Of the practices by which early Christians came to define themselves, few if any exceeded the Eucharist in significance. While the early church apparently allowed many of its activities to be broadly accessible, from a very early stage this particular rite seems to have been strictly reserved for confessing believers. In this paper I will argue, on the evidence of the earliest witnesses, that the first-century Christians regarded the Eucharist as a symbolic means of publicly identifying not only with the church but also – more fundamentally – with a newly defined eschatological temple. In a setting in which the pre-70 CE church had a rather ambivalent relationship to the second temple, the Eucharist must be assigned a key role in communal identity-construction.