209 ON JESUS’ LAST WEEK(S) safe conclusion is that the Troas vigil was held in a Jewish house, but this fact is hardly relevant to the meaning of the episode, for it has been shaped into a kind of Eucharistic story: in the middle of the night, Eutychus falls down and dies in a way that parallels the breaking of the bread. This can be interpreted as a sign of death, but Paul says he is not dead. However, he is seen alive only at daybreak, after Paul’s departure. So the sign of resurrection appears on the first day around sunrise. Thus, the story of Eu- tychus gives an illustration of the meaning of the Eucharist: the rite leads to a special dawn, which can be understood as the be- ginning of a new Creation, so that the lunar calendar reference loses any significance. In fact, instead of “lamps”, the Western Text (WT) has ypolampadev “ high windows, skylights”, a device Ω ¥ useless by night, but meaningful if the group is waiting for dawn. A similar piece of evidence is given by the Younger Pliny in a letter to Trajan in 112 CE (Ep. 10.96) : he writes that the sole crime to which the christiani admit is to meet for prayer on certain days, before dawn. If the rite was a weekly custom, we should again invoke the rule already stated: if such an orderly feature is mentioned casually without a trace of discussion, it should be viewed as an established tradition. Of course, the institution of the Eucharist during the Last Supper looks like an innovation, but the context would indicate that the rite is to be performed once a year, close to the Jewish Passover. This was indeed what the Quartodecimans did, but it does not account for a weekly rite on the first day of the week — the Lord’s Day. Some links are missing. In fact, the Synoptic stories of the institution display at least two notable features: firstly, they have the conciseness of a litur- gical formula, in contrast to the context, where the disciples react and speak; secondly, there is no instruction to repeat it 9. It was ob- served, many years ago 10, that the material rite itself must have ex- So Matt, Mark as well as Luke (WT), which does not have the words 9 over the wine, in keeping with the mere “breaking of the bread” elsewhere in Luke-Acts. There are grounds to surmise that the longer form of the usual Luke, which includes the repetition order, has been harmonized with 1 Cor 11. A l r e a d y E. RENAN i n his Life of Jesus ( Fr e n c h original, 1860). 10 A. SCHWEITZER, The Lord’s Supper in Relation to the life of Jesus and the History of the Early Church (ed. J. REUMANN) (Macon, GA 1982), observes