The only way I can account for the shabby treatment accorded the Last Supper in Killing Jesus is to suggest that its authors are interested only in the plot to execute Jesus to the exclusion of everything that does not directly bear upon it. But the rest of the book has plenty that does not directly concern this theme. And the Last Supper itself, one would think, seems to have a great deal to do with the death of Jesus, else we would not be calling it the Last Supper, reminiscent of a convicted murderer's “last meal.” So what gives? Because what the authors do to the Supper is to gut it. They give no real idea of the significance of the event in either John or the Synoptics, and the significance is vastly different between them. It is true, as we will see, that much of what appears in the Last Supper narratives of all the gospels cannot be considered historical in nature. But that hasn't stopped O’Reilly and Dugard up to now.
Let's begin with the three matters that do interest our authors before we examine what they left out.
VENUE AND MENU
Was the Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples supposed to be a Passover seder? Believe it or not, this is very far from clear. The stages of a typical Passover meal are not recorded in any of the gospels, but that might simply be because the point is not to depict the ritual meal for its own sake, but rather to use it as the setting and vehicle for something else. Suffice it to say that there are not enough details to confirm the Paschal nature of the occasion. What other evidence is there?
Mark and Matthew place their Last Supper material in a framework according to which the meal must be a Passover seder, but, as with most of the material in the Synoptics, the connection between one narrative unit and those adjacent to it may well be artificial. And the beginning and end of each episode may be a secondary embellishment intended to spin the main portion in this or that direction, interpreting it for the reader. That looks like what we find in Mark and Matthew. Mark 14:12–16 appears to be a self-contained narrative about the providential or miraculous provision of the Passover feast for Jesus and his disciples who have no home or possessions. There is no hint, despite O’Reilly, that Jesus has made prior arrangements and then tells the disciples about them. These are the only arrangements. He is talking to the men whom he would have had make any prior arrangements, but this is all new to them.
And the story looks like it is based on 1 Samuel chapter 9. Jesus corresponds to Kish, who dispatches two men, his son Saul and a servant (1 Sam. 9:3), just as Jesus sends two disciples (Mark 14:13). When Saul and the servant arrive in the city, they see a young woman coming out to draw water (1 Sam. 9:11), just as Jesus’ disciples are told to keep an eye out for a man carrying water (Mark 14:13). All transpires as predicted (1 Sam. 9:6; Mark 14:16). Saul asks, “Where is the house of the seer?” (1 Sam. 9:18), while Jesus directs the disciples to ask, “Where is my guest room?” (Mark 14:14). In 1 Samuel 9:19, Samuel oversees the preparation of a feast, while in Mark 14:16, the disciples prepare the Passover feast. “Everything works together for the good of them that love God” (Rom. 8:28). The story did not necessarily lead into an account of the feast for which these providential preparations had been made. The point may have been simply to depict God's provision for his Son. And if we imagine that the episode of the Last Supper itself was another independent cameo, there is no internal evidence of it being a Passover meal. This is, then, the case with Mark and Matthew.
In Luke it is different. He seems to have noticed, in Mark, the loose fit between the preparation story and that of the Supper. To knit them together more firmly he has added an initial remark of Jesus as the Last Supper begins: “I have earnestly desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer” (Luke 22:15). Luke makes other adjustments to Mark's original, but they will concern us a bit later on.
Does John's Gospel understand the Last Supper as a Passover meal? John 13:1 sets the scene “before the feast of the Passover” and goes on to open the scene thusly: “during supper” (verse 2), so it would be natural, if this is all John said, to infer that it was the Passover supper. But it does not explicitly connect the two. And the meal is not described, only the feet-washing and the prediction of imminent betrayal, which are the only two items O’Reilly and Dugard recount. But if we widen our focus to the rest of John's Passion narrative, we can see that the Last Supper is not supposed to be a Passover at all.
First, when Jesus tells Judas to go and do his business and get it over with, and Judas does get up and head for the door, John says none of the others lifted a finger to stop him because they assumed “that, because Judas had [charge of] the money box, Jesus was telling him, ‘Buy what we need for the feast’” (John 13:29). This by itself is enough to prove that it cannot have been the seder that they were then sitting down to eat. If the scene took place on Passover eve, that is, the evening commencing Passover (in accord with the Hebrew calendar whereby each day officially begins at sunset), then we must picture them sitting down to (actually reclining around) a bare table. A little late for buying the food and wine if they were right then sitting down to a Passover meal. And what Jewish merchant would have been open for business? The Torah required every Jew to be in his home on that holy night. No, this is just the evening meal on the night before Passover.
O’Reilly and Dugard assume the meal was a Passover supper and recognize there is an apparent contradiction between John and the Synoptics on what day of the week it took place, for John implies it was on a Wednesday evening, while the Synoptics set it on Thursday. They tell us in a footnote that Pope Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) has resolved the problem by positing that Jesus and his men observed a different ritual calendar, the solar calendar, like the Qumran sect of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Pharisees and Temple priests followed the lunar calendar, with the result that different Jews celebrated Passover a day apart, just as Eastern Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas a week later than Roman Catholics and Protestants today. This harmonization, by the way, must not be credited to Ratzinger. He merely borrowed it from Annie Jaubert, who proposed it back in 1965.1 But it will not work, despite its ingenuity, because John 13:29 makes it clear that Jesus and his men planned to celebrate the Passover the next night, the same night everybody else did.
In John 18:28 we read that the priests requested Pilate to emerge from his palace to talk with them because to enter a Gentile's home would render them ritually polluted. They might have done this otherwise, but not this night, desiring to remain pure so that “they might eat the Passover,” which therefore had not yet arrived. In 19:14 it is explicit that Jesus’ scourging and crucifixion were taking place before Passover: “Now it was the day of Preparation for the Passover.” But there is more. For this evangelist, the death of Jesus is that of the new Passover Lamb, “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). John's chronology is theologically, not historically, based. He has arranged it to have Jesus crucified on the day the Passover lambs were being butchered.
In summation, it is not clear that the pre-Markan tradition knew the Last Supper as a Passover celebration. Mark juxtaposed the scene with another depicting the providential provision for Jesus and his disciples to observe the Passover, the result being that the latter story introduced the former and made the Last Supper into a Passover seder. Matthew took this over from Mark. Luke decided the connection was still not sufficiently integral and added Jesus, at table, referring to “this passover.” John severed the link (restoring the original independence of the Last Supper), making the Supper an ordinary meal just before Passover. As usual, O’Reilly and Dugard have just chosen what they think makes for an exciting story, a kind of ancient police procedural or murder mystery.
THE HOLE IN HOLY COMMUNION
It is quite striking that Killing Jesus completely omits from the Last Supper the institution of the Eucharist, the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. In this our authors are following John, who replaces the ritual with what may be intended as a new sacrament, that of feet washing. But John does not completely banish the Eucharist. He has moved it back to the Galilean ministry in chapter 6, where one can find it wedged into the Bread of Life discourse. “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh” (John 6:51). “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life” (John 6:53, 54).
I think that the whole scene, together with the words of institution, is fictive, a combination of myth and liturgy. All this has no place in a historical reconstruction of the life of Jesus. No reader will be surprised at my verdict. But it would be astonishing if O’Reilly and Dugard, who evidence no sense of critical historiography, dropped the gospel account of the institution because they believe it didn't happen.
So what do O’Reilly and Dugard think happened at the Last Supper? Though summarized in surprisingly cursory fashion, as if to get it out of the way, our authors include the scene of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet.
Jesus begins the evening by humbling himself and washing each man's feet with water. This is a task normally reserved for slaves and servants, and certainly not for a venerated teacher of the faith. The disciples are touched by this show of servility and the humility it implies. Jesus knows them and their personalities so well and accepts them without judgment: Simon the zealot, with his passion for politics; the impulsive Peter; James and John, the boisterous “sons of thunder,” as Jesus describes them; the intense and often gloomy Thomas; the upbeat Andrew; the downtrodden Philip; and the rest. Their time together has changed the lives of every man in the room. And as Jesus carefully and lovingly rinses the road dust from their feet, the depth of his affection is clear. (pp. 219–20)
This is almost unrecognizable when compared to John's text (13:1–17). The real thing ends with a commandment: “If I, then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do as I have done for you…. If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them” (John 13:14–15, 17). It is plausible that, as some have suggested, the feet washing is intended as a metaphor and that the real point is the same as Colossians 3:13b: “forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, you also must forgive.” But I think Mennonites and others who practice feet washing as a sacrament (or church ordinance) are correct. The description of feet washing as an example and the specific injunction to wash one another's feet point to the story being a ceremonial etiology,2 a story explaining, perhaps fictively and after the fact, a ritual.3 But you'd never guess this from Killing Jesus.
O’Reilly and Dugard substitute for this a bizarre scene of sentimentality and touchy-feely schmaltz. Like Leo Buscaglia or Wayne Dyer, Jesus is just gushing. One feels embarrassed for Jesus; one fears he is making a bit of a fool of himself. Not the way this scene is played in the Gospel of John, mind you, but in Killing Jesus. There is nothing about either the moral or ritual significance of Jesus’ action. Instead we read a groundless psychological thumbnail of several of the disciples. Peter is “impulsive”? Good old Pete? Is this because he professed his loyalty to Jesus but did not live up to it? Because John says he was the one who sought to defend his Master with violence in Gethsemane? To chalk these things up to being “impulsive” is a way of making the character into a Sunday school cartoon, a Disney version of the apostle. And “sons of thunder” characterizes James and John as hotheads? This is another psychologizing trivialization. The title “Boanerges,” assigned them in Mark 3:17, is the tip of an archaic theological iceberg, a reference to Castor and Pollux, sons of the Thunderer, Zeus. Thomas’ proverbial negativity is simply a result of the character's narrative function as the one who puts up the hurdle of skepticism for the miracle-working hero to leap.4 “Simon the zealot, with his passion for politics” is a ludicrous domestication of a member of the revolutionary Zealot movement. O’Reilly and Dugard make Simon sound like a political junkie addicted to C-SPAN and Hardball. And “upbeat Andrew”? “Downtrodden Philip”? What the hell? Killing Jesus makes the apostles look like the Seven Dwarves.
What is the origin of the story of Jesus acting the menial role of a slave? I believe it is a prime example of how an originally mythic story of Jesus became progressively historicized, a process O’Reilly and Dugard are carrying further in their pseudo-historical Killing Jesus. We can still see the original on display in an ancient hymn quoted in Philippians 2:6–11.
Who, though he was in the form of God
did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,5
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a servant,
being born in the likeness of men.
And being found in human form
He humbled himself
And became obedient unto death (verses 6–8)
The hymn is reminiscent of the labors of Hercules. Transforming this myth into narrative form, Mark decided to have Jesus say this about himself:6 “Whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of man also came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:44–45). Luke rewrote this saying and transferred it to the Last Supper: “Let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves. For which is the greater, one who sits at table, or one who serves? Is it not the one who sits at table? But I am among you as one who serves” (Luke 22:26–27). But Luke does not go so far as to depict Jesus playing waiter at their table. It is just a saying, just a metaphor. Luke uses the same imagery elsewhere:
Let your loins be girded and your lamps burning, and be like men who are waiting for their master to come home from the marriage feast, so that they may open to him at once when he comes and knocks. Blessed are those servants whom the master finds awake when he comes; truly, I say to you, he will gird himself and have them sit at table, and he will come and serve them. (Luke 12:35–37)
John has taken the next step. Just as he had borrowed Luke's beggar named Lazarus and made him into Lazarus of Bethany, so now he makes Luke's magnanimous master into the Lord Jesus who literally girds himself with a towel, has his disciples recline at table, and washes their feet. O’Reilly and Dugard take it from there. But history it's not.
HOLD IT RIGHT THERE, ISCARIOT!
O’Reilly and Dugard try to preserve a historical character for John's Last Supper so they can mine it for their “history” of Jesus’ execution. They shamelessly sidestep a major problem with taking John's account seriously. After Jesus drops the bombshell that one of those present would shortly hand him over to the authorities, the disciples all rush to demand, “Is it I?” Peter asks the Beloved Disciple to get Jesus to reveal the name, and Jesus pinpoints Judas by dipping his bread into the dish simultaneously with Judas. But the others remain oblivious. How? O’Reilly and Dugard “explain” that, amid the hubbub following Jesus’ announcement, they didn't catch the exchange between Peter, the Beloved Disciple, and Jesus. But Peter did. Why on earth did he, even if not the others, rise to his feet and bar Judas’ path? Of course, it is because the narrator cannot have Peter or anyone else get in the way of his advancing plot line. He simply neglects any narrative motive, and O’Reilly and Dugard cannot bail him out. It is much the same as an old MADtv skit in which the robot Terminator returns from the future to prevent the death of Jesus. At the Last Supper, when Jesus announces the imminent betrayal, the Terminator, seated alongside the disciples at the table, blasts Judas with an automatic assault rifle, whereupon Jesus resurrects him. The robot guns him down again, and Jesus restores his life again, then rebukes the Terminator, “Stop killing Judas!” Jesus tells him his saving destiny must go forward. That's pretty much what's going on in John.
CULT OF THE CORN KING
One always hears that the Last Supper marked Jesus’ reinterpretation of Passover as a memorial of his own saving death, the transformation of the Jewish ritual into the Christian one. And that is probably not an inaccurate description as long as we are talking about how the gospel writers viewed it. But to ascribe this understanding to the historical Jesus is a big mistake.
Above, I mentioned ritual etiologies. This is one of them. Long ago, New Testament scholar Alfred Loisy pointed out what should have been obvious: the story of the institution of the Eucharist presupposes that the ritual is already being practiced, that readers are familiar with it, and that the story seeks to explain the elements of the ceremony. “This is my body” presupposes the familiar use of bread in the ritual and reveals the true or esoteric significance, perhaps to the newly baptized, now being admitted to the sacramental mystery for the first time. Likewise with “This is my blood.” Loisy says,
All this would be intelligible enough to a Christian reader familiar with a developed Eucharistic rite as practised in the group for which the Gospel was intended: but perfectly unintelligible on the occasion when the sayings are supposed to have been uttered…. These mystic sayings have no natural sense except as referring to an established Christian sacrament, and as explaining it.7
On the other hand, none of this makes any sense in a Jewish context, given all that we know about Judaism of the period—or of any period. To Jews, the notion of blood drinking had always been absolutely abhorrent. See Genesis 9:4: “You shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.” Leviticus 7:26–27 says, “You shall eat no blood whatever, whether of fowl or of animal, in any of your dwellings; whoever eats any blood, that person shall be cut off from his people” (cf. also Lev. 17:10–14 and Deut. 12:16, 23). Even metaphorical blood drinking would have been unthinkable, like a religious use of child-molestation imagery. It is simply out of the question to imagine Jesus telling fellow Jews to eat his flesh and drink his blood. Even John 6:52 (“How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”) underestimates the grossness of the implied blasphemy.
So the body and blood rite cannot fit with any sort of Jewish worship. But we don't have to look very far to find an altogether natural context for it, where it must have originated: the Egyptian Osiris cult and the Greek mysteries of Dionysus. These were very ancient religions known for centuries to Jews, and not just Diaspora Jews but Palestinian Jews as well. Palestine had been part of the Egyptian empire as far back as the third millennium BCE. And Dionysus worship had been familiar to Jews as least as far back as the mid-second century attempt of the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes to convert Jews to Hellenism, at which time many Jews joined in the rites of the wine god (2 Macc. 6:7–9). It was widely believed that the Jewish Jehovah and the Greek Dionysus were but different names for the same deity anyway, and the whole religion of Sabazios presupposed their identity.8 The “blood” of Dionysus was, of course, wine. His “flesh” was grain, bread. The same was true of the grain god Osiris (whom Greeks also identified with their own Dionysus). The devotees of Osiris shared a sacred meal of bread and wine, sometimes bread and beer.
The words attributed to Jesus at the Last Supper obviously presuppose such symbolism and thus the same world of ideas. Jesus is speaking as the Corn King, who presides over the ritual consumption of his body and blood, which are grain and wine. The ritual script provided in the scene has nothing whatsoever to do with the ostensible theme of the Jewish Passover, the ancient exodus from Egypt, but everything to do with fertility celebrations. In that context, the whole makes plenty of sense. For our purposes here we need not delve into the larger questions of whether Christianity actually started out as a vegetation cult or merely assimilated the myths and rituals of one somewhere along the way. It is sufficient for us to peg this ritual formula as the product of such a context.
Loisy also points out how this sequence is not integral to its present setting in the Markan Last Supper scene. It seems to interrupt the theme of the surrounding verses.
The natural sequence after “they all drank of it” is “I will drink of it no more,” etc. This was the order in the basis-story: it spoke only of the bread that he would eat no more and of the wine that he would drink no more till they ate and drank together in the Kingdom of God. The institution of the mystic Supper (“this is my blood,” etc.) is a highly distinct afterthought in the development of the Gospel catechesis.9
Why this vow? It meant that Jesus expected the apocalypse to dawn in a mere matter of days. Joachim Jeremias sums it up: “By a solemn vow of abstinence He forswears all feasts and wine for the future, so as to set before His disciples and impart to them His own complete certainty that the final consummation is near at hand.”10 It is strikingly ironic that, whereas the vow presupposes that ongoing history is about to be cut off, the words of institution presuppose just the opposite, since they seek to launch a new ritual to be performed in generations to follow. This only underlines the composite (and therefore fictional) nature of the Last Supper narrative.