache 14. 1-2, where it is used of the eucharist or (more probably) the eucharist-agape. When the term was definitely adopted into the Christian vocabulary, its further definition in Old Testament language was inevitable. Here the nearest analogue might have been found in the “peace-offerings”, which were eaten by those who offered them. But the Christians did not usually follow Levitical distinctions closely, and Hippolytus (3. 5) speaks of the bishop as “propitiating God’s countenance”, language that more properly belongs to the “sin-offerings”.

A special type of Christian offering were the first-fruits (