Passover and Last Supper Revisited

Abstract

Although Jesus' Last Supper probably took place on the night before Passover (as in John) rather than on the first night of Passover itself (as in the Synoptics), it contained elements strongly marked by the Jewish institution of the Passover seder (fixed order of service) and haggadah (ritual retelling of the exodus events). These elements were not, as some scholars of Judaism have recently argued, post-70 CE developments. Rather, evidence from Jubilees, Philo, and the NT itself indicates that seder and haggadah already existed in some form in the pre-70 period.

1. Introduction

Was the Last Supper a Passover seder? Although there have always been doubters, it is safe to say that, a generation ago, the usual scholarly answer was, ‘Yes’. To be sure, the discrepancy between John and the Synoptics over the dating of the Supper was acknowledged as a problem.¹ According to Mark (14.12, 17-26), who is closely followed by Matthew (26.17) and Luke (22.7), the Supper occurred on the evening of ‘the first day of Unleavened Bread’,² that is, at the beginning of Nisan 15.³ The Last Supper, therefore, took place at the beginning of Passover. In accordance with this Synoptic chronology, Jesus' death the following afternoon occurred on what was still Nisan 15, the first ‘day’ of the holiday according to the normal Jewish method of time-reckoning, in which ‘day’ begins at sunset.⁴ According to John, however, Jesus died on the afternoon of the day of preparation for Passover, Erev Pesach (19.14, 31, 42), that is, Nisan 14; his Last Supper the night before, therefore, was not a Passover meal.

This discrepancy, however, was not viewed as an insurmountable problem by NT scholars affirming a Passover setting. Either they argued that the Synoptics rather than John were right on this particular,⁵ or they speculated that John and the Synoptics were using different calendars,⁶ or they asserted that, while John's dating might be correct, Jesus, sensing the imminence of his arrest and execution, may have modeled his last meal on the feast of deliverance he did not think he would live to celebrate.⁷

But a more serious challenge to this consensus has emerged in recent years, and it has come primarily from scholars of ancient Judaism rather than NT specialists. The question these researchers have posed is: In Jesus' time, was there actually such a thing as a Passover seder? That is, was there in the early first century CE a Jewish custom of gathering on the first night of Passover at a ceremonial meal whose distinctive elements, arranged in a fixed order (the literal meaning of seder),⁸ were interpreted for the edification of the participants in a ritual retelling (haggadah) that linked those elements with the exodus from Egypt?⁹ And more and more of these researchers have been answering this question with a ‘no’, identifying the seder instead as essentially a post-70 CE replacement for the pre-70 tradition of Passover sacrifice, which came to an end when the Romans destroyed the Temple in which Jewish sacrifice took place.¹⁰ And this conclusion matters for historians of early Christianity because the words of institution that Jesus speaks over the bread and wine in the Synoptics (‘This is my body… This is my blood’) are usually interpreted as his own twist on the Jewish custom of explaining the matzah and other seder elements—a connection that has helped scholars both to interpret Jesus' words and to maintain their historicity. But if there was no such Jewish custom, that whole approach falls to the ground.¹¹

What is the reason for these doubts about the existence of a seder rite in the pre-70 period? The central arguments are the following:

1. 1. The foundational Pentateuchal passages dealing with the Passover festival (Exod 12–13 and Deut 16) outline neither a seder nor a haggadah, as defined above; they merely specify such things as how the sacrificial lamb should be chosen (from the sheep or the goats), how it should be cooked (roasted), and how it should be eaten (with unleavened bread and bitter herbs). No set order in the eating of these foods is prescribed, nor is it said what prayers or hymns, if any, should accompany their consumption. In other words, there is no seder in the strict sense. Neither is there a haggadah. The instructions that specify the way in which a father should reply to his son when the latter asks about the distinctive rites of the feast (Exod 12.26-27; 13.14-15; Deut 6.20-25; cf. Exod 13.8) are ad hoc; they outline the sort of thing that should be said if and when queries arise, not a fixed arrangement of ritualized questions and answers.¹²

2. 2. Later biblical and Second Temple Jewish texts dealing with Passover concentrate on the sacrifice in the Temple; they do not refer to a fixed order of foods, blessings, and hymns, or a ritual retelling of the exodus events.¹³ Nor do they provide any clear evidence for a domestic celebration of Passover by Jews generally in the Second Temple period.¹⁴ In fact, several texts militate against such a supposition, since they stipulate or suggest that the Passover sacrifice should be eaten only within the Temple courts (2 Chron 35.11-13; Jub. 49.16-21; 11QTemple 17.6-9) or the city of Jerusalem (m. Zev. 5.8).¹⁵

3. 3. The earliest evidence for a haggadic accompaniment to the Passover meal comes in the Mishnah (Pesaḥim 10), which was redacted in the early third century CE and basically outlines the seder as it presently exists: four cups of wine; haggadah before the meal consisting of interpretation of Passover sacrifice, matzah, and bitter herbs; recitation of the Hallel (Pss 115–118); and afikoman (post-prandial treat). But recent scholars have argued that this chapter of the Mishnah is secondary to the corresponding chapter of the Tosefta, which lacks reference to the haggadah and instead mandates a discussion of the laws (not the events) of Passover after (not before) the meal.¹⁶ If these scholars are right, there probably was no such thing as the Passover haggadah until a very late stage in the game,¹⁷ certainly later than the first century.¹⁸

4. 4. The biblical Passover meal is to be eaten in haste (בחפזון/μɛτὰ σπουδῆς; Exod 12.11).¹⁹ According to Friedman and Hauptman, this was still the practice in late Second Temple times, as is shown by the custom of the ‘Hillel sandwich’, which was originally a device for fulfilling the biblical commandment by eating the three mandated foods all at once and thus dispatching them swiftly.²⁰ Hence in Hillel's time, the early first century CE, the Passover celebration had not yet developed into the sort of gracious meal, accompanied by wine and appetizers, that it would later become and that is the presupposition for the haggadah. Friedman and Hauptman trace this innovation to the Tosefta, and Hauptman views it as a post-70 adaptation to the culture of the Greco-Roman symposium.²¹

2. Jubilees and Philo

Strong as this case appears to be, and supported though it is by such an impressive consensus, I remain unconvinced. It seems to me that these recent views overemphasize the biblical and rabbinic evidence and downplay or ignore evidence from the book of Jubilees, Philo, and especially the NT. The latter sources, in my opinion, point towards the emergence of a leisurely Passover meal and a domestic seder, including haggadic recital, in the pre-70 period.

The neglect of these sources distorts the results of some Passover researchers. Several of the contentions of Friedman and Hauptman, for example, are belied by evidence from the book of Jubilees. That book shows that it was not the post-70 CE redactors of the Mishnah or Tosefta who first turned the Passover celebration from a hasty repast of lamb, matzah, and bitter herbs into a ‘gracious meal’ accompanied by wine. Rather, the second-century BCE author of Jubilees is already concerned to show that the biblical regulations about eating the meal in haste applied only to the first Passover celebration, not to subsequent ones: ‘For you celebrated this festival hastily when you were leaving Egypt until the time you crossed the sea into the wilderness of Sur, because you completed it [the first Passover] on the seashore’ (Jub 49.23, emphasis and bracketed material added). The intent here seems to be to show that the note in Exod 12.11 about consuming the Passover meal in haste is not meant to apply to life in the author's present.²² The hermeneutical strategy, therefore, is strikingly similar to that in the much later Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, which specifies that the instructions in Exod 12.11 about eating in haste apply only to ‘this time and not to future generations’.²³ Both the author of Jubilees and Pseudo-Jonathan, apparently, lived in communities in which the Passover meal was consumed in a leisurely manner. But how could they square this custom with the explicit injunction to haste in Exod 12.11? The answer both adopted was to limit the applicability of that injunction to the first Passover.²⁴

Thus, while Jubilees provides no evidence for a domestic celebration of Passover, and even polemicizes against it (see 49.21), it does show that, already in the second century BCE, some Jews were treating the Passover meal as a leisurely repast to be enjoyed with wine (see 49.6), contrary to the spartan regulations of Exodus.²⁵ And the sharp polemic of Jubilees against domestic celebration of Passover may suggest that some Jews known to the author were celebrating the feast at home.

That they were doing so a century or so later, but still before the destruction of the Temple, seems to be suggested by Philo, Spec. 2.148:

ἑκάστη δὲ οἰκία κατ' ἐκɛῖνον τὸν χρόνον σχῆμα ἱɛροῦ καὶ σɛμνότητα πɛριβέβληται, τοῦ σϕαγιασθέντος ἱɛρɛίου πρὸς τὴν ἁρμόττουσαν ɛὐωχίαν ɛὐτρɛπιζομένου.

On this day every dwelling-house is invested with the outward semblance and dignity of a temple. The victim is then slaughtered and dressed for the festal meal which befits the occasion.²⁶

If, as this passage seems to imply, the slaughter of the Passover sacrifice is to take place at every dwelling-house (ἑκάστη…οἰκία) in Jewry world-wide (cf. QE 1.10), we seem to be dealing with at least the rudiments of a domestic celebration of Passover.²⁷

We have evidence from Jubilees, therefore, that the Passover meal had become a leisurely repast by the second century BCE and from Philo that it had become (or reemerged as) a domestic celebration, at least in some circles, by the beginning of the first century CE. These are necessary conditions for the development of seder and haggadah, but Jubilees and Philo do not themselves provide unequivocal evidence for the emergence of those forms. There are, however, a couple of tantalizing hints in Philo that some form of the seder may have existed by his time. These hints are contained in two passages which, as Naomi Cohen points out, are similar in striking ways to two important sections in the Haggadah.²⁸

The first Philo passage, de Congressu 167, asserts that the unleavened bread of Passover, despite its biblical description as ‘the bread of affliction’ (see Deut 16.3), is not an instrument of suffering but an essential component of ‘the meal of festivity and joy’ (τὴν ἑορτῆς καὶ ɛὐϕροσύνης τράπɛζαν, my trans.).²⁹ This reversal of the valence of ‘bread of affliction’ is similar to that which occurs in a famous Aramaic passage in the Haggadah that also echoes Deut 16.3, since it begins, ‘This is the poor bread (הא לחמא עניא) which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt’.³⁰ This passage, which is referred to as Ha Lachma after its first two words, goes on to invite the needy and hungry to come into the house where the meal is taking place and join in the paschal sacrifice by eating this ‘poor bread’. Thus, as in the Philo passage, the invitation to eat ‘the bread of affliction’ is paradoxically viewed as a cause not for sorrow but for joy. We will return to Ha Lachma below.

The second Philo passage, Quaestiones et Solutiones in Exodum 1.15, is even more striking:

Unleavened bread is (a sign) of great haste and speed, while the bitter herbs (are a sign) of the life of bitterness and struggle which they endure as slaves. That is that which is said (ῥητόν).³¹ But as for the deeper meaning, this is worth noting, (namely) that that which is leavened and fermented rises, while that which is unleavened is low. Each of these is a symbol of types of soul, one being haughty and swollen with arrogance, the other being unchangeable and prudent, choosing the middle way rather than extremes because of desire and zeal for equality. But the bitter herbs are a manifestation of a psychic migration, through which one removes from passion to impassivity and from wickedness to virtue. For those who naturally and genuinely repent become bitter toward their former way of life.

Here Philo cites an interpretation of the matzah as a sign of haste, presumably that with which the Jews were forced to leave Egypt, and of the bitter herbs as a sign of their suffering in that country. The exact same connections are made in the Passover Haggadah, in a passage partly paralleled by a Mishnaic saying attributed to Rabban Gamaliel, a first-century rabbi (m. Pes. 10.5; on Gamaliel's identity, see below). Even more importantly, Philo makes it clear that the interpretations he relates are not his own invention (he goes on to give spiritual exegeses more to his liking) but belong to τὸ ῥητόν—a term that means ‘that which is said’ and could appropriately be rendered in Hebrew with haggadah.³² As noted, this is not unequivocal evidence for the existence of the haggadah in Philo's time, but it does suggest that it may have existed by then.³³

3. The NT Evidence

Already, then, Jubilees and Philo suggest that by the early first century CE the Passover meal may have become an occasion for expounding the significance of the particular holiday foods at a leisurely repast held at home. The first unequivocal evidence for this custom, however, comes from the NT. I do not think that the seder-skeptics have fully weighed the significance of this testimony.³⁴

The most important datum is that, as we have already seen, all three Synoptic Gospels portray Jesus' Last Supper as a Passover meal and show him ritually distributing matzah and wine to his disciples at this meal and interpreting these elements symbolically and in sacrificial terms (‘my body [given for you]…my blood shed on behalf of many’).³⁵ Moreover, at least two out of the three Synoptics (three out of three if the longer reading in Luke 22.19b-20 is accepted)³⁶ link the ‘cup word’ with the covenant established by Moses in the exodus when they show Jesus echoing Exod 24.8, ‘Behold the blood of the covenant…’³⁷

As has been noted above, this Synoptic identification of the Last Supper as a Passover meal contrasts with the situation in the Gospel of John, where the Supper occurs on the night before Passover begins. Several recent seder investigators have used this discrepancy to relativize the Synoptic evidence, arguing that John is probably more accurate in dating the Supper to Erev Pesach.³⁸ I agree on this narrow point of chronology,³⁹ but in my view that does not diminish the importance of the Synoptic evidence for the question about the existence of a pre-70 CE seder. The Synoptics, after all, are strongly rooted in pre-70 traditions, as is clearly demonstrated with regard to the Last Supper story in particular by the parallel in 1 Cor 11.23-26, and Mark at least may have been composed before the destruction of the Temple—if not, shortly thereafter.⁴⁰ Even in the latter case, there was scarcely sufficient time between the destruction of the Temple in 70 and the composition of Mark perhaps a year or two later for a thorough transformation of the Passover celebration to occur. The important question for our purposes, then, is not whether or not Jesus' Last Supper actually was a Passover meal, but whether or not the Synoptic Gospels, which are rooted in pre-70 realities, portray it as such. And since the answer to that question is ‘yes’, the Synoptics provide valuable evidence for the shape of the Passover celebration before 70.⁴¹

Moreover, it is striking that John, as noted, portrays Jesus' last meal as occurring on the night before Passover and as lacking his symbolic actions and words over the bread and wine. The Synoptics, by contrast, picture Jesus' last meal as a Passover supper, and this meal does contain those interpretative actions and words. Is this combination of Synoptic presences and Johannine absences just a coincidence? That seems unlikely; rather, it is probable that the authors of the Synoptics think that Jesus' symbolic actions and words fit into the context of a Passover meal.⁴² And this makes sense in light of the important ways in which these actions dovetail with the portrayal of the Passover seder in later Jewish sources. This is not a matter of reading the evidence from these later sources back into the NT accounts but of concluding from their distinctive shared characteristics that the Passover rites depicted in these different corpora have some sort of genealogical relationship to each other.⁴³

4. The ‘Bread Word’ and Ha Lachma

The most important of these shared characteristics is what Jeremias refers to as Jesus' ‘altogether extraordinary manner of announcing his passion’ through ‘speaking words of interpretation over the bread and the wine’.⁴⁴ While this sort of table talk has precedents in the Greco-Roman symposium, where the foods at the feast sometimes turn into the subject of the conversation, it is unprecedented in ancient Jewish contexts—except for the Passover seder.⁴⁵ The earliest rabbinic reference to the custom is found in the Mishnaic passage to which we have already referred, Pesaḥim 10.5, in which Rabban Gamaliel designates the matzah as one of the three special foods that must be interpreted at every Passover meal. (We will return to the other two below.) This demand is repeated in the Passover Haggadah and is fulfilled there by an interpretation that treats the unleavened bread as a sign of the Israelites' need to hurry out of Egypt.⁴⁶

But it is also fulfilled near the beginning of the seder in the Ha Lachma paragraph to which reference was made earlier. For convenience of reference, I give the paragraph in full below and number its component sentences:

הא לחמא עניא די אכלו אבהתנא בארעא דמצרים (1

כל דכפין ייתי ויכל כל דצריך ייתי ויפסח (2

השתא הכא לשנה הבאה בארעא דישראל השתא עבדי לשנה הבאה בני חורין (3

1. 1) This is⁴⁷ the poor bread that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt.

2. 2) All who are hungry, let them come and eat; all who are needy, let them come and partake of the Passover sacrifice.

3. 3) This year we are here, next year we shall be (or: let us be) in the land of Israel; this year we are slaves, next year we shall be (or: let us be) free people.

The similarity in structure and meaning of ## 1 and 2 to the ‘bread word’ in the Synoptic tradition is striking. Here, for example, is Luke's version of this saying (Luke 22.19), the main elements of which are drawn from Mark and supported by the early passage 1 Cor 11.24:

καὶ λαβὼν ἄρτον ɛὐχαριστήσας ἔκλασɛν καὶ ἔδωκɛν αὐτοῖς λέγων·

τοῦτό ἐστιν τὸ σῶμά μου τὸ ὑπὲρ ὑμῶν διδόμɛνον·

τοῦτο ποιɛῖτɛ ɛἰς τὴν ἐμὴν ἀνάμνησιν.

And having taken bread and having given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them saying:

This is my body which is given for you.

Do this for the remembrance of me.

We have here, as in the Ha Lachma paragraph, an invitation to eat the matzah,⁴⁸ and this act of eating is linked with the theme of remembrance that is implied in Ha Lachma (‘that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt’) and is so integral to the whole seder.⁴⁹ In both cases, moreover, the eating of the matzah has sacrificial overtones (‘my body given for you/partake of the Passover sacrifice’). Most importantly, Jesus' introductory formula in all versions of the saying, ‘This is my body which…’ is strikingly similar to the first words of Ha Lachma, ‘This is the poor bread which…’⁵⁰ What are we to make of these parallels?

They would be less important for our purposes—though they would still be interesting—if recent scholarship were right and Ha Lachma were a late addition to the seder service. Kulp, for example, notes that, while it ‘appears in geonic Haggadot and in most manuscripts and geniza fragments of the Haggadah…it does not appear in ancient Eretz Yisraeli Haggadot’, and Goldschmidt relates that, where the paragraph is present, the order of its sentences varies, and sometimes the first sentence (the crucial one for our purposes) is missing altogether.⁵¹ As for Talmudic evidence, Klawans remarks that, while the Bavli discusses the biblical phrase ‘bread of affliction’ in several places (see, e.g. b. Ber. 39b; b. Pes. 36ab, 115b), it never mentions Ha Lachma,⁵² and Goldschmidt observes that, while b. Taʾan. 20b offers a parallel to the second sentence of the paragraph, it does not present the invitation to the needy in the context of the seder but simply relates it to the customary charity of R. Ḥuna, a late second-century Amora.⁵³ There has been a recent tendency, therefore, to date Ha Lachma late; Safrai and Safrai, for example, pronounce it a product of the Babylonian Geonim, and Leonhard dates it even later, perhaps to the twelfth century CE.⁵⁴

These arguments, however, are perhaps less decisive than their framers think, given the fragmentary nature of our evidence from Jewish antiquity, in particular about folk celebrations such as the seder.⁵⁵ Moreover, the lack of attestation to Ha Lachma in rabbinic sources is counterbalanced by the parallels from other sources, which open up the possibility that some parts of it may have existed early on. We have already seen, for example, that Philo parallels the first two sentences of the paragraph by turning the biblical ‘bread of affliction’ into a paschal meal to be celebrated joyfully. There is also a noteworthy parallel between these same sentences of Ha Lachma and John 6.35—a passage that occurs, significantly enough, in a Passover setting (cf. 6.4):⁵⁶

This is the poor bread…   I am the bread of life

All who are hungry   The one who comes to me

let them come in and eat   will not go hungry

But the most compelling piece of evidence is, of course, the striking correspondence in form and meaning between Jesus' words of institution, ‘This is my body’, and the beginning of Ha Lachma, ‘This is the poor bread’. Again, it needs to be asked: Can this parallel be ascribed to chance? Such a striking correspondence in theme and wording seems unlikely to be fortuitous or an example of independent development.⁵⁷ Therefore there seems to be a prima facie case that some form of Ha Lachma, and hence of the Passover seder, already existed in the pre-70 era.⁵⁸

5. Seder as Reversal of Last Supper?

There is, however, an alternate way of explaining the parallels between the Passover seder and the Last Supper, and it has been argued with vigor in recent years by Israel Yuval. This is the theory that the seder itself is essentially a response to the Christian eucharist rather than being its source. Thus, for example, the striking parallel between Ha Lachma and Jesus' words of institution is interpreted as a polemical reversal of the latter by the former.⁵⁹ Here is Yuval's reconstruction of the way in which the seder developed in the context of what he calls ‘Jewish–Christian dialogue’ (though it would probably be truer to his theory to speak of Jewish polemic against Christianity):

During the time of the Temple the celebration of Passover included two main components, the sacrificial meal and the Hallel. For two generations after the Temple's destruction, instead of the defunct sacrifice, people generally ate a roasted kid⁶⁰ (a custom, perhaps, in distant communities before the Destruction as well) and studied the laws of sacrifice that they could no longer perform. This is the tradition described in the Tosefta's account of scholars gathering to study the laws of Passover all night long. At this stage, the Christian midrash on Exodus 12 and the paschal sacrifice emerged. In response, the Jewish Haggadah distanced itself from sacrifice and emphasized instead the duty to tell the story of the Exodus, as described in the Mishnah (M. Pes. 10). This stage was crystallized by the beginning of the second century C.E.⁶¹

Crucial to this theory is Yuval's analysis of Gamaliel's statement about the necessity of interpreting Passover sacrifice, matzah, and bitter herbs at the seder in m. Pes. 10.5. In line with most recent seder researchers, Yuval identifies this Gamaliel as Gamaliel II, a leader of the post-70 rabbinic movement, rather than Gamaliel I, his grandfather, a pre-70 figure who is mentioned in Acts 5.34-39; 22.3.⁶² The distinctive point of his analysis is to interpret Gamaliel's statement as a ‘reversed parallel’ to Christian theology, in which the pesach is Jesus (John 1.29; 1 Cor 5.7), the matzah is his body (Matt 26.26//Mark 14.22//Luke 22.19), and the bitter herbs are his suffering (Aphrahat Dem. 12.8)⁶³ or the punishment awaiting Israel for rejecting him (Melito Peri Pascha 93).⁶⁴ According to Yuval, then, ‘Rabban Gamaliel is demanding a declaration of loyalty to the Jewish understandings and, therefore, an implicit denial of the Christian alternative’.⁶⁵ Yuval also sees Gamaliel's ban on concluding the Passover meal with an afikoman (m. Pes. 10.8) as a response to Christian beliefs about Jesus, since Melito (Peri Pascha 66) uses the word ἀϕικόμɛνος to speak about the ‘coming’ of Jesus in incarnation and passion.⁶⁶

As this last example might suggest, Yuval tends to see parallels and polemic everywhere, and some of his arguments seem far-fetched.⁶⁷ There is, as a matter of fact, a more sensible and widely accepted explanation for the afikoman, since that term seems to be a loanword (ἐπίκωμον) that is used, along with its cognates, in Greek sources to indicate the sort of after-dinner revelry that sometimes followed Hellenistic banquets and symposia.⁶⁸ Gamaliel's dictum, ‘They do not follow the meal at which the Passover sacrifice is eaten with afikoman’, fits this context perfectly. As Baruch Bokser points out, moreover, the Mishnah did not invent the contrast between Passover feasting and the debauchery of pagan banquets. Philo, for example, warns that those at the Passover feast are not to overindulge in food and wine ‘like those in other symposia’,⁶⁹ and Josephus, in Bokser's words, ‘sets the Passover rite apart from regular banquets with the phrase “feasting alone not being permitted”’.⁷⁰ Another example comes from a NT passage that to my knowledge has not previously been mentioned in this regard, 1 Cor 5.7-8:

ἐκκαθάρατɛ τὴν παλαιὰν ζύμην, ἵνα ἦτɛ νέον ϕύραμα, καθώς ἐστɛ ἄζυμοι· καὶ γὰρ τὸ πάσχα ἡμῶν ἐτύθη Χριστός. ὥστɛ ἑορτάζωμɛν μὴ ἐν ζύμῃ παλαιᾷ μηδὲ ἐν ζύμῃ κακίας καὶ πονηρίας ἀλλ' ἐν ἀζύμοις ɛἰλικρινɛίας καὶ ἀληθɛίας.

Purge the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us, therefore, celebrate the feast, not with the old leaven, the leaven of evildoing and fornication, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

Here we see reflected, not only the biblical ceremonies of purging the house of leaven (see Exod 12.15) and sacrificing the Passover lamb, but also a warning against letting the paschal feast become an occasion for dissipation—the same sort of reaction against Hellenistic banqueting practices that we have noticed in Philo, Josephus, and Gamaliel's dictum about the afikoman. Rather than being a post-70 CE response to Christianity, then, the afikoman seems to reflect a Jewish understanding pitting the Passover meal against Hellenistic banqueting customs, an approach that existed already in the early first century CE and is attested in an early NT text.

As for Yuval's argument that m. Pes. 10.5 is a response to Christian interpretations of the biblical elements of the Passover meal, we have seen that Philo already offers interpretations of two of the three foods mandated here, interpretations very similar to those that later appear in the Haggadah, and ascribes these interpretations to ‘the traditional exegesis’ (ῥητόν). Yuval's theory is rendered further suspect by the way in which he combines different Christian sources from widely varying times, some of them subsequent to the era of Gamaliel (Melito died around 180 and Aphrahat wrote between 336 and 345), to construct an artificial picture of a Christian understanding to which Gamaliel's statement is supposed to be a response.⁷¹

Moreover, the movement Yuval posits from the Christians' ‘spiritual’, Christological interpretation of the Passover foods to the more literal interpretation of them in Jewish sources makes less sense than seeing the development as going in the opposite direction, from the more literal to the more spiritual. Indeed, the latter is the direction in which we can see Philo himself moving in QE 1.15, where he first cites the traditional, more literal exegesis of the bitter herbs and matzah, then develops his own spiritual exegesis, which is less tethered to the details of the biblical text. For similar reasons, it seems more likely that Ha Lachma's literalistic ‘this is the poor bread’ statement was transformed into Jesus' highly metaphorical ‘this is my body’ saying than the other way around. Furthermore, neither Ha Lachma nor Gamaliel's statement in m. Pes. 10.5 betrays any overt sign of being the sort of anti-Christian polemic that Yuval alleges. Ancient religious ideological warfare was usually not conducted so subtly, and it seems methodologically unsound to posit its existence in passages that betray no overt sign of it.⁷² Yuval's theory, moreover, ignores the different liturgical contexts of the Passover seder and the Christian eucharist, the former being celebrated annually and the latter weekly. If the rabbis had intended to respond to eucharist, one might have expected this response to be incorporated into the weekly Sabbath meal rather than the annual seder.⁷³ A movement in the other direction, from the seder-like Last Supper to the weekly celebration of the eucharist, makes more sense, given the centrality of Jesus' death in early Christianity.

I do think that Yuval has performed a valuable service by raising the question of the function of Gamaliel's dictum in m. Pes. 10.5, but I do not think that the answer he gives is the only one possible, or the most compelling. ‘Whoever does not mention these three things at Passover has not fulfilled his obligation’ might, as Yuval posits, be a way of introducing a new religious duty. But it might also be the repetition of a traditional demand or, more likely than either, a new version of a traditional requirement. In other words, before Gamaliel's time it may have been recognized that there was an obligation to interpret the special holiday foods on the first night of Passover, but there may have been unclarity about exactly which ones needed to be interpreted, and Gamaliel's dictum may have been an attempt to end that unclarity. And this sort of new twist on a traditional custom is exactly what we see Gamaliel doing in the famous passage in b. Ber. 28b-29a in which he seeks for a way to reformulate (לתקן) one of the statutory Eighteen Benedictions, that against the heretics, to reflect the changed conditions of his own time.⁷⁴

This sort of interpretation of Gamaliel's dictum as trying to end an undesirable variety of practices also corresponds to the variation we have noted in earlier sources with respect to the foods that should be the center of attention at Passover. Jubilees mentions the sacrificial lamb and the wine, while Philo refers to and gives traditional interpretations for the matzah and bitter herbs. The Jesus of the Synoptics says words of interpretation over the matzah and the wine, whereas Gamaliel in the Mishnah specifies the Passover lamb, bitter herbs, and matzah, giving a slightly different interpretation of these elements, and in a different order, than appears in the Haggadah. The best interpretation of this variation would seem to be that, prior to Gamaliel's time, there was a Passover custom of explaining the distinctive holiday foods, but there was variation, as befits a folk ceremony, with regard to which foods needed to be explained and how. It was this variation that spurred Gamaliel to promulgate what he hoped would be an authoritative ruling.⁷⁵

6. Conclusions and Ramifications

1. 1. Since Passover originated as a folk ceremony and probably continued to be so in later periods, the best starting point for reconstructing its shape in the Second Temple period is not priestly injunctions or the dicta of later sages but the cumulative evidence of all sources from the pre-70 period, including the NT.⁷⁶

2. 2. As might be expected in dealing with a folk rite, those sources provide evidence for a variety of practices.

3. 3. Common to at least several of those sources, however, is the custom of interpreting some of the special Passover foods—though the sources, again as expected, differ on exactly which foods need to be interpreted and how.

4. 4. In the post-70 period, rabbinic sages such as Gamaliel tried to standardize these practices.

5. 5. The sages were only partially successful in rabbinizing the seder, as can be seen, for example, in the correspondence against the Mishnah between the Haggadah and the traditional exegesis cited by Philo (see above). Even today, the Haggadah is an amalgam uniting a popular underlay (e.g. Ha Lachma, Dayyenu, Chad Gadya) with a rabbinic overlay (e.g. Gamaliel's dictum about what foods are to be interpreted, the Bnei Berak stories, the ‘I and not an angel’ midrash).

6. 6. The variety of seder practices in the present is the latest reflection of the creative tension that has always existed within Passover between that which has been handed down (traditum) and the traditioning process that continues to introduce change (traditio), which is partly catalyzed by popular interests and pressure.⁷⁷