Most of us remember the dramatic ending of the last Indiana Jones movie, The Last Crusade, when good-guy Jones confronts a wicked quester for the Holy Grail in a room full of cups. A Knight Templar is guarding the vessels, some of which are gorgeous, jewel-studded metal items, others rudimentary wooden cups. But which one is the true Grail, the cup Jesus shared with his disciples at the Last Supper, the cup that tradition (and the Knight Templar) promises will give eternal life? The wicked quester concludes it must be one of the more ornate cups. He grabs a shining gold vessel, drinks from it—and immediately disintegrates into a lifeless pile of dust. The Knight Templar wryly quips: “He chose poorly.”
But is this the only poor choice the wicked quester has made? Or is the whole enterprise of looking for the Holy Grail a poor choice?
The historical search for the Holy Grail seems to have taken place off and on since the Middle Ages (see “From Symbol to Relic”). But the searchers have seldom considered our earliest evidence of this elusive cup: the New Testament. To determine whether such searches for a cup of eternal life 014might be fertile or futile, we must turn to the Letters of Paul and the Gospels—and not late medieval romances.
The first question to ask these texts is whether there ever was a Holy Grail—a single, special cup used at the Last Supper.
First, regarding the quality of the cup, we can safely dismiss the idea that a chalice, a metal cup, would have been used. We must remember that this meal, according to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, took place during the Jewish Passover festival (more on this later), and that the normal cup or cups for such a meal would have been quite ordinary indeed, not a cup fit for a king. The Gospels offer no suggestion that the host of this meal was wealthy and thus would possess any expensive drinking cups or bowls (which were also used in the first century). It is most likely that the Last Supper cup was carved of wood—quite fitting for a carpenter’s last meal—or white chalk, a form of soft limestone that was popular for drinking vessels in first-century Jerusalem,a although glass vessels were also popular throughout the Roman world. In any case, it is unlikely, although not impossible, that the cup would have survived the centuries in the way a metal cup might have done. It is even more unlikely that the cup would have had any distinguishing markings or design that would allow us to identify it with any certainty or even probability today.
Second is the question of quantity: Was there one communal cup at the Last Supper?
Our earliest record of what happened at the Last Supper is found in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, written in the early 50s A.D. According to Paul, “After supper [Jesus] took the cup saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Corinthians 11:25–26). The repeated use of the phrase “this cup” may imply a communal cup. The earliest gospel, Mark, seems to make this explicit: “Then he took the cup, gave thanks and offered it to them, and they all drank from it” (Mark 14:23). Matthew 26:27 and Luke 22:17 appear to agree; John 13 does not mention a cup at all. So the evidence suggests there was indeed one communal cup that Jesus had the disciples partake of. Interestingly enough, the text never says that Jesus himself drank from the cup, though this may be implied.1
So, we may conclude there was a cup—a Holy Grail, if you will—but it is unlikely that it would have survived or that it would have been in any way distinguishable from the typical cups used in first-century Jerusalem.
Thus far, we have been talking about literal references to the cup in the New Testament. But throughout the Gospels, the term “cup” is used both metaphorically and literally, though seldom are the two types of references considered together. These metaphorical references have been equally important in inspiring the quest for the Holy Grail.
Consider the story of Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before he is to die. In great 015agony, Jesus throws himself on the ground and asks God to rescue him from his horrible fate. In Mark 14:36 (and parallels), Jesus beseeches God: “Take this cup from me.” The cup is a metaphor for Jesus’ own death.
Compare this to Mark 10:38 where two of the apostles, the sons of Zebedee, ask Jesus for the “box seats” (one at Jesus’ right hand, the other at his left) in the kingdom of God. Jesus responds: “Can you drink the cup I drink, or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?” Jesus is alluding to his death and resurrection, although the disciples seem to miss the metaphor. They respond rather glibly, “We can.”
Why does Jesus associate the “cup” with death? The answer comes from the Hebrew Scriptures, and its many references to the wicked (sometimes Israel, sometimes Israel’s enemies) drinking from the cup of God’s wrath. For example, Psalm 75:8: “In the hand of the Lord is a cup of foaming wine mixed with spices; he pours it out and all the wicked of the earth drink it down to its very dregs.” Or Isaiah 51:17: “Awake, awake! Rise up, O Jerusalem, you who have drunk from the hand of the Lord, the cup of his wrath, you who have drained it to its dregs.” Lamentations 4:21–22 reads, “Rejoice and be glad, O Daughter of Edom, you who live in the land of Uz. But to you also the cup will be passed; you will be drunk and stripped naked … But, O Daughter of Edom, he will punish your sin and expose your wickedness.”
In each case, the cup represents the death that God’s wrath or judgment will bring upon sinners. Note that it is always God who offers the cup. Thus, when Jesus asks God to “take this cup” in the Garden of Gethsemane, 041he is not just shrinking from death, but from a death that is God’s punishment for sin.
At the Last Supper, Jesus further transforms this cup metaphor so that the vessel becomes a symbol of both death and redemption. According to Paul, “The Lord Jesus on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way, after supper he took the cup saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Corinthians 11:23–26). Similarly, in our earliest gospel account, Mark 14:12–26, Jesus says about the bread, “Take it; this is my body,” and about the cup, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many.”
Scholars have endlessly debated whether or not the Last Supper was a Passover meal, held during the Jewish festival that commemorates the Exodus from Egypt, and especially the night when the angel of death “passed over” the houses of Jews who had put blood on the lintel of their doors (see Exodus 11–12).b In my view it likely was, 042but it was a Passover meal at which Jesus reinterpreted the traditional meaning of certain aspects of the meal.
In Jewish tradition, various elements of the Passover meal recall specific events of the flight from Egypt. For example, the unleavened bread (matzoh) served at Passover represents the bread the Israelites made but did not have time to let rise in their haste to leave Egypt. The Passover lamb represents a substitutionary sacrifice that spares those covered by its blood from the wrath of the death angel sent by God.
Jesus personalizes the Passover meal as a reference to his own coming death and the salvation this will bring. By saying “this is my body … this is my blood” in the context of the Passover meal, and speaking of a covenant or new covenant, Jesus implies what the Gospel of John, the last gospel to be written, states clearly: that Jesus was the new Passover Lamb whose death would take away the sins of the world, by absorbing God’s just judgment on sin (John 1:29). The cup at the Last Supper is thus still a cup of God’s wrath—a symbol of death as divine punishment for sin—but it is equally a cup of redemption. In offering his cup to his disciples, Jesus is in effect symbolically offering the disciples redemption—the benefit of his death—before he even dies!2
Jesus intends this meal to be a remembrance meal, just as the Passover meal had been, only now his disciples were to celebrate a new release from slavery and bondage, a new Passover, a new Exodus—involving the release from the bondage of sin for Jesus was indeed to drink the cup of God on the cross.
So what then of the quest for the Holy Grail? The power of the cup at the Last Supper is symbolic. The cup is a vivid reminder of the promise of eternal life. But in the earliest Christian thinking, the cup itself does not provide the elixir of life; that comes only from faith in the death of Jesus. We have no reason from early Christian literature of the first or second centuries to think that Jesus’ first followers valued the cup as something other than a symbol. Nor do these early writings offer any hint that the Last Supper cup was saved or preserved. The ongoing search for the Holy Grail is nothing more than an exercise in futility. It is, as the Knight Templar told us in Indiana Jones’s Last Crusade, a very poor choice indeed.
Most of us remember the dramatic ending of the last Indiana Jones movie, The Last Crusade, when good-guy Jones confronts a wicked quester for the Holy Grail in a room full of cups. A Knight Templar is guarding the vessels, some of which are gorgeous, jewel-studded metal items, others rudimentary wooden cups. But which one is the true Grail, the cup Jesus shared with his disciples at the Last Supper, the cup that tradition (and the Knight Templar) promises will give eternal life? The wicked quester concludes it must be one of the more ornate cups. He grabs a […]
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There appears to be a conflict between the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) and the Gospel of John. See Baruch M. Bokser, “Was the Last Supper a Passover Seder?”BR, Summer 1987; Jonathan Klawans, “Was Jesus’ Last Supper a Seder?”BR, October 2001; and the dated but still helpful study by Joachim Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus (London: SCM, 1966).
Endnotes
1.
This might be implied by the saying that follows in Mark 14:25, in which Jesus says he will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until he drinks it new in the kingdom. But even here it is not clear whether he had already committed himself to abstain and so simply passed the cup to the disciples, or not.
2.
This is not the place to get embroiled in the details of the controversy about whether these words are more than symbolic. Suffice it to say (1) The words about the bread of haste and the bitter herbs and the like in the Passover meal were clearly seen as symbolic, not as literal. (2) The original Aramaic of Jesus’ words cannot be understood to mean “This becomes my body, this becomes my blood,” as if the ritual was magically transforming the elements into something they had not been previously. Had an early Jewish audience such as Jesus’ thought he was talking about his actual physical body and blood they would have run out of the room screaming about cannibalism. (3) The Aramaic probably was “This … my body” “This … my blood” since the verb “to be” would have been lacking in that language in such a saying. (4) It is interesting that we get the phrase “hocus pocus” from the Latin form of Jesus’ words Hoc est meus corpus (“This is my body”).
