a breaking; in the New Testament, the breaking of a loaf by hand that opens and marks a shared meal
On its own this word means simply a breaking, the act of snapping or dividing something apart. It is an uncommon word: outside the Bible Greek writers used it for the fracture of a bone, the pruning of a vine, the bending of a joint, or the way light bends as it passes through water. Luke is the only New Testament writer to use it, and he uses it just twice, both times in the same set phrase: the breaking of the bread.
That phrase is not natural Greek. Greeks cut or divided their bread; they did not speak of breaking it. The expression comes straight out of Hebrew, where to break bread with someone was a plain way of saying you shared a meal and welcomed a person to your table. Luke carries that Jewish way of speaking over into Greek and turns it into an almost fixed name for what the first Christians did when they gathered to eat.
Because of that, the word ends up carrying far more weight than its simple meaning would suggest. In the Emmaus story the two disciples finally recognize the risen Jesus in the breaking of the bread, and in the summary of the earliest church in Jerusalem the believers devote themselves to the breaking of the bread alongside teaching, fellowship, and prayer. Scholars debate hard whether Luke means an ordinary meal, the Lord's Supper, or a gathering in which the two were not yet separated. The word itself does not settle that question: it means breaking, and everything else it suggests comes from the scenes Luke places it in.
Disputed
Whether Luke's fixed phrase "the breaking of the bread" (Luke 24:35; Acts 2:42) denotes an ordinary shared meal, the Eucharist proper, or a communal meal in which the ordinary and the ritual had not yet been separated.
- majorityThe community's shared meal already included, or simply was, what would develop into the Lord's Supper, without yet being a distinct rite; the middle position held by most Luke-Acts specialists.; F. F. Bruce, The Book of the Acts (NICNT), 73; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Acts of the Apostles (Anchor Bible 31); Hans Conzelmann, Acts of the Apostles (Hermeneia), 23
- minorityThe phrase is a technical designation for the Eucharist, in effect the first Christian liturgy.; Francois Bovon, Luke 3 (Hermeneia), 368-381; Xavier Leon-Dufour, Sharing the Eucharistic Bread (1987)
- minorityThe phrase names an ordinary Jewish meal opened by breaking a loaf with thanksgiving; its adoption as a title for the Lord's Supper comes only later.; David G. Peterson, The Acts of the Apostles (Pillar), 161; Andrew McGowan, Ancient Christian Worship (2014), 19-20