St. Aphrahat the Persian (c. 280-c. 345) | EAST

(Updated July 14, 2025)

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Demonstrations

St. Aphrahat the Persian, Demonstration 12: On Passover (344)

• The Blessed Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist | §6

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(§6)¹

For our Savior ate the Passover with his disciples in the watch night of the fourteenth (Nisan). He constituted the sign of the Passover in truth for his disciples. After Judas went out from them, he took bread, blessed and gave to his disciples, and saying to them, “This is my body; take, eat, from it, all of you.” So also he said a blessing over the wine, and saying to them, “This is my blood, the new covenant, which is shed for many for the forgiveness of sins. Thus when you are gathered together you shall do for my memorial” (Matt. 26:26, 28; Mark 14:22-24; Luke 22:19-20). Our Lord was not yet seized. Our Lord said these things [at the Last Supper] and arose, from where He had celebrated the Passover sacrifice and had given His body to eat and His blood to drink, and He went out with His disciples to that place, where He was seized. For after He had eaten His body and drank His blood, He was counted with the dead. 23 | 24

Our Lord gave His body and by His own hands to eat. He gave His blood to drink before He was crucified…And He was among the dead in the night during which the fifteenth dawned, the night of Sabbath, the whole day and three hours in Friday, and in the night during which Sunday dawned, at the time He had given His body and blood to His disciples, He rose from the Sheol.

Footnotes

1. St. Aphrahat the Persian, Kuriakose Valavanolickal, trans., Aphrahat Demonstrations, Vol. 2 (Kerala, India: St. Ephrem Ecumenical Research Institute, 2005), 23-24. ↩︎