Was the Last Supper a Passover meal?

Mark, Matthew and Luke: yes

The first three Gospels are explicit. They date the preparations by the sacrifice itself.

On the first day of unleavened bread, when they sacrificed the Passover, his disciples asked him, “Where do you want us to go and prepare that you may eat the Passover?”

Two disciples find the upper room, “and they prepared the Passover” (Mark 14:16). At the table, Luke has Jesus name the meal himself:

I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer,

John: the day before

John tells the same night and never calls it a Passover meal. His account opens with a date.

Now before the feast of the Passover, Jesus, knowing that his time had come that he would depart from this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.

When Judas leaves the table, some disciples assume Jesus has sent him to “buy what things we need for the feast” (John 13:29), so the feast is still ahead. Next morning the priests will not enter Pilate’s headquarters, so as to stay fit to “eat the Passover” (John 18:28). In John, Jesus dies on the afternoon the lambs were killed in the Temple, as laid out in what day Jesus died.

Clues in the meal

The German scholar Joachim Jeremias, in The Eucharistic Words of Jesus, gathered the signs of a Passover in the Synoptic story:

• At night, in the city. All week Jesus spent his nights outside the city, at Bethany. This meal is eaten after dark inside Jerusalem (Mark 14:17), as the Passover lamb had to be (Exodus 12:8).
• Food explained. Jesus interprets the bread and the cup. At Passover the head of the table explained the lamb, the unleavened bread and the bitter herbs; the Mishnah says whoever has not spoken of those three has not kept the feast (Pesachim 10:5).
• A closing hymn. “When they had sung a hymn, they went out” (Mark 14:26), likely the Hallel, Psalms 113 to 118, which ended the Passover meal (Pesachim 10:7).

And against it: no Gospel mentions a lamb or bitter herbs at the table. The bread is called artos, the everyday word, not azyma, unleavened. On what would be the feast day itself, a night trial is held, Simon of Cyrene comes in “from the country” (Mark 15:21) and Joseph of Arimathea buys linen (Mark 15:46). The chief priests had even planned to act “not during the feast” (Mark 14:2). And the seder as Jews keep it today took shape after AD 70: see what Passover commemorates.

Ways to fit them together

• John moved the date. He wanted Jesus to die as “the Lamb of God” (John 1:29) at the hour of the lambs. Or the reverse: the first Gospels turned a farewell meal into a Passover. Paul, writing before any Gospel, calls Christ “our Passover” (1 Corinthians 5:7) but dates the supper only “on the night in which he was betrayed” (1 Corinthians 11:23).
• Two calendars. In 1957 the French scholar Annie Jaubert proposed that Jesus followed the solar calendar of the book of Jubilees and the Qumran community, eating the Passover on Tuesday evening. Pope Benedict XVI, in Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week (2011), found that unlikely and judged John’s dating the more probable.
• An early Passover. Knowing he would be dead before the feast, Jesus gave his last meal its meaning a day early, “for I tell you, I will no longer by any means eat of it” (Luke 22:16).

The question even divided churches’ bread. Western Christians, following the Synoptic Passover, came to use unleavened wafers. Eastern Christians kept leavened bread, and the quarrel over it was among the grievances of the schism of 1054.