Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

Among Jesus scholars there is dispute about whether Jesus’ last meal was a Passover meal at all. While the tradition of the first three evangelists clearly speaks of a Paschal meal in the night before the fifteenth of Nisan, the Fourth Gospel stresses that the day of Jesus’ crucifixion was the fourteenth of Nisan, so that Jesus died at exactly the hour in which the Paschal lambs were being slaughtered in the temple.¹⁴ But precisely that would be Johannine theology: Jesus is thus depicted as the true Paschal lamb. Consequently, John does not represent Jesus’ last meal as a Passover supper.

In what follows I will give preference to the accounts of the first three gospels: Jesus’ last meal was the Passover meal in the night before 15 Nisan. The counterarguments have weight, but they are in no way decisive.¹⁵ At times they ignore the situation altogether. For example, it is argued that the Passover meal was celebrated in the family, with women and children, while Mark says that Jesus took his last meal with only the group of the Twelve.¹⁶ Indeed, that is how Mark portrays it. And that must have been Jesus’ precise intention: not to celebrate the Passover meal as it was usually done, with his natural family, but with his new family, and not with a random selection of disciples who might have been available. Instead, as Mark emphatically states, he wanted to celebrate it with the Twelve (Mark 14:17-18). His last meal had the familial intimacy that is proper to the Paschal supper, and yet the choice of participants points emphatically to Israel, to the eschatological gathering and new creation of the people of God that Jesus had begun with his circle of twelve. Here the usual ritual may not be held up against Jesus’ freedom. In what follows I will rely on Mark’s account for the description of the details.¹⁷ He depicts the special character of the meal as follows:

During the meal Jesus takes the bread, speaks the usual thanksgiving prayer over it, breaks it, and hands it to the Twelve. That is the prescribed ritual. It is the table prayer before the main course, after the appetizers have been eaten and the father of the family has recalled the people’s being led out of Egypt. It is true that Mark says nothing about the appetizers, the Passover liturgy, and other elements of the meal. The tradition he is following assumes all that as familiar and a matter of course. Mark and his tradition relate only what is special and unique about this one Passover meal.¹⁸ One of those things was that Jesus interpreted the broken bread he handed to his meal companions with the words “This is my body.”

“Body” should not be understood in our Western sense, in contrast to the soul. “Body” means the whole person. Jesus intends to say, “I myself am this bread, with my whole history and life. My life will be broken like this bread. I give it to you so that you may share in it.”

Thus Jesus’ sign-action is a prophecy of his death, which he proclaims in the sign of the broken bread. But at the same time this sign-action is more than a death prophecy, for Jesus gives the Twelve a share in his existence, in his life that will now be given over to death. Evidently his death has a depth dimension in which the Twelve, and therefore Israel, must share. Mark—in contrast to the Lukan/Pauline line of the Last Supper tradition¹⁹—does not yet say at this point what that dimension may be.

The Markan tradition assumes, without saying it explicitly, that the main part of the meal—the eating of the Paschal lamb with bitter herbs, bread, and the fruit mixture called ‘aroseth—followed the table prayer and the word of interpretation over the broken bread. At the end of this central part, the father of the family took the “cup of blessing” and pronounced another prayer of thanksgiving over it. At this point Mark again begins to tell us of another unusual event: Jesus makes the giving and drinking of the cup of blessing a sign-action as well, for after saying the prayer of thanksgiving he interprets the cup as follows: “This is my blood, [the blood] of the covenant, that will be poured out for many.”

The statement is replete with traditional motifs, almost too many for people today. But we should not fault the ancient text for it. Today’s hearers would not know, either, that the background of the Aramaic words of interpretation Jesus cites is Deuteronomy 16:1-8. For Jewish ears at that time a few central words, often just one, were sufficient to evoke a broader biblical context. What is Mark’s text saying?