Christians also jealously guarded their ceremonies of Baptism and Eucharist from the uninitiated. It is indeed one of the peculiarities of their surviving literature from the first century CE (mostly the books of the New Testament) that although it talks a great deal about Baptism, it almost seems deliberately to avoid mention of the Eucharist – after Paul’s description of the Eucharist when writing to the Corinthians in the mid-first century, and the parallel descriptions in the Gospels, there is hardly any reference to it except in the writings of Ignatius of Antioch and the Didachē, both
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