Some Notes on Passover, the Last Supper of Jesus, and modern Jewish-Christian Dialogue

For years, Passover has been an especially fruitful occasion for interfaith events.  This owes partially to the universality and inherent "inter-faithiness" of the message and observance of the Festival, even without reformist adaptation or filtering, let alone with it.  In the case of Jewish-Christian relations, there is of course the general connection of Jesus as a Jew, the reality of Christianity beginning as an offshoot of second temple/proto-rabbinic Judaism, and the specific connection of the climactic events of the entire Christian religious narrative with Passover-time in early first century Judea.

In the 1980s and 90s, what some would call a "golden age" of Jewish-Christian dialogue and interreligious programming in major metropolitan areas, there was a lot of very nice bonding during communal seders and other dialogue events over the idea of the famous Last Supper having been a "Passover Seder."  This bonding is undeniably a very good thing, of significant historical, theological, and interpersonal value.  For myself and many others, it has indescribably poignant emotional value.  Unfortunately, there are a few scholarly problems with the idea, as lovely as it is.

One basic issue is that the "Passover Seder" as we know it today did not properly exist during the time that the historical Jesus of Nazareth walked the dusty streets of Jerusalem.  There was no Haggadah as such, no seder plate, no four questions, no four children, no afikoman, no rousing choruses of Chad Gadya or Adir Hu, and definitely no infernal repetitions of the earworm Dayenu. 

The ritualized and choreographed order of the home service and meal that we know so well did not begin to take shape in written form until roughly the second through fifth centuries CE.  Especially while the Temple in Jerusalem still stood, the average Jew's observance of Passover was very Temple-centered.  Pilgrimages were made, and people witnessed sacrifices made on their behalf and participated in the eating of positions of the sacrificial lamb.  They recited Psalms and praises, an ancient practice preserved in our tradition of Hallel on major Festivals.  Because the Torah commands a retelling of the Passover story of liberation in the home, we can infer that Jews were doing something commemorative as they sat around their tables and broke bread and blessed wine.  Unfortunately, the earliest attested written sources date to centuries later, so we do not have a direct window into earlier practices.

At the same time, it was once believed that the material in the siddur (a codified collection of Jewish liturgy primarily for the Synagogue) did not much pre-date the middle ages, perhaps the late 800s CE.  We knew that there was communal prayer in synagogues since before the destruction of the second Temple, but assumed that it was very ad-hoc and varied by community.  This is largely correct, but discoveries in the mid 20th century at Qumran (the so-called "Dead Sea Scrolls") demonstrated that there were certain prayer formulas and phrases familiar to us from the canonical siddur of rabbinic Judaism that were already floating around in prototypical forms close to the time of Jesus.  They were transmitted and developed through oral tradition and perhaps some intermediate written texts which are now lost to us until they were written and codified in forms such as the prayer books of Rav Amram and Saadia, which have been familiar to us for a long time.  It stands to reason that some of these whispers of the siddur attested in the desert scrolls had been floating around orally for yet more time before they were written!  Therefore, it is plausible that some form or antecedent of some of the classic prayers and benedictions and perhaps narrative tropes of the Haggadah were floating around and passed down orally for quite some time before the earliest written instances of which scholars are currently aware, potentially as far back as the time of Jesus.

Unfortunately, NT accounts of the Last Supper are murky and varying, and while there is general agreement that the events leading up to Jesus' execution took place some time around Passover, the night before his execution may very well not have been the first night of the Festival, when whatever proto-seder-like ritual that existed at the time might have been observed.  In that case, the Last Supper could not have been a Passover meal of any kind, though it could have been a Sabbath evening meal, or an ordinary non-Sabbath, non-Festival meal, which would naturally have included the staple components of Jewish piety and prayer to be found at any meal: the sharing of bread and wine with some form of thanks given to God to bless the meal and the people eating it.  That alone would be a moving and irrefutable connection between all kinds of rabbinic Jewish practices and the very heart of Christianity.

In conclusion, it is quite reasonable to speculate that there is a non-remote chance that Jesus himself would have been familiar with some rudimentary home ritual for Passover during which a meal would be eaten, unleavened bread would be blessed and eaten, bitter herbs would be consumed, and wine would be blessed and consumed.  Perhaps something like Hallel might have been observed, or that might only have been in the Temple or early synagogues.  Can this rudimentary antecedent be called a "seder"?  Not technically, since that imposes the language and categories of a more developed rabbinic Judaism on the proto-rabbinic period when Temple and Synagogue coexisted.  But colloquially, there is a good case for stopping short of a summary or dogmatic denial or shutting down of any talk of the Last Supper being a "Passover Seder."  In the year 2018/5778, Jews and Christians can and should bond over a Passover meal conducted according to rabbinic Judaism on its own terms, and we can and should talk about ways in which there is a connection to the historical Jesus, a topic which is understandably of interest to committed Christians who believe more and different things about Jesus that we do.  While it's important to be careful to avoid simplistic backdating of the nature and character of rabbinic Judaism onto Biblical or Temple Judaism (or worse, forward-dating of pre-rabbinic Judaism onto rabbinic Judaism), there are absolutely ways in which rabbinic Judaism as practiced today can offer modern Christians insight into the person, worldview, and life-ways of the historical Jesus and the Ancient Near Eastern environment that produced him.  Let us find a reasonable compromise and embrace some productive tension between the impulse to find commonality and connection and the impulse to zealously curtail the over-simplification and historical imprecision community leaders on both sides of Jewish-Christian dialogue sometimes allow or promote in the name of facilitating bonding and delighting the non-specialist audiences of interfaith programming.