The name of the Love Feast — Greek: Agapē—may conceivably occur in the New Testament more often than has been generally realized, because Agapō is also the ordinary New Testament word for “love”. So it may well be that in a number of passages where reference to the virtue “love” has been understood there was originally an allusion to the church’s Love Feast. These may be worth considering, in the light of the well-established principle of Bible interpretation that where there is a choice between a general or abstract interpretation and one which is particular, concrete or special, the latter is more likely to be the true one.
(a) “When Jesus knew that his hour was come . . . having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them to the end” (John 13:1)
(b) There is now possible a startling and impressive re-interpretation of other familiar words: “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one for another” (John 13:34-35)
What is now usually taken as a perfectly general description of Christian living may originally have been applied to its clearest and most characteristic expression, the meal of fellowship. “Love one another” was a commandment of the Old Testament (Lev 19:18). But “Have a meal of fellowship together culminating in remembrance of Me in Bread and Wine” was an altogether new commandment. And it was this practice by which the disciples of Jesus were most readily identifiable, as Pliny’s letters to Trajan clearly show. “Ye do show forth the Lord’s death till he come”, wrote Paul.
(c) There is support for the foregoing suggestion in 2 John 5-7: “And now I beseech thee, lady, not as though I wrote a new commandment unto thee, but that which we had from the beginning, that we love one another . . . For many deceivers are gone forth into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.”
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One