HistoricalChristian.Faith

Was "Do this in remembrance of me" a commission to the apostles alone? (Luke 22:19; 1 Corinthians 11)

Type: interpretive argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: contested — the command was certainly first spoken to the Twelve, and reading it as their priestly commissioning is coherent and fits the uniformly reserved celebration of the early church; but that the words by themselves restrict who may celebrate is an inference the bare text underdetermines, since Paul hands the very same command to the whole Corinthian congregation · the restricted reading advanced by Thomas Aquinas, the Council of Trent, and the Catholic magisterium; the perpetual-ordinance reading advanced by the Reformers and most Protestant exegetes.

Related arguments: Christ's commission to the apostles — see also Did Christ delegate his own authority to the apostles, to be handed on to ordained successors?

The interpretation to weigh

The historic "why only priests" case rests in part on a reading of the institution narrative: that Christ's command "this do in remembrance of me" (Luke 22:19; cf. 1 Corinthians 11:24–25) was a commission to the apostles specifically — at the Last Supper he both constituted the Twelve priests and charged them, and through them their ordained successors, to confect and offer the Eucharist — rather than a general instruction to every Christian. On this reading the second-person command attaches to those addressed, and the office of celebrating descends through ordination from the apostles alone. The objection denies the inference: the words establish that the rite is to be repeated, but not that only a restricted class may perform it; Paul transmits the identical command to a whole mixed congregation, and the present-tense imperative reads naturally as a standing ordinance for the church, not a transfer of office. This page weighs the two readings of the same texts.

The case for a commission to the apostles

Only the Twelve were at the table. Luke frames the meal narrowly: "when the hour was come, he sat down, and the twelve apostles with him … and he … gave unto them, saying … this do in remembrance of me" (Luke 22:14, 19). The command is in the second person to a defined company; on the plainest reading it is addressed to those present, the apostles, not to the church at large that was not there.¹

The dogmatic form. The Council of Trent made the reading a defined doctrine: at the Supper Christ offered his body and blood and "delivered [them] to be received by His apostles, whom He then constituted priests of the New Testament; and by those words, This do in remembrance of me, He commanded both them and their successors in the priesthood, to offer them." Its canon anathematizes denial: "If any one shall say, that by those words, Do this in remembrance of me, Christ did not institute the apostles priests; or, did not ordain that they, and other priests, should offer His own body and blood; let him be anathema" (Session XXII).² The standard reference statement of the Catholic position reads the words as spoken "not to the whole mass of the laity, but exclusively to the Apostles and their successors in the priesthood," and Aquinas rests the priest's power directly on them: ordination "puts [the priest] upon a level with them to whom the Lord said … 'Do this for a commemoration of Me'" (Summa Theologiae III, Q. 82, a. 1).³

"Do this" as "offer this." The strongest exegetical prop is not the bare pronoun but the verb. Joachim Jeremias argued that "this do" (touto poieite) carries sacrificial overtones — in the Septuagint poieō is repeatedly used of offering a sacrifice — so that the command "must have been charged with sacrificial overtones for second-century ears; Justin at any rate understood them to mean, 'Offer this.'" If the command is "offer this," it is by its nature addressed to those who offer; a sacrifice implies a sacrificer, and the charge falls on the order that presides — which is exactly how the church read it from the sub-apostolic age, restricting the offering to the bishop and those he authorized (Ignatius, Nicaea).⁴

The case for a standing ordinance for the whole church

Paul gives the same command to a whole congregation. The decisive counter-text is 1 Corinthians 11. Writing to a mixed church — not to apostles — Paul repeats the institution verbatim, "this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me … This cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me," and then applies it to all: "as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he come" (1 Corinthians 11:24–26). His instructions on examining oneself and discerning the body are directed to every participant, not to a celebrating caste (11:28–29). If "do this" had restricted the act to ordained successors, Paul applies it in precisely the wrong direction.⁵

The grammar points to repetition, not restriction. The imperative poieite is present tense — "keep doing this" — which the older readers heard as instituting a perpetual observance ("do this perpetually," some versions paraphrase), not as a once-for-all conferral of office. What the command settles is that the rite continues; who may preside is a separate question the words do not, of themselves, answer. The Protestant reading concludes that "Scripture gives no indication of a limited class of Christians" charged with the act, and takes the "holy priesthood" of 1 Peter 2 as the whole church.⁶

Adversarial assessment

What holds. That the command was first spoken to the apostles is simply the narrative datum — Luke and Paul both have Christ address the Twelve. And the move from "spoken to the apostles" to "carried on by an ordained ministry" is not arbitrary: the church that received these texts did, uniformly and very early, reserve the eucharistic offering to an appointed order (Ignatius, Justin, Cyprian, Nicaea), which is the practice one would expect if the first hearers took the charge as a commission to themselves and their successors rather than a blanket license. The sacrificial-verb reading ("offer this") gives that practice a genuine exegetical foothold rather than leaving it as sheer church order. So the interpretation is coherent and historically corroborated; it is not a mere apologetic afterthought.

What is overstated. The inference does not live in the words "do this" alone. Taken by itself, a second-person command to a group establishes what they are to do, not that only they (and a line of successors) may ever do it — "take, eat" and "this do" are addressed to the same hearers, yet no one reads "take, eat" as reserved to the ordained. The restriction has to be supplied from elsewhere (the nature of the rite as sacrifice, the standing ministry), and where a proponent makes the bare command carry the whole weight — as Aquinas does when he lets ordination follow from being "put upon a level with them to whom the Lord said 'Do this'" — the proof-text is loaded beyond what it can bear on its own. The hard fact for the restrictive reading is 1 Corinthians 11: the one apostle who transmits the command in writing hands it to an entire congregation as the normative practice of the church, with no hint that its performance is reserved while its reception is general. That does not prove the rite was lay-celebrated — the early evidence is uniformly against that — but it shows the institution narrative does not, on its own face, settle the question of agency. The Tridentine formulation ("constituted priests … by those words") states as the plain sense of the text a reading the text underdetermines; it is theological inference clothed as exegesis.

Two questions kept apart. (a) Was the command first given to the apostles? — yes, on the narrative. (b) Does the command, of itself, establish that only their ordained successors may celebrate? — that is the contested step, and it is underdetermined by the words and cut against by Paul's congregational use of them. The restriction the doctrine needs rides not on "do this" simply but on the prior conviction that the Eucharist is a sacrifice (so that the charge falls on those who offer); grant that, and the apostolic-commission reading follows naturally, deny it, and the command reads as easily as a standing ordinance for the whole church. The argument is therefore downstream of the eucharistic-sacrifice question, exactly as the wider priesthood dispute is.

Assessment

Contested. The reading is strong by the lights of the tradition and the early church's practice and weak by the lights of bare exegesis, and the two do not converge. As a claim about narrative setting — that Christ spoke the command to the apostles at the Supper — it is simply true. As the load-bearing claim the doctrine makes of it — that those words by themselves constituted the apostles priests and reserved the act of celebrating to them and their ordained successors — it is an inference the text does not compel: a second-person charge to repeat the rite settles that it continues, not who may perform it, and Paul transmits the identical command to a whole congregation as the church's standing practice. The restrictive reading is coherent and far from ruled out — it coheres with the uniform sub-apostolic reservation of the offering and gains real force if "do this" means "offer this" — but it is a less-probable reading of the bare command, not the plain sense of it, and it leans on the prior eucharistic-sacrifice premise to do its work. Hence contested: a genuine and early commission the institution narrative is consistent with, but not one the words of Luke 22:19 establish on their own against the congregational use Paul makes of them.

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