Eucharist in the Gospel of Philip

Eucharist in the Gospel of Philip

The Eucharist and Jesus

The eucharist is Jesus. In Syriac it is called pharisatha, which means, “that which is spread out.” For Jesus came to crucify the world.

Eucharist and Baptism

The cup of prayer contains wine and water, for it represents the blood for which thanksgiving is offered. It is full of the holy spirit, and it belongs to the completely perfect human. When we drink it, we take to ourselves the perfect human.

The living water is a body, and we must put on the living human. Thus, when one is about to go down into the water, one strips in order to put on the living human.

The Holy Person
The holy person is completely holy, including the person’s body. The holy person who takes up bread consecrates it, and does the same with the cup or anything else the person takes up and consecrates. So how would the person not consecrate the body also? 

The Breaking of Bread (Acts 2:42) is also known as “the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist, and the communion meal.

From the Gospel of Philip it can be gathered that the meal consisted of bread and wine mixed with water.

82 And the bread and the oil are sanctified by the power of the Name, and they are not the same as they appeared to be when they were received, but they have been transformed by power into spiritual power. Thus, the water, also, both in exorcism and baptism, not only keeps off evil, but gives sanctification as well (Extracts from the Works of Theodotus 82)

According to the Extracts from the Works of Theodotus 82.1, the bread was “sanctified by the power of the Name.”

The same applies to “the bread and the oil”: they are transformed into a spiritual power by the power of the Name of God

The Valentinians celebrated the Eucharist with bread and a cup.  The Gospel of Philip in particular shows that Valentinians could speak without difficulty about partaking of the flesh and the blood of the Savior in the Eucharist, because they gave a symbolic meaning to these words: thus, for instance, the “flesh” is the Logos and the “blood” is the Holy Spirit. 

The author of the Gospel of Philip manages to find allusions in the Eucharistic bread both to the crucifixion (the “spreading out”: 63:21–24) and to the incarnation (“bread from heaven”: 55:6–14), and that the Eucharistic prayer in 58:10–14 is an invocation of the union with the angels, in other words of the bridal chamber.In the latter case it seems that the reference to the union with the angels served to stage the Eucharist as an image of the wedding feast associated with the bridal chamber

As a meal, the significance of the Eucharist was, as we have seen, exclusively symbolic; the enjoyment of food and drink was hardly a goal in itself.

bread The substance of the omnipresent Christ body. There is substance in words of Truth, and this substance is appropriated by prayer and meditation on Truth.

wine/blood the sustenance for spirit, mind, 

So it is also [75] with bread, the cup, and oil, though there are mysteries higher than these. (The Gospel of Philip)