There are certainly liturgical echoes audible in some of
the language of the church fathers describing Christ’s death as a sacrifice,
which was a term borrowed from pre-Christian worship, both Jewish and pagan,
and adopted very early for Christian worship. Just how early the idea of
sacrifice was applied to Christian worship, specifically to the Eucharist, is
the subject of controversy. But by the date of the Didache—although that date is itself a controversial issue—the
application of the term “sacrifice” to the Eucharist seems to have been quite
natural, together with the identification of the Christian Eucharist as the
“pure offering” commanded in Malachi 1:11. But even without an answer to the
question of the Christian sacrifice, the description in the Epistle to the
Hebrews of the death of Christ as a sacrifice seems to have been based on the
Jewish liturgy. When the Jewish liturgical context of this sacrificial language
could no longer be taken for granted among Christian hearers and readers,
the Christian liturgies were already using similar language about the offering
of the prayers, the gifts, and the lives of the worshipers, and probably
also about the offering of the sacrifice of the Mass, so that the sacrificial
interpretation of the death of Christ never lacked a liturgical frame of
reference. When Barnabas, perhaps alone among the apostolic fathers, identified
Jesus with the sacrificial victim of Old Testament worship, this accorded with
his view of the Old Testament. And when, somewhat more than a century later,
Cyprian described Christ as offering the sacrifice of his suffering,*
it was in the context of the most extensive discussion of the celebration of
the Eucharist in the third century. Between Barnabas and Cyprian, we find
Tertullian speaking of Christ “offering himself up [to God] for our offenses”
and citing the sacrifices of pagan worship in defense of the appropriateness of
such an idea; and in a contrast between the “sacraments” of the Old Testament
and those of the New, he spoke of Christ as a “sacrifice for all the Gentiles.”*(Jaroslav
Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, 5 vols. [Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1975], 1:146-47, emphasis in bold added)
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