Endnote 9 – Was The Last Supper a Passover Seder?

Alon, The Jews in Their Land, pp. 261–265; Samuel Safrai, “He‘erot histariyot le Mishnah Pesahim Pereg Asiri,” in Bible and Jewish History. Studies in Dedication to the Memory of Jacob Levir, ed. B. Uffenheimer (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1971), pp. 297–306, spotted the transformation in Mishnah 10:5 but, as I argue in Origins, it is present in the contents and formulation of the entire Pessahim chapter 10. While Tabory (“Towards a Characterization of the Passover Meal,” [in Hebrew], Bar-Ilan Annual 18–19 [1981], pp 68–78 and “The Passover Eve Ceremony—An Historical Outline,” Immanuel 12 [1981], pp. 32–43) independently recognized that the seder transforms a pre-70 sacrificial meal of the Passover offering, he (like Alon and Safrai) does not consider the impact of the Mishnah’s “rhetoric.”