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EATING AND DRINKING, POWER AND IDENTITY: A CASE STUDY OF MEAL TRASITIONS IN BIBLICAL AND ECCLESIASTICAL SOURCES A Dissertation presented to the Faculty of Claremont School of Theology In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy by Jin Seong Woo May 2011 ©2011 Jin Seong Woo ALL RIGHTS RESERVED This dissertation completed by Jin Seong W oo has been presented to and accepted by the faculty of Claremont School of Theology in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Doctor of Philosophy Faculty Committee Gregory J. Riley, Chairperson Karen Torjesen Tammi Schneider Interim Academic Dean Philip Clayton ABSTRACT Eating and Drinking, Power and Identity: A Case Study of Meal Traditions in Biblical and Ecclesiastical Sources JinSeong Woo Since Mary Douglas has developed the notion that food is a strong identity marker and breaker, food anthropologists have persuasively articulated and illustrated the role of food in the formation of identity. The goal of this dissertation is to apply this anthropological notion to various meal traditions in biblical and ecclesiastical sources to see how these meals function in establishing identities and boundaries in their respective contexts. There are numerous meals and acts of eating and drinking in the Bible and early ecclesiastical writings. Among them, six texts or contexts that contains the topic of eating and drinking are chosen and discussed in this dissertation: Genesis 2-3 and 18:1-18, Exodus 24:1-11, Mark 6:32-44, Gal 2:11-21 and ICor 11:17-34, the eucharistic meal in the context of generating episcopal power, and the eucharistic meal among Christians suffering persecution at the hands of the Romans. Close analyses of the selected literary traditions illuminate that meal traditions played a central role in defining the relations between the divine and humans and also between different groups of humans. Furthermore, it also illuminates a theme that emerges when we consider these case studies together. That theme is one of moving from a more inclusive community to a more and more narrowly defined community that excludes people through the consumption of a sacred meal. CONTENTS 1. Introduction Insights from Food Anthropology 1 Theme, Scope, and Order 5 Methodological Considerations 11 A Summary of Previous Scholarship 16 2. Eating and Drinking as the Starting Mark of God's Intervention in History: Genesis 18:1-8 29 What They Ate 30 Who Ate 33 What Was the Role of the Meal in the Literary Context 36 3. Eating and Drinking as a Marker of God's Closeness to the People: Exodus 24: 1-11 40 Larger Scale Analysis 41 Exodus 19-40 43 Exodus 24:1-11 51 Common Themes between Exodus 24:1-11 and the Eucharistic Ideas 54 4. Eating and Drinking as the Core of Jesus Movement that Breaks the Boundary between "Sacred" and "Unclean": Mark 6:32-44 57 Gregory Riley's Heroic Christology as a Larger Theological Framework to Understand the Table Fellowship 61 Overview of "Feeding the Five Thousand" 63 Who Ate 65 What They Ate 69 How They Ate 78 A Unique Christology and a Unique Symposium 89 5. Eating and Drinking as Paul's Locus to Maintain Jesus' Egalitarianism (Galatians 2:11,1 Corinthians 11:17-34,14:34-35) 92 Justification by Faith and Transgressive Commensality between Jews and Gentiles (Galatians 2:11-21) 101 The Body of Christ and Transgressive Commensality between Free and Slave (1 Corinthians 11:17-34) 123 6. Eating and Drinking as a Means of Generating Episcopal Power 136 One ritual, Many Myths 138 Conflicts Over the Table 144 Establishing Episcopacy through Eating and Drinking as a Means of Separation 155 Apostolic Succession, Paterfamilias, and Episcopacy 165 7. Eating and Drinking as a Means of Building Christian Identity under Roman Persecution 171 Romanization, Pax Deorum and Christians 172 The Imperial Cult and Roman Identity 181 Roman Persecution and Christian Reaction 194 Martyrdom and 'Noble Death' 200 The Eucharistic Meal as True Sacrifice 214 Meat vs. Bread 220 8. Conclusion 232 Chapter 1 Introduction Insights from Food Anthropology For decades, food anthropologists have persuasively articulated and illustrated the role of food in the formation of identity, setting up the principle that food is a strong identity marker and breaker. In this regard, Mary Douglas is an appropriate starting point of the discussion, since she has argued for giving attention to the social aspects of eating and drinking beyond their nutritive and physiological values, accordingly producing prominent anthropological works on food. To be sure, before Douglas, there were other influential anthropologists such as Claude Levy-Strauss and Roland Barthes, but in terms of impact to the field and relation to the concerned topic, Douglas remains unsurpassed. Among many works of Douglas, "The Abominations of Leviticus," in Purity and Danger, and "Deciphering a Meal" in Implicit Meanings are relevant to the current study.1 In the latter, Douglas starts her inquiry with a question, "if food is a code, where is the precoded message?" and provides the following answer: If food is treated as a code, the messages it encodes will be found in the pattern of social relations being expressed. The message is about different degrees of hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, boundaries and transactions across the 1. Maiy Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966); Mary Douglas, Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), esp., 249-75. This article is reprinted in Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, eds., Food and Culture: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 1997), 36-54. The latter is a revised and expanded version of the former. 2 boundaries.2 In a nutshell, Douglas finds in food an implicit relation to identity. To illustrate this simple conceptualization, Douglas takes up "a particular series of social events and sees how they are coded."3 In this step, she takes up two types of food-related social events for analysis: home meal and food regulations in the Hebrew Bible. Through the decoding process of the first event, especially through the analysis of binary pairs in home meal patterns, Douglas illustrates that the patterns of home meal encode social boundaries. For example, in the social universe, sharing meals indicates higher degree of intimacy than sharing drinks, and likewise hot meals more so than cold meals.4 The decoding analysis of the second event reveals basically the same precoded message in the dietary regulations in Mosaic law: purity and pollution reflect the conceptual social boundaries of the society. According to her, there are rigid classifications in animals according to degrees of holiness: 'abominable,' 'fit for the table, but not for the altar,' and 'fit for the altar.' And the criteria for this classification are, "coordinated for the three spheres of land, air, and water."5 If an animal is featured as "living between two spheres, or having defining features of members of another sphere, or lacking defining features," 2. Mary Douglas, "Diciphering a Meal," in Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (New York: Routledge, 1997), 36. 3. Ibid., 36. 4. Ibid., 37-44. 5. Ibid., 46. 3 it is anomalous, and thus abominable.6 Contrarily, animals that show proper behavioral and morphological features are clean, and thus fit for the altar. In other words, animals that "conform fully to their class" are clean, whereas animals that "are imperfect members of their class, or whose class itself confounds the general scheme of the world" are unclean.7 Douglas goes on to extend the general principles behind this analysis to humans in the Old Testament, showing that the scheme of humans exactly corresponds to that of animals: Israelites who are "under the Covenant," are "fit for temple sacrifice," and "consecrated to temple service."8 Thus, for Douglas, the precoded message of food both in modem western society and in ancient Israel is about identity and boundary. After Douglas, anthropologists and sociologists produced a substantial number of works, yet they are basically re-articulations, elaborations, illustrations and expansions of Douglas' fundamental thesis: food is a boundary marker/breaker.9 Accepting Douglas 6. Ibid., 48. 7. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 69. 8. Douglas, "Diciphering a Meal," 48-50. 9. For a brief history of food sociological-anthropological food studies and a bibliography, see Peter Scholliers, "Meals, Food Narratives, and Sentiments of Belonging in Past and Present," in Food, Drink and Identity: Cooking, Eating and Drinking in Europe Since the Middle Ages, ed. Peter Scholliers (Oxford: Berg, 2001), esp., 10-12 and 19-22. Three anthologies are useful to understand the contributions of these studies: Peter Scholliers, ed., Food, Drink and Identity: Cooking, Eating and Drinking in Europe Since the Middle Ages (Oxford: Berg, 2001); Counihan and Van Esterik, Food and Culture: A Reader, Stephen Mennell, Anne Murcott, and Anneke H. van Otterloo, The Sociology of Food: Eating, Diet, and Culture (London: Sage, 1992). In addition, Claude Fischler's article is interesting in that it points out, in the modem industrialized society, where agro-industry provides most of food, the identity function of food comes to be problematic; see Fischler, "Food, Self and Identity," Social Science 4 and her colleagues' themes, a few historians have entertained this relation of food and identity in their works. For example, Peter Gamsey shows that, in classical antiquity, there was a clear division between "the frugal menus of the mass of the population," and "the haute cuisine of the few."10 He also shows that various banquets of Greeks, "demonstrated and confirmed the membership and solidarity of the group, paraded the status of the group vis-a-vis outsiders, and set out the hierarchies that existed both in the society at large and within the group itself."11 If Gamsey illustrates how the matters of 'what they eat' and 'with whom they eat' give a firm sense of social boundaries in a society, Efffos illustrates how social boundaries are built up through such things as "under what circumstances and under whose authority the food stuffs, including the Eucharistic wine and wafer, might be consumed."12 Efffos explores the Christian endeavor in Merovingian Gaul to achieve the successful long term conversion of pagan patrons.13 The clerics, "repeatedly legislated against the dangers of pagan sacrifice and substituted Christian feasts in their place," and excommunicated those who did not Information 27 (1988): 275-92. 10. Peter Gamsey, Food and Society in Classical Antiquity, Key Themes in Ancient History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp., chap. 8. 11. Ibid., 128. 12. Bonnie Effros, Creating Community with Food and Drink in Merovingian Gaul (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 4. 13. Ibid., 17.