" Just in the same manner St.
Paul tells the Corinthian Jews, that if they observed the ceremonial of
the passover, or rather, "as often as they observed it," they were to
observe it worthily, and make it a religious act. They were not then
come together to make merry on the anniversary of the deliverance of
their ancestors from Egyptian bondage, but to meet in memorial of
Christ's sufferings and death. And therefore, if they ate and drank the
passover, under its new and high allusions, unworthily, they profaned
the ceremony, and were guilty of the body and blood of Christ.
It appears also from the Syriac, and other oriental versions of the New
Testament, such as the Arabic and Ethiopic, as if he only permitted the
celebration of the spiritualized passover for a time in condescension to
the weakness of some of his converts, who were probably from the Jewish
synagogue at Corinth. For in the seventeenth verse of the eleventh
chapter of his first epistle to the Corinthians, the Syriac runs thus:
[190] "As to that, concerning which I am now instructing you, I commend
you not, because you have not gone forward, but you have gone down into
matters of less importance." "It appears from hence, says Barclay, that,
the Apostle was grieved, that such was their condition that he was
forced to give them instruction concerning these outward things, and
doting upon which they showed that they were not gone forward in the
life of Christianity, but rather sticking in the beggarly elements; and
therefore the twentieth verse of the same version has it thus:
[191]'When then ye meet together, ye do not do it as it is just ye
should in the day of the Lord; ye eat and drink.
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