Endnote 13 – Was The Last Supper a Passover Seder?

The Christian use of paschal motifs to explain the message of Jesus underscores the significance of Passover symbolism in the minds of first- and second-century Jews and may also have contributed to the urgency of the problem. But it cannot be said that the seder was created in response to Christian developments. Similarly, Hellenistic banquets or accounts of symposia did not cause the restructuring of the Passover rite beyond its biblical parameters, as suggested, for example, by Siegfried Stein, “The Influence of Synposia Literature on the Literary Form of the Pesah Haggadah,” Journal of Jewish Studies 7 (1957), pp. 13–44. Indeed, Mishnah, Pesahim 10:7–8 takes concrete steps to differentiate the seder from such meals. Rather, the phenomenon of banquets and the literary genre of the symposium, at most may have affected the form that the seder took. But whatever features were adopted (and they are generally details in the seder’s later stages) were made subservient to the religious ideology of the seder and structured around its protocol. See Bokser, Origins, especially pp. 4–32, 50–66 and notes, to which add, for the ancient Near Eastern background, R. D. Barnett, “Assurbanipal’s Feast,” Eretz Israel 18 (1985), pp. 1–6 and the literature cited there.