Shaped by the Supper: The Eucharist as an Identity Marker and Sustainer—A Literary Analysis of 1 Corinthians 11:17–34

This study demonstrates that Paul presents the Eucharist in 1 Corinthians 11:17–34 as an identity-forming and identity-sustaining liturgical act. Through literary analysis, the research first highlights Paul’s deliberate fivefold use of the verb συνέρχομαι (“to come together”) to frame the passage, emphasizing the communal nature of the Eucharist. The meal is intended to mark the identity of the church as one body—set apart from the status-based divisions typical of Roman banquet culture. The current study also observes that Paul strategically places the early Christian confession of the Lord’s Supper at the center of his argument. In doing so, he calls the Corinthians to recall this tradition and re-engage in a shared act of remembrance—one that enacts the memory of Christ’s death and thereby reconstitutes them as a unified body. This understanding is rooted in Jewish conceptions of ritual memory, in which liturgical acts not only recall the past but renew and reinforce communal identity. Through such embodied remembrance, the church does not merely recall who it is; it performs and sustains that identity. Thus, the Eucharist functions both to form the church as one body distinct from the world and to maintain that identity through repeated, participatory remembrance.