Was the Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples actually a Jewish Seder meal? Many would say yes, pointing to the Synoptic Gospels as evidence. Biblical scholar Jonathan Klawans begs to differ. His articles (from the site of the Biblical Archaeology Society) are quite complex, but I think I got the gist of them!
First, there is actually no evidence for a Seder meal before the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in AD 70. We simply don´t know how the Passover meal may have looked like during Second Temple times. Any similarities between the Last Supper and the Seder may be due to a Jewish need to respond to Christianity.
Or they may be due to a "Passoverization" of Christian rituals, some Christians wanting to celebrate the Jewish Passover, and hence inventing a tradition about Jesus eating a Passover meal (what would later develop into a Seder). Klawans also believes that at least the Gospel of Luke may actually argue *against* celebrating the Passover at all, rather commemorating it with strict fasting.
Klawans further points out that the chronology of the Gospel of John makes more sense than that of the Synoptics. Jesus must have been crucified and buried on the 14th of Nisan ("Thursday" in Passover week by our reckoning). But if so, he literally couldn´t have partaken of the Passover meal, which would have taken place when he was already dead!
The author also discusses a more exotic possibility: that Jesus and his group (and perhaps other Jews?) followed a solar calendar in which the Passover celebrations were "off" with one day. But according to Klawans, this would necessitate intercalary days, and there is no evidence for such in Jewish solar calendars, for instance the one mentioned in the Book of Jubilees. At the time of Jesus, the solar calendar would be off by several months compared to the lunar one, making it impossible for a solar Passover to co-incide with the lunar one.
Not sure where any of this ultimately leads, but here you go!
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