What did the early church believe about communion?
By Easton Martin | January 3, 2026
From the earliest days of the Church, the Eucharist stood at the center of Christian worship, yet its form and theological framing were far less uniform than later traditions often assume. Scripture, early Christian manuals such as the Didache, and the writings of those taught directly by the apostles reveal a practice that was deeply meaningful but not rigidly standardized.
In the New Testament, the Synoptic Gospels present the Eucharist primarily as a covenantal meal. Jesus takes bread and wine, identifies them with his body and blood, and commands his disciples to repeat the act in remembrance of him. Paul echoes this tradition in 1 Corinthians 11, emphasizing both proclamation and self-examination. These texts provide the earliest liturgical core, but they do not prescribe precise language, frequency, or structure beyond the basic elements.
By the late first or early second century, the Didache offers one of the earliest non-biblical descriptions of Christian communion. Strikingly, its Eucharistic prayers differ significantly from later sacramental formulas. The cup is blessed before the bread, there is no explicit reference to Christ’s body and blood, and the language centers on thanksgiving, unity, and the gathering of the Church into God’s kingdom. The Didache also distinguishes between ordinary meals and the Eucharist, reserving communion for the baptized, yet it gives no indication that its prayer forms were universal or mandatory.
This diversity continues in the writings of the Apostolic Fathers.
The writings of Ignatius of Antioch are often cited as early evidence for belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and rightly so. Ignatius speaks with striking realism, insisting that the Eucharist is “the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ” and condemning those who refuse communion because they deny Christ’s true incarnation. However, Ignatius’s emphasis is not on explaining how Christ is present, but on why that presence matters. This is in stark contrast to later theologians who focused more on aristotelian categories of substance and accidents when attempting to figure out in what sense, if any, the bread and wine become Christ’s flesh and blood.
Ignatius’ concern is directed against Docetism, which denied that Christ truly took on flesh or truly suffered. For Ignatius, affirming the Eucharist as Christ’s flesh is a confession of the incarnation and resurrection, not a metaphysical claim about the transformation of the elements. He offers no philosophical account of change in bread and wine, no sacramental mechanics, and no technical vocabulary resembling later doctrines such as transubstantiation. Instead, the Eucharist functions as a theological and ecclesial boundary marker: it testifies to the reality of Christ’s embodied life and death and binds the Church together under the authority of the bishop. Ignatius’s realism is thus christologicall rather than speculative, reflecting an early Christian world in which belief preceded systematization.
Justin Martyr describes a structured communal meal involving readings, prayers, and the distribution of bread and wine, but again without claiming a single fixed formula handed down verbatim from the apostles. What mattered was fidelity to Christ’s command and the Church’s shared faith, not uniform liturgical expression.
Taken together, these sources suggest that there was no single, tightly defined apostolic tradition governing exactly how communion was to be celebrated. Early Christians agreed on the Eucharist’s importance, its connection to Christ’s saving work, and its role in uniting believers, but they expressed these convictions in different ways.
