In the 16th century, when the European continent was in disarray due to the terrible confrontation between the Habsburgs and the Ottoman Empire, the cities and villages of Europe were flooded with the Sultan’s agents, who sent information about the general situation to Constantinople.
Both Turkish officials and these agents were generally ignorant of European history, culture and customs. As a result, the pens recorded a number of funny situations. For example, one of the Turkish agents who was present at the liturgy of the Catholic Church (Mass) writes:
«They killed the lamb and drank its blood.»
But it is clear that the lamb, in a symbolic or Christian sense, is Jesus «slain for the salvation of mankind.» The Fathers of the Church, creating the Christian doctrine, set themselves the task of linking, uniting and incorporating the Old and New Testaments into a common logic from a symbolic and philosophical point of view.
From this point of view, the main bridge was a logical union of the episodes of the liberation from Egyptian captivity, led by Moses, and the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. If you remember, in one of the episodes the Jews had to slaughter lambs, leave bloody footprints on the doors of their houses, so that God would recognize his followers and not kill their sons.
The symbolic idea of the slaughtered saving lamb is already becoming an integral part of Jesus’ rhetoric in the New Testament. He calls himself “the lamb of God,” meaning slaughter and then salvation at the last supper.
And therefore, Christian churches, including the Catholic, each time during the liturgy relive the Last Supper anew, symbolically depicting biblical episodes of the slaughtered, saving lamb.
But the Turkish agents did not know all this.
