Was The Last Supper a Passover Seder?

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To this day, Jews throughout the world observe the Passover festival with a highly ritualized meal called a seder. The word means “order” and refers to the order of the service at the meal, including prayers, psalms, other readings, the retelling of the story of the Exodus from Egypt and the eating of special foods that have symbolic significance.

It is commonly supposed that the Last Supper, the meal Jesus ate with his disciples the night before his crucifixion, was a seder.

But was the Last Supper a Passover seder?

The question itself assumes that the Last Supper occurred on the eve of Passover. But all the gospel accounts do not agree on this. The Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) clearly indicate that the Last Supper was the Passover meal:

“And on the first day of Unleavened Bread, when they sacrificed the passover lamb, his disciples said to him, ‘Where will you have us go and prepare for you to eat the passover?’” (Mark 14:12; see also the parallel passages in Matthew 26:17 and Luke 22:7–9).

The disciples then “prepared the Passover” (Mark 14:16; Matthew 26:19; Luke 22:13). “When it was evening, he sat at the table with the twelve disciples” (Matthew 26:20 and, with slight variations, Mark 14:17 and Luke 22:14). This is the account in the Synoptic Gospels.

According to the Gospel of John, however, the Last Supper occurred a day earlier.

Obviously referring to the same meal, at which Judas betrayed Jesus, John tells us that it occurred “before the feast of Passover” (John 13:1, see also John 19:42). Moreover, after the Last Supper—between the second and third time Peter denied he was a disciple of Jesus, when Jesus was taken to Pilate—we are told that the Jews had not yet eaten the Passover (John 18:28). Finally, John is careful to point out that Jesus’ crucifixion occurred on “the day of Preparation for the Passover” (John 19:14).

Scholars have provided a variety of responses to this apparent discrepancy. Some say John is correct and the synoptics are incorrect. Others say the synoptics are correct and John is incorrect. Still others attempt to harmonize the two accounts by suggesting that they are referring to different calendars.

Putting chronology aside for the moment, I would like to focus on the nature of the Last Supper. Was it a seder meal as we have come to know it, assuming that it occurred on the eve of Passover?

The answer, I believe, is no. The seder meal as we know it did not develop until after 70 A.D., in response to the Roman destruction of the Temple that ended the First Jewish Revolt.

The description of the Passover festival in the Hebrew Bible seems to combine two originally independent festivals. The first was an ancient agricultural festival known as the Festival of Unleavened Bread (an alternative name for Passover, both in the New Testament and among Jews even today). Unleavened bread (matzah), without yeast, was baked at the time of the first harvest, in early spring. The Bible assumes that this festival commemorates the Exodus from Egypt and that the unleavened bread symbolizes that experience, in particular, the haste with which the Israelites fled (Exodus 12:17–20, 29). The second festival was the Festival of the Passover Offering, commemorating the historic deliverance of the Jews when God slew the Egyptian firstborn, but passed over the houses of Jews whose doorposts were swabbed with the blood of a sacrificial lamb (Exodus 12:13, 23–27). It was at this point that Pharaoh allowed the enslaved Israelites to leave Egypt.

The fullest biblical account of the evening Passover observance is found in Exodus 12, which sets out what should be done on the first Passover night and how it should be remembered in subsequent years.

The Israelites are instructed to prepare a Passover offering, to eat it with bitter herbs and unleavened bread, and to put some of the sacrificial animal’s blood on the doorposts so as to provide a sign that the Destroyer or angel of death should “pass over” the Israelite homes and afflict only the Egyptian firstborn.

To ensure that the story is retold in subsequent years, the Bible uses a pedagogic device: “And when your children ask you, ‘What do you mean by this rite?’ you shall say, ‘It is the Passover 027sacrifice to the Lord, because He passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt when He smote the Egyptians, but saved our houses’ ” (Exodus 12:26–27). The sacrifice and placing of the blood on the doorposts are assumed to elicit this question from the child.

Here and in all other biblical references to the evening rite the text assumes the centrality of the sacrifice; the sacrifice is the heart of the rite. Thus, Numbers 9:1–15 considers the need for a “second Passover” for those who cannot observe the first because they were in a state of impurity or on a journey; they must bring a paschal offering one month later and eat it with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. The implication is that the holiday cannot be celebrated without this sacrificial lamb.

After the establishment of the monarchy and construction of Solomon’s Temple, the nature of the Passover observance changed. According to the Bible, before this time it had been a domestic observance. The biblical text, even before Solomon’s time, nevertheless looks forward to the place that “God will choose” for his sanctuary (Deuteronomy 16:2); that is, Jerusalem. When, in the time of the monarchy, God had in fact chosen Jerusalem and his sanctuary was built there, the nature of the Passover observance changed. The Passover sacrifice was still central, but instead of a domestic observance, it became a national pilgrim festival, with the sacrifice offered at God’s sanctuary in Jerusalem—though families might celebrate the festival in that central location.

Passover, at this point associated with joyous festivity, took on the dimensions of a national holiday. A communal or family meal still took place after the sacrifice, but the sacrifice remained the critical feature and the eating of the sacrificial animal was the essential central element of the meal. As in earlier times, the unleavened bread and bitter herbs were eaten with the animal.

Except for the change from a domestic observance wherever Israelites assembled, to a national pilgrim festival in Jerusalem, the same basic pattern of observance is found in Joshua 5:10–11; 2 Kings 23:21–24; Ezekiel 45:21; Ezra 6:19–22 and 2 Chronicles 30:1–27 35:1–19. The last two chapters of Chronicles, describing the Jerusalem observance, emphasize the great rejoicing, as well as the role of the Levites and other experts in singing praises to God; Chronicles also states that the eating of the Passover sacrifice took place in kinship groups.

Early post-biblical sources maintain the centrality of the communal sacrificial meal, even when they supplement the biblical heritage. For example, Jubilees, a post-biblical text from the second century B.C., speaks of observing the rite of the Passover offering at the central sanctuary in Jerusalem and emphasizes the slaughter of the sacrifice and the people’s joy as they eat the sacrifice, drink wine and praise God (Jubilees 49). (For the first time, the drinking of wine is required. Reference to bitter herbs is omitted, and unleavened bread is mentioned only as part of the Festival of Unleavened Bread.) Other sources—the epic Greek Jewish poet Ezekiel (second century B.C.), Samaritan traditions, the Temple Scroll and other Dead Sea Scrolls—all refer to an evening celebration centering around the sacrifice.

Even the Jewish philosopher Philo (c. 30. B.C.–45 A.D.), who adopts an allegorical reading of the Bible, assumes the centrality of the Passover offering and meal, which he spiritualizes. To the biblical record, he adds only the singing of prayers and hymns. He is clear, however, regarding the celebratory nature of the festival: the practice of “the whole people” offering the sacrifices, a people “raised for that day to the dignity of the priesthood…was sanctioned by the law once in every year to remind them of their duty of thanksgiving.”¹

The first-century Jewish historian Josephus, though frequently mentioning Passover as a thanksgiving for the deliverance from Egypt, describes the eating of the sacrifice in fraternities, among the multitude of participants who came on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He refers to the great number of sacrifices and the singing of the Levites accompanied by musical instruments.²

These post-biblical texts do note some changes in observance—prayers, wine, omission of bitter herbs, Levites singing, etc.—but they consistently 028center on the sacrifice, a distinct holiday of the Passover Offering. Preparing and bringing that offering led up to the experience of the sacrifice, which culminated in the sacrificial meal.

Jews outside of Jerusalem who did not participate in the sacrifice could still observe the seven-day Festival of Unleavened Bread by avoiding leaven.³ They might, on their own, gather to usher in the holiday with a special meal, instruct a child on the meaning of the event, offer praises to God and drink wine.⁴ But especially those who had once gone on pilgrimage to Jerusalem would have realized that they were missing the national celebration. Without the sacrifice, they could not fully share in the experience of the observance in Jerusalem. Philo insightfully grasped this dynamic:

“Countless multitudes from countless cities come, some over land, others over sea, from east and west and north and south at every feast. They take the temple for their port as a general haven and safe refuge from the bustle and great turmoil of life, and there they seek to find calm weather, and, released from the cares whose yoke has been heavy upon them from their earliest years, to enjoy a brief breathing-space in scenes of genial cheerfulness. Thus filled with comfortable hopes they devote the leisure, as is their bounded duty, to holiness and honouring of God. Friendships are formed between those who hitherto knew not each other, and the sacrifices and libations are the occasion of reciprocity of feeling and constitute the surest pledge that all are of one mind” (Philo, Special Laws, Book I, 69–70).

Anthropologists like Victor Turner⁵ have illuminated how the heightened experience of departing from home and normal social structures and going on pilgrimage amidst the throngs of pilgrims would cause people to abandon their usual approach to the world and open themselves to new experiences. Furthermore, people gathering in one location reawaken, reinforce or create a sense of being part of a larger group. In sharing something that was offered to God, one not only sensed the divine presence, but solidified one’s bonds with those who shared in the meal.

After the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. all this was no longer possible. A new challenge faced the Jewish community. How should it observe a festival that had been tied so closely to the sacrificial cult? Some circles of Jews were apparently so caught up in their grief over 029the loss of the Temple that they could not react. Others, however, most notably the nascent rabbinic movement, found means to continue Jewish life. They drew on and elevated the importance of those biblical rites which did not require sacrifices and tried to make other religious rituals independent of the Temple cult and its sacrificial rites. This was a slow process, and all the stages are not clear, especially because the earliest rabbinic sources were edited considerably after the events. The most important and earliest of these rabbinic texts is the Mishnah, edited in about 200 A.D., after the failure of the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome in 135 A.D. The failure of the Second Jewish Revolt dashed any remaining hope of rebuilding the Temple or reinstituting its cultic forms. By 200 A.D., the necessity of the rabbinic approach for Jews was confirmed. Since the Mishnah was not compiled until about 200, it is difficult to be sure what was originally proposed as a temporary solution and what was suggested, whether after the Temple’s destruction in 70 or whether after the failure of the Second Jewish Revolt, for the long term.⁶

Several scholars⁷ have noted teachings in the Mishnah that explicitly free ritual acts from the 030Temple cult, but they also note mishnaic texts that make a change without explicitly acknowledging it. Indeed, most of the Mishnah is written as if religious life in general underwent no changes. Based on this phenomenon, Jacob Neusner attributes to the Mishnah an ahistorical and timeless view of reality.⁸

A close study, however, reveals that the laws of the Mishnah introduced fundamental changes. In the case of the Passover ritual, the Mishnah reworks the domestic version of the Passover observance, as described in Exodus 12 (before the establishment of the Temple in Jerusalem). It transforms what the Bible describes as a domestic, sacrificial meal into a non-sacrificial seder. It does this extremely subtly. For example, it equates eating unleavened bread and bitter herbs with the sacrifice, teaching that the unleavened bread and bitter herbs comprise the festival’s three essentials. Because these two remain viable irrespective of the existence of a Temple cult, the biblical rite can become independent of the sacrifice.⁹ Moreover, by suggesting that Jews outside the Temple in the pre-70 period had a meal without the Passover offering, it creates a pre-70 precedent for the new protocol without the sacrifice. The Mishnah therefore writes as if the new rituals were the standard pre-70 practice—anachronistically reading back into history rituals that had not yet been adopted. To appreciate how this is done requires a close critical reading of the texts.¹⁰ But it is clear that this in fact occurred. This reworking of history, as it were, was undoubtedly intended to convince Jews that they should believe or feel that what they were doing pursuant to mishnaic rules was religiously viable.

The Mishnah also introduced a change in the thrust of the Exodus story. This is reflected in the Mishnah’s instruction that one “starts with the disgrace [section of the Bible, which, e.g., narrates Israel’s slavery] and ends with the glory; and expounds [the biblical section] from ‘A Wandering Aramean was my father’ (Deuteronomy 26:5), until he finishes the entire portion.” The first part of the requirement entails reviewing the essential message of Passover—the freeing of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery. The participants are to narrate Israel’s history from its “ignominious” origins to its praiseworthy state. Such a retelling would not be unusual even in a pre-70 sacrificial rite. But the latter part of the quoted passage prescribes a novel feature, the exposition of the classic biblical text of Israel’s early history. That text in effect asserts that Israel continues to experience the divine bounty and redemption.¹¹ This activity will enable the participants to derive new meaning from the biblical account of redemption from slavery. Leading people to focus on the ongoing promise of redemption was made especially prominent by the rabbis after the tragedy of 70 A.D.

While the Mishnah speaks of eating the Passover offering, the unleavened bread and bitter herbs, the latter two, as we have noted, are equated with the sacrifice. Overcoming the sense of the physical loss of the Passover offering is further developed in the Mishnah’s symbolic explanation for each of the foods: As the Mishnah explains, the Passover offering is made because the Lord passed over the houses of the Israelites, the bitter herbs are eaten because the Egyptians embittered their lives and the unleavened bread is eaten because the Lord redeemed his people. Note the unleavened bread has replaced the Passover sacrifice in conveying the notion of redemption. The text continues:¹²

“Therefore we are obligated to give thanks, to praise, to glorify, to crown, to exalt, to elevate the One who did for us all these miracles and took us out of slavery to freedom, and let us say before Him Hallelujah.”

The symbolic interpretation of the three foods, giving significance to what they represent rather than to the literal act of eating, provides a means of relating to them without their physical presence being consequential. The symbolic meaning of the unleavened bread, redemption, leads to the religious consequence of recognizing redemption: One must give thanks to God by singing the appropriate biblical psalms and by reciting a blessing formula. This reminds the people of past bounty so as to make them realize that they continue to experience it in the present.

This, in effect, restructures the biblical practice. Instead of Levites or other experts singing during the slaughtering of the paschal lamb, ordinary 031people—without experts—are to offer thanksgiving even without the sacrifice, Since God continues to redeem Israel, Israel still experiences the divine presence.

In still another passage, the sages, Rabbi Tarfon and Rabbi Aqiva, differ over the proper blessing to close these thanksgiving praises to God:

“And [one] seals with [the term for] redemption. Rabbi Tarfon says, ‘ … Who has redeemed us and redeemed our ancestors from Egypt and brought us to this night’—and [one] does not seal [with a concluding formula].’ ” “R. Aqiva says, [One adds to the blessing:] ‘Thus O Lord, our God and God of our ancestors, bring us in peace to the approaching festivals which are coming to meet us, happy in the building of your city, [so as] to eat from the Passover and festive offerings whose blood will reach the wall of your altar with favor, and let us thank You for our redemption. Praised art thou, O Lord, who redeems [or redeemed] Israel’ ” (Mishnah, Pesahim 10:6).

Tarfon and especially Aqiva refer not simply to a past redemption but to an ongoing redemption. In the mention of a hope for the “building of Your city,” the Jews in the post-70 period were provided with a firm foundation of hope for future redemption. In the post-Mishnaic period this thought was considerably expanded on; in contrast, at this point the message speaks of the future in terms of the continued presence of God who redeems and only in passing alludes to the loss of the Temple. But the hope for the future is clear, and this restructuring reflects a transformation caused by the reality of life (without the Temple), which contradicts the meaning of the rite as a pilgrimage festival celebrating national redemption. The holiday has taken on a new dimension, reaching back to the pre-Temple perspective of Exodus 12, emphasizing the meal as a family gathering independent of any national cult. But the new rite also deals with the hope of future redemption by channeling it into the experience of the seder.

This pattern accords with a feature of rituals in general. As historians of religion have noted, rituals are often designed to respond to and overcome the contradictions of life. On the one hand, the anxiety and disappointment caused by unachievable ideals are temporarily eased by the experience of the ritual, where one feels integrated with one’s fellow celebrants and in effect—at that moment—redeemed; on the other hand, a person there receives a taste of the ideal so that he or she may try to achieve it in daily life.

By this process and this way the Mishnah has reworked the domestic observance described in Exodus 12 into something quite different, making a sacrificial meal into a seder. This was done in response to the religious crisis presented by the Temple’s destruction.¹³ The Mishnah characteristically focuses not on the trauma but on what was necessary in order to deal with that trauma, in effect working through the religious and psychological problem.

This is in accord with the outlook of the Mishnah as a whole, as suggested by Jacob Neusner.¹⁴ While the Mishnah nowhere claims it is transforming the earlier heritage, a careful reading of the text indicates that, in fact, it is. Emotionally it may have been too difficult openly to acknowledge this change; memories of the Temple were still too vivid to state cavalierly that it and its sacrificial system were being replaced. Moreover, the rabbis were trying to convince others and themselves that the new procedures were religiously viable and desired by God. Anachronism provided them, as it has other religious thinkers through the centuries, with a creative and positive means to move forward. As Alan Mintz aptly put it:¹⁵

“Alarmed at the effect the loss would have on the people, the rabbis made believe that there had been no rupture, and that the institutions they created or adapted had always existed.… It is a fascinating idea, and one that goes some way toward accounting for how traditions originate in untraditional practices and why fictions are sometimes necessary to give these new traditions power and secure their acceptance.”

Let us return now to the Last Supper. The meal that Jesus and his disciples would have eaten on the eve of Passover was the sacrificial meal following the animal sacrifice at the Temple, not a seder as we know it. It would have focused on the sacrifice and celebrated the Exodus. It would not, however, have looked to a future redemption, as the post-70 seder did.

In all four gospels, Jesus and his disciples go to Jerusalem for the Passover observance, standard practice of all good Jews who were able to make the journey. In a city crowded with pilgrims, it was doubtless difficult to find a place where Jesus and his disciples could gather to eat the sacrificial meal. Jesus instructs his disciples, as recorded in the Gospel of Mark.

“ ‘Where will you have us go and prepare for you to eat the Passover?’ And he sent two of his disciples, and said to them, ‘Go into the city, and a man carrying a jar of water will meet you; follow him, and wherever he enters, say 032to the householder, “The Teacher says, ‘Where is my guest room, where I am to eat the Passover with my disciples?’ ” And he will show you a large upper room furnished and ready; there prepare for us.’ And the disciples set out and went to the city, and found it as he had told them; and they prepared the Passover” (Mark 14:12–16).

During the Last Supper, food is “dipped” and wine is drunk, but this does not tell us much in terms of Passover observance. True, at a seder wine is drunk and food is dipped in other food, but this was true at other banquets and, for some, even at ordinary meals.^a Moreover, the special dipping at the seder originally involved the bitter herbs, which were dipped into a special concoction called haroset.^b

Thus, there is nothing in the gospel description that indicates that the Last Supper was a rabbinic seder, rather than the traditional sacrificial meal held at the time.

Yet there is another aspect of the Passover meal as depicted in the Synoptic Gospels that critical scholars recognize as having been influenced by the theological purview of the Gospel accounts rather than, as we now see, by the intrinsic nature of the Passover observance. Just as the early rabbis restructured Passover, so the Synoptic Gospels interpret the holiday and the meal to fit the message of Jesus. The rabbis did their restructuring in a manner that fit their need to demonstrate that Judaism could continue after the destruction of the Temple, to show that the God of Israel still related to Israel, and that Israel could still experience God and find favor in God’s eyes.

Jesus’ followers made a comparable claim by interpreting the sacrificial Passover meal to convey a message for their future. Just as the seder provided a means for Jews to heighten their sense of disparity between the ideal of redemption and the reality of contemporary life, channeling it into a ritual that provided a respite from normal social structures, a taste of redemption in this world, and a hope for a full redemption in the future, so the Last Supper provided the same three elements for the followers of Jesus, and the commemoration of that meal and of the passion, especially at Easter, was intended to support later generations.

Thus, the Passover meal, as portrayed in the Synoptic Gospels is not structured to celebrate the Exodus—for this reason, some scholars argue that the meal may not originally have been a Passover meal in remembrance of the redemption from Egypt—but is reinterpreted in a way that relates to the future of the Jesus movement, that is, Christianity. The bread becomes the salvational body of Christ and the wine his blood—the sign of future redemption.^c

The central element of the sacrificial Passover meal was the ideological message of Exodus. But just as the early rabbis restructured this message in the days after the destruction of the Temple, transforming the meal into a seder, so did the early Christians. The early Christians did not focus narrowly on the Exodus. Rather, because the Last Supper, like the later rabbinic seder, became an anticipation of a future salvific experience, the Synoptic Gospels concentrate on Jesus in the kingdom of God, on the future judgment, and on the meaning of the passion, that is, on Jesus’ death as a permanent sacrifice. Hence Jesus’ message is to await the coming event, just as the Israelites, according to Exodus 12 and as alluded to in the Mishnah, were to await their redemption (and, in effect, in the course of the meal to experience part of that redemption—in the Christian case, in the eating of the unleavened bread and the drinking of the wine, the body and blood of Christ).

In reworking the structure of a Passover sacrificial meal, the Synoptics may coincidentally be sharing a common position with early rabbis. They both adapt the biblical institution to the new message that redemption is at hand. For the Christians, it depended on believing in Jesus; for the Jews, it required following the way of Torah. Therefore both Jews and Christians in this world, 033though in significantly different ways, could experience redemption in their own lives.

In the Fourth Gospel, John uses the Passover analogy in a different way, which requires him to place the Last Supper before the Passover. According to John’s chronology, Jesus was condemned on “the day of Preparation of the Passover” (John 19:14). He was crucified, according to this chronology, at the same time the paschal lambs (the Passover offering) were being sacrificed at the Temple. Thus the Last Supper must occur before the Passover meal. As commentators have pointed out, since Jesus was killed during the time when the paschal lambs were killed, John is presenting Jesus as a Passover offering.¹⁶ This synchronization not only explains how Jesus died for humanity, but it has traditionally been argued, this gives his death a more enduring redemptive quality than the regular Passover sacrifice.

Thus, both John and the synoptics use Passover analogies to convey their message, but in different ways. As a result, the Last Supper occurs before Passover eve in John, but on Passover eve in the synoptics. But both John and the synoptics reinterpret the Passover message, just as the rabbis did after 70 A.D., from the sacrificial meal celebrating the Exodus to a promise of future redemption.

6 To this day, Jews throughout the world observe the Passover festival with a highly ritualized meal called a seder. The word means “order” and refers to the order of the service at the meal, including prayers, psalms, other readings, the retelling of the story of the Exodus from Egypt and the eating of special foods that have symbolic significance. It is commonly supposed that the Last Supper, the meal Jesus ate with his disciples the night before his crucifixion, was a seder. But was the Last Supper a Passover seder? The question itself assumes that the Last Supper occurred […]