Communion / The Lord’s supper
From A collection of short essays. Project references reflect the source essay; see our current status.
There’s a section in many English Bible translations named ‘The Last Supper’. That’s confusing in most countries with a British heritage where ‘supper’ is a late-night snack (often around 9pm), and where we would definitely call the meal that Jesus had along with his disciples a ‘dinner’.
However, despite that, many churches celebrate something they often call ‘Communion’ or ‘The Lord’s supper’ (and the miniature ‘meal’ is certainly not usually a ‘dinner’). Now ‘communion’ or even the verb ‘to commune’ is not a word that you’d hear on the street, except perhaps in a New Age small group or something. ‘Community’ is a common word, but ‘communing’ apparently means “to get very close to someone or something by exchanging feelings or thoughts” (according to the Cambridge dictionary, with an example about communing with nature by lying naked in the grass!) But we are certainly instructed to remember (or consider/meditate about) Jesus (e.g., Luke 22:19).
These are just some of the new terms that new Christians or visitors have to learn when they start attending churches. Some denominations have much more jargon than others, e.g., learning words like advent and lent and liturgy, in fact you can find whole online dictionaries of this like www.ChurchOfEngland.org/terms-and-conditions/glossary and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_Christianity. I estimated this latter one to contain some 200 terms!
One of the aims of the new Open English Translation of the Bible is to reduce the amount of jargon like this, or Christianese as some call it. We do this by asking the question: If our non-Christian work colleagues were talking about this concept, do they have a well-known word or phrase to describe it? Sometimes they do; sometimes they don’t.
Sometimes Bible translations are stuck with old words through an accident of history, e.g., Middle English ‘tabernacle’: via French from Latin tabernaculum ‘tent’, diminutive of taberna ‘hut, tavern’. So, the OET-RV just uses ‘tent’.
So back to communion/Lord’s supper, the name isn’t in the Bible but only in section headings and similar. How about “Yeshua’s final Passover dinner”? But changing the name of the ceremony at church might be more difficult.
Robert Hunt, January 2024