(excerpt) Christianity came into existence at table. The earliest churches — that is, the earliest assemblies — seem to have continued the meal tradition of Jesus, the meal tradition with which the gospels are filled: \u27Behold a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and of sinners,\u27 went one description of Jesus (Luke 7:34). Christian communities struggled to understand and maintain Jesus’ remarkable open commensality — his astonishing, God-signifying, religiously offensive and politically dangerous eating and drinking with the hoi polloi, his critique of the dining-room practice of the closed circle, his re-working of mealmeaning
