Our Daily Bread: Food and Drink in the Apostolic Age

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Food and drink are the staples of human life. In the world of the Roman Empire, when most people were farmers living in agrarian cultures and droughts or contaminants were constant threats to crops and water supplies, the cultivation, preparation, trade and religious significance of food and drink were central to daily life. Food and drink were the staples for all peoples living within the Empire, including the Hebrews of the Holy Land and Diaspora as well as the Christians of the apostolic Church. This essay will explore the role of food and drink in the lives of the Greco-Romans, Hebrews and early Christians of the first century A.D.

The culinary practices of the Hebrews before the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 A.D. centered on the rules of ritual purity or cleanliness outlined in the Mosaic Law and interpreted by the different religious sects of the time, including the rabbinic Pharisees and the monastic Essenes. The kosher laws for the preparation and consumption of food, as well as its use in religious festivals and Temple sacrifices, originated in the Torah, particularly in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 12 and 14. These laws were made more rigorous and precise by the Pharisees, which can be seen in the Talmud collection of rabbinic teachings, especially the Hullin tractate; one rule even regulated the halmé aromatic pickle used for preserving fish.[1] Wine, the most common drink of the time, also had to be kosher and made by Hebrew hands alone.[2] Jewish kosher laws primarily centered on clean and unclean animals; these dietary exclusions in Scripture and Jewish tradition likely derive from animals which were used in pagan sacrifices or for occult power in other cultures, such as the Canaanites, including pigs, mice and serpents, not from hygienic or psychological motives.[3] However, rabbinic teaching also extended them to the ritual purity of containers and serving vessels, one of many debates which brought them into conflict with the even stricter Essenes.

The Essenes, an ascetic group whom scholars think lived primarily around the Dead Sea, refused to participate in the Temple ceremonies and believed that the Temple priesthood was invalid.[4] They had their own ceremonial laws for regulating ritual cleanliness with food and drink, most of which tended to be stricter than what they considered to be the lax Pharisees. These included the proper way to cook the sin-offering and to eat the grain portion of the peace-offering, as well as the contamination of a clean container by liquid poured from it into an unclean vessel, a hotly-debated topic of Essene-Pharisee theology.[5] The Essenes treated the ceremonial law as equivalent to natural or moral law, thus differing greatly from Christians.[6]

Most Hebrews living in the Holy Land in the time of Jesus’s earthly ministry consumed two main meals a day: morning and evening, with a small midday snack.[7] (Lk 14:12) Bread was such a staple that, in ordinary usage, “bread” indicated food in general and “breaking bread” was usually a generic term for having a meal.[8] This can be seen, for example, in St. Paul feeding his captors at sea in Acts 27:33-36, showing that bread was commonly eaten on long journeys, likely alongside preserved fish, dried fruit, nuts and similarly hardy foods. David also extolled the satisfying necessity of bread, “[B]read may strengthen man's heart” (Ps 103:15 DRA) and Lamentations values bread even above other possessions: “All her people sigh, they seek bread: they have given all their precious things for food to relieve the soul”. (Lam 1:11) Other staples were olives, ewe and goat's milk for butter, cheese and yogurt, honey, grape syrup, and other fruits and vegetables; meat, except fish, was saved for special occasions.[9] Dried, popped grain was eaten as a snack by farmers, mentioned in Mt 12:1.[10] Salt was used for seasoning and preservation, especially of fish. Taken from the Dead Sea, it was also used in Temple sacrifices, (Lev 2:13) and if it lost its saltiness, it was stored in the Temple and used to salt the marble courtyard during winter rains, hence Jesus's parabolic reference.[11] (Mt 5:13) Hands were washed before and after meals and some wealthy banquets could be highly elaborate.[12]

Roasted wheat was also eaten on voyages, and coarsely-ground wheat was made into porridge. Women baked large, spiced cakes, and confections resembling pan-fried honey doughnuts, as well as a kind of sweetmeat candy similar to Turkish delight.[13] Salted fish muries from Magdala and olive oil were exported. Four kinds of locusts were eaten, though the Talmud mentions eight hundred varieties, and were often boiled or dried like shrimp, or ground and mixed with flour to make a kind of biscuit, similar to Chinese shrimp-bread.[14] Their favorite vegetables were beans, lentils, cucumbers and onions and their favorite fruits were melons, figs, pomegranates, nuts and dates.[15] Bread, usually yeasted outside Passover – barley for the poor and wheat for the rich - was baked on the embers of a small household oven.[16] Meat was frequently roasted on a spit or stewed, and meals tended to be strongly seasoned.[17] Well or spring water, milk, pomegranate or date juice and the light beer shechar (similar to Roman cervisio) were common drinks, but red wine, filtered and mixed with water, was most common and prized, sometimes sweetened with honey.[18] (Lk 1:13-15)

Romans ate essentially an ancient Mediterranean diet, similar to the Palestinian Hebrews, except for their Mosaic purity regulations.

The Romans primarily ate cereals and legumes, usually with sides of vegetables, cheese, or meat and covered with sauces made out of fermented fish [garum and liquamen], vinegar, honey, and various herbs and spices. While they had some refrigeration, much of their diet depended on which foods were locally and seasonally available. Meat and fish were luxuries primarily reserved for the upper and upper middle classes.[19]

Garum was seen as having medicinal properties and was produced and shipped throughout the Empire.[20] Romans commonly drank posca, vinegar heavily diluted, and cervisio, a light beer, alongside wine, which they also diluted with water and often spiced.[21] In their religious rituals, Romans used many items, both animate and inanimate, for sacrificium, deriving from the practice “to render sacred” (sacrum facere) a thing for worship and appeasement of the gods. A wide variety of materials were sacrified, most commonly animals or vegetables that were ordinarily eaten, like cows and pigs, as well as beans, wheat, first fruits, wine and milk. Uncommon foods were also sacrificed, like dogs (especially puppies) and lizards, as were non-foods such as incense, serving vessels and even humans on special occasions.[22]

Jesus, according to Mark 7:18-19, declared all food and drink clean, thus freeing Christians from the ceremonial purity of the Mosaic law; this was reaffirmed in St. Peter’s vision in which God declared all formerly-unclean animals to be clean (Acts 10:11-16) and at the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 . It was also central to the pastoral theology of St. Paul, both in relation to some Jewish converts who were still “weak” in faith, since they held onto the kosher laws (Rom 14), and some Gentile converts who were similarly “weak” because they were scandalized by Christians who ate food sacrificed to idols. Paul counseled “strong” Christians in both cases to be patient with their brethren and abstain from foods that might scandalize them while still understanding that all food is created by God and thus good. (1 Cor 8; Rom 15) Early Christians practiced charity and alms-giving to the poor in many ways, one of which consisted in following Jesus’s command to feed the hungry in Matthew 25 and in imitation of His own miraculous generosity in the multiplication of the loaves and fishes. (Mt 14-15) This practice, although made central to Christian life by the Gospel, derived from ancient Hebrew charity, as seen throughout the Old Testament (e.g. Tobit 4:16, Job 22:7, Prob 25:21, Is 58:10, Ezek 18, etc.).

Jesus further elevated the universal value of bread and wine by using them at the Last Supper to institute the sacrament of the Eucharist, explaining in John 6 that He Himself is the Bread of Life which, unlike the merely bodily sustenance of manna eaten by the Hebrews in the Exodus, provides spiritual food for eternal life, through bread and wine transubstantiated into His sacrificial Body and Blood. St. Paul made this association clear in his Eucharistic theology, (e.g. 1 Cor 10:16-17) and the Eucharist became central to the life of the Church, (Lk 24:35, Acts 2:42) gathering on the first day of the week, the Lord’s Day and the day of the Resurrection to celebrate the new Passover. (Jn 20:1, Acts 20:7, Rev 1:10) The most common prayer of the Gospel, the Lord’s Prayer or Our Father, given by Christ Himself, includes a prayer to “give us this day our daily bread,” both for temporal bodily sustenance and for the eternal life of the Eucharist, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains: “Taken literally (epi-ousios: ‘super-essential’), it [‘daily’] refers directly to the Bread of Life, the Body of Christ, the ‘medicine of immortality,’ without which we have no life within us.”[23]

The common practice of the first Christians, all of whom were Hebrews, was to observe the traditional Sabbath, both at the synagogue and at home, as well as the Mosaic feasts and sacrifices of the Temple. (Acts 2:46) Once Christians were banned from the synagogues, they developed a liturgy which closely resembled its forms, called Synaxis, to honor the Sabbath. Christians would then celebrate the more solemn and sacramental liturgy of the Eucharist every Sunday morning at a home blessed by a bishop and presided over by a bishop or presbyter. In the evening, baptized Christians offered an agape fellowship meal, akin to the Jewish chaburah communal meal eaten on the eve of the Sabbath and feast days, at individual homes.[24] For Gentile Christians, not bound by the Mosaic law, the Synaxis and Eucharist were eventually combined into a single Divine Liturgy followed, at times, by a separate agape meal. These agape meals, intended for fraternal charity and alms-giving for the poor, were adapted from Hebrew and pagan practices, varied widely by region and were also held, like pagan catacomb feasts, as Christian funeral banquets and on the commemorative feasts of martyrs. St. Paul (1 Cor 11:17–34, Jude 1:12) and St. Peter (2 Pt 2:13), as well as St. Augustine and other Church Fathers, described the abuses of these feasts which frequently devolved into gluttony and elitism, and St. Paul warned that they could obscure the solemn meaning of the Eucharist. Therefore, over time they were excluded from Christian practice.[25]

Food and drink, which acted as continuous sources of joy, celebration, enrichment, cultural expression and worry were consecrated by God into sacramental expressions of the mystery of His divine love, first in the rites of the Old Testament and then in the fullness of the revelation of Jesus as the Bread of Life, participated in by Christians through the Eucharist. Although the cultivation and use of food and drink have changed greatly over the succeeding two thousand years, their meaning for Christians remains the same.

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[1] Henri Daniel-Rops, Daily Life in Palestine at the Time of Christ, trans. Patrick O’Brian (London: Phoenix, 2002), 204.

[2] Daniel-Rops, Daily Life in Palestine, 205.

[3] S.M. Polan, “Dietary Laws, Hebrew,” in New Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. Berard L. Marthaler, 2^nd ed., vol. 4 (Detroit: Gale, 2003), 742-743.

[4] John Bergsma, Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Image, 2019), 52. Kindle.

[5] Bergsma, Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls, 211-212.

[6] Bergsma, Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls, 222.

[7] Daniel-Rops, Daily Life in Palestine, 207; Ralph Gower, The New Manners and Customs of Bible Times (Chicago: Moody, 1987), 42, 47.

[8] Daniel-Rops, Daily Life in Palestine, 199; Gower, The New Manners and Customs, 50.

[9] Daniel-Rops, Daily Life in Palestine, 200-202.

[10] Gower, The New Manners and Customs, 47, 50.

[11] Gower, The New Manners and Customs, 53, 56.

[12] Gower, The New Manners and Customs, 54.

[13] Daniel-Rops, Daily Life in Palestine, 200.

[14] Daniel-Rops, Daily Life in Palestine, 202.

[15] Daniel-Rops, Daily Life in Palestine, 201, 203.

[16] Daniel-Rops, Daily Life in Palestine, 199.

[17] Daniel-Rops, Daily Life in Palestine, 203.

[18] Daniel-Rops, Daily Life in Palestine, 204-206.

[19] Madeline Brown and Alain Touwaide, “What did the Romans Eat, and Why?” at Smithsonian (2010), at https://naturalhistory.si.edu.

[20] Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, 31, 43, trans. Henry T. Riley, ed. Gregory R. Crane (London: Taylor and Francis, 1855), at Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu.

[21] Daniel-Rops, Daily Life in Palestine, 206.

[22] Celia Schultz, “Roman Sacrifice, Inside and Out,” Journal of Roman Studies 106 (2016), 58-76.

[23] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2^nd ed. (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 2020), 2837. Kindle.

[24] Tim A. Troutman, “Christian Worship in the First Century,” at Called to Communion (17 June 2010), at www.calledtocommunion.com.

[25] C. Bernas, “Agape,” New Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. Berard L. Marthaler, 2^nd ed., vol. 1 (Detroit: Gale, 2003), 169-171.