Abstract
What is the relationship between Jesus and Judaism? Who did Jesus think he was? What did he expect to happen in the future? And what is the relationship between Jesus’s words and actions and the emergence of the early Church?
In Jesus and the Last Supper, Brant Pitre argues that these guiding questions of ‘historical Jesus’ research can only be answered adequately when we integrate the contribution of the Last Supper, along with related words and deeds of Jesus, ‘situated within the triple contexts of ancient Judaism, his public life and ministry, and the rise of the early church’ (p. 3). In 500 pages, Pitre attempts precisely this. He argues that Jesus’ words and deeds related to the Last Supper, reported in the Synoptic Gospels as well as the discourse in Capernaum of John 6.22–71, are substantially historical, and that in them Jesus enacts a web of scripturally informed prophetic intentions.
According to Pitre, Jesus, as the new Moses, inaugurates a new covenant in his blood and institutes a new bread of the presence (Ch. 2). In John 6, Jesus anticipates the Last Supper by asserting that his own flesh and blood are ‘eschatological manna’, given from heaven for the life of the world (Ch. 3). In Chapter 4, Pitre addresses the long-standing dispute over the apparent discrepancy between the chronology of the Synoptics and John regarding the date of the Last Supper. By parsing the different senses of the word ‘Passover’ in the Old Testament and early Judaism, Pitre argues that John, like the Synoptics, presents Jesus’ Last Supper as a Passover meal the evening before his crucifixion on 15 Nisan. I find Pitre’s solution thoroughly convincing; all who study Jesus’ final days should reckon with it. In Chapter 5 Pitre argues that Jesus transformed the Passover into a new sacrificial feast in which ‘he commands his disciples to eat his flesh … as part of a new Passover meal’ (p. 443). Finally, Pitre connects the Last Supper, particularly Jesus’ vow not to drink wine until he does so with his disciples in the kingdom, to the widespread early Jewish expectation, rooted in prophetic promise (e.g. Isa 25.6–9), of an eschatological messianic banquet.
This is a cogent, well-argued, impressively researched book. Even with such abundant detail and intricate argumentation, it is clearly written and relatively accessible for non-specialists. Occasionally, as in Pitre’s case for a ‘new bread of the presence’ (pp. 121–47), the evidence stretches a bit thin. To substantiate such a subtle typological correspondence may call for different tools than the historical ones used here. And, once in a while, conclusions seem to sneak into premises, as in some of the descriptions of Jesus commanding his disciples to eat his body and drink his blood ‘under the form’ or ‘appearance’ of bread and wine (pp. 109, 211, 429, 443, 514). Nonetheless the book offers a fresh, engaging, historically and theologically significant contribution to the study of Jesus. Even those who dissent from some of Pitre’s conclusions will be richly challenged and instructed.