Breaking bread, building bridges
THE culinary details of The Last Supper remain unknown to this day. The gospels seem more concerned with what Jesus said, his prediction of Judas’s betrayal, and the institution of the Eucharist rather than whether Peter ate pickled fish or goat stew.
The gospels state Jesus was crucified on the first day of Passover, the eight-day holiday during which Jews eschew all grain and eat only unleavened bread.
So The Last Supper, according to historians and most religious interpretations, was the ritualistic meal always eaten the night before, the Seder.
Sure, the gospels state that Jesus broke bread. But in ancient Hebrew, “bread” can refer to the leavened or unleavened variety. Sometimes, the word just means “food”.
That Seder, which Jews continue to repeat on Passover and which Christians commemorate as Maundy Thursday, the first day of the Easter Triduum, arguably marks the beginning of the splintering between Christianity and Judaism.
In a sense, Passover became Easter.
In ancient Greek, Easter was called Pascha, which is simply the Greek word for Passover (derived from Pesach, the Hebrew term for the holiday and for the lamb sacrifice with which the Israelites celebrated).
“For the early church, Jesus Christ was the fulfilment of the Jewish Passover feast,” an Episcopal guide reads.
Just as God redeemed the Israelites from Egypt, the early church believed, Jesus redeemed his followers from sin.
Indeed, in Corinthians, Paul calls Christ “our passover lamb”.
The early followers of Christianity continued to celebrate Passover, but as time passed and Christianity gained many non-jewish adherents, the Christian version of Pascha increasingly emphasised Jesus’s death and resurrection until the middle of the second century, when we have the first recorded instance of a distinct Christian celebration.
At the time, this proto-easter was still celebrated on Passover but the date sparked debate among early Christians.
At the Council of Nicea in 325 AD, Christian leaders announced they were permanently separating The Last Supper Easter from the Jewish Calendar. Well, kind of.
As Easter is still calculated, somewhat like Passover, according to the lunar calendar and by the spring equinox – both holidays probably have their root in the pagan harvest celebrations – they still coincide every year.
The rituals have diverged since then, but the overlaps are still there. Easter is technically a 50-day celebration, which is based on Judaism’s 50-day festival of weeks, another harvest festival, and both emphasise rebirth.
The gaps have been growing, though.
As Jewish-american comedian Jon Stewart, former host of The Daily Show, pointed out in 2012, Christians now have chocolate bunnies and candies, while us Jews have horseradish and “the bone of a dead baby lamb.” “We’ve got to take it up a notch,” Stewart exclaimed to fellow Jews. “They’re crushing us.”
And yet this tale of two holidays is not simply the story of one tradition evolving into another. In many ways, it includes the invention of anti-semitism and some of the worst massacres in European history.
Strictly from a story perspective, Jesus is crucified on Passover because, as he predicts at that Seder –The Last Supper, Judas betrays him.
Judas is just the Roman name for Judah, the Jewish state.
In his latest book Biblical Literalism, a Gentile Heresy, Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong argues no one would ever have this name.
The name first appears as a minor character in Mark and then Matthew, he claims, invented his betrayal to shift the blame of Jesus’s death from the Romans to the Jews.
Matthew hoped, this would shield early Christians from the anti-jewish persecution Romans were enacting as punishment for a Jewish rebellion in Roman-occupied Judea (present day Israel-palestine), Spong argues.
The story of Judas’s betrayal, which gave rise to the crucifixion and Easter, also spun the yarn for the central thread of European Anti-semitism from the Middle Ages through to Hitler: that the Jews killed Jesus.
Easter, a marker of the resurrection but also of Judas’s betrayal, then became a time of anti-semitic attacks – reprisals for Judas’s betrayal – at various points through history, and Passover, the Jewish festival of liberation, became a time of immense fear in some communities.
“Always a time of danger, this season spawned charges of ritual murder as well as host desecration,” North-western University religion professor Barbara Newman writes in The passion of the Jews of Prague.
“For Jews were said to use the blood of Christian children to bake matzoth or other Passover foods.”
The 1389 massacre of the Jews of Prague was just one such example.
On the eve of Easter and the final day of Passover, a Jew was said to have thrown a pebble at a priest carrying communion in a vessel to a sick man.
A group of other Jews were said to then have run up and destroyed the wafer. In response, Prague Christians proceeded to murder 900 Jews, tearing off the limbs of children, and looting homes. Tales of Jews destroying “hosts” were common in Medieval Europe as pretexts for anti-semitic crimes.
They were believable because Christian doctrine held Jews responsible for “deicide,” killing Jesus with Judas’s betrayal, and many believed Jews would want to do the closest thing to killing him again.
But the Catholic Church has since renounced and apologised for the doctrine of deicide. In 2015, the Church even told its members to not proselytize Jews. Things have cooled. These days, Israel receives more visitors during Easter than any other time, thousands flocking to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the site of Jesus’s Tombs.
Many share El-al flights with large families of orthodox Jews. And these days, at the Shoprite in Sea Point, beneath blue cardboard signs announcing “Chag Sameach v’eh Kasher” , you can grab chocolate eggs on one side of the aisle and Matzo on the other and buy them both from the young Muslim cashier, and no one will bat an eye.
• Mast is a visiting a reporter at Independent Media from the US. He is studying towards a BSC Journalism at North Western University in Chicago.