Abstract
This important book makes a sustained and strong argument for the contention that the last supper best makes sense as an event that occurred during the last week of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. In particular, Pitre argues that the future hopes expressed in the words of institution reflect the fact that Jesus foresaw his death as sacrificial and that he envisaged a future for his followers. These are bold and challenging claims that run counter to the positions held by many scholars. In order to construct his argument, Pitre uses four questions to focus his discussion. In turn these are:
Are the words and deeds of Jesus at the Last Supper historically plausible in a Jewish context? If so, what did Jesus mean by them?
What does the Last Supper reveal about Jesus’ self-understanding?
How does the Last Supper fit in Jesus’ overall eschatological outlook?
What does the Last Supper reveal about Jesus’ intention toward the community of his disciples?
One of the issues that Pitre seeks to confront is the fact that the words of institution, with their apparent point of view that looks beyond Jesus’ imminent death and suffering, appear to be in tension with the widespread view that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who expected the immediate consummation of the present age (p. 17). In terms of the approach adopted, Pitre bases his method on that of E. P. Sanders in Jesus and Judaism. For Pitre, the key considerations are ‘plausibility’ and ‘coherence’. In judging the possible authenticity of Jesus material, the tradition must make sense in a first-century Palestinian context. Secondly, it must be coherent with other traditions concerning Jesus that are adjudged to be authentic. Thirdly, any given tradition must account for ‘the plausibility of effects within the early church’ (p. 41).
After setting up the parameters of the investigation and defining the approach in the first chapter, Pitre explores the New Moses typology associated with Jesus in the second. After listing a number of episodes from the gospel tradition, it is argued that regardless of whether the historicity of any one of the episodes is questioned ‘they more than suffice to show that “the general impression” produced by our primary sources is that Jesus spoke and acted in ways that harken back to the words and deeds of Moses in the Pentateuch’ (p. 55). One of the more important parallels that is mentioned is that of Moses, who ‘poured out “the blood of the covenant” at Sinai with the twelve tribes’ (p. 55), and Jesus’ last supper with twelve disciples where the words of institution refer to ‘blood’ and ‘covenant’. It would have been useful if Pitre had presented arguments for the historicity of the five examples that he cites of ways in which Jesus acted or spoke like Moses. While Pitre is correct that if one doubts the historicity of any one of the examples, that is not fatal to the overall argument based on ‘the general impression’. However, if one is unconvinced that the majority of examples are historical, or even that they are not particularly strong echoes of the Moses tradition, then this would undercut the plausibility of his overall contention. Admittedly Pitre does spend significant time arguing for the authenticity of the traditions surrounding the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness (pp. 66–90). Here, Pitre effectively shows that the feeding story resonates with the story of Moses the feeding the people manna in the wilderness—something entirely apparent from the Johannine account of the feeding. The thing that is lacking is a persuasive argument that such feeding stories, loaded with Mosaic symbolism, are not in fact creations of the evangelists or earlier tradents, but are actual events from the life of Jesus—with Jesus himself acting in a self-conscious way to mimic the actions of Moses. To put it more bluntly, how does one make a convincing argument that the miraculous feeding actually took place and was not a pious fiction that cohered both with first-century Jewish beliefs concerning prophet-like actions and the wider portrayal of Jesus as a miracle worker, and well as suiting the theological needs of the early church?
In the third chapter, Pitre continues exploring the idea of eschatological manna from heaven, in order to argue ‘that Jesus associated this manna with the bread that he would identify at the Last Supper’ (p. 148). There is much in this chapter that is rich and full of insight. In essence, Pitre focuses on two passages, the Lord’s Prayer (Matt 6:9–13//Lk 11:2–4) and the bread of life discourse (Jn 6:48–66), to suggest that with these two passages ‘there are strong reasons for concluding that the substantia verba Jesu contained in both of them are historically plausible on the lips of Jesus’ (p. 149). The first text provides the more plausible piece of evidence. The Lord’s Prayer occurs in double tradition material that might have a good chance of originating with the historical Jesus. However, to make his case that the bread petition is about eschatological manna, Pitre has to adopt a particular interpretation of the rare Greek term epiousios, which he takes as meaning bread ‘for the Coming Day’ (pp. 174–5), where ‘coming day’ has eschatological, rather than temporal, meaning. The difficulty with this argument is that it hangs too much weight on a lexically uncertain rendering of a Greek word that is otherwise virtually unattested in the surviving literature. Moreover, the evidence listed in support of this option is typically given in support of the meaning ‘tomorrow’s bread’ or ‘future bread’, without an eschatological sense being intended. The second piece of evidence, the bread of life discourse (Jn 6), is even more contested. Pitre states that this is ‘the most controversial and difficult of all the eucharistic words of Jesus’ (p. 193). One may ask, if Pitre is correct that the traditions in Jn 6 belong to the ministry of Jesus, given the Johannine chronology which places this discourse more than a year prior to the Last Supper (which John does not narrate), whether it makes any sense to call these ‘eucharistic words’. That label might be more plausible (but only marginally so) if the bread of life discourse is a post-Easter composition that employs Eucharistic type language at this point in the one gospel that has no Last Supper account. Despite the lengthy discussion of this passage (pp. 193–244) it is preferable to view it as heavily laden with the theological reflections of the fourth evangelist, and hence it is difficult to see the voice of the historical Jesus preserved here in any substantive way.
The following chapter looks at the date of the Last Supper. In many ways this is an excursus that tackles one of the hoary problems of NT scholarship. The recent article by Helen Bond, “Dating the Death of Jesus”, treats related questions and could have opened up fresh possibilities on issues to do with dating the Last Supper. The following two chapters ‘The New Passover’ and ‘The Eucharistic Kingdom of God’ argue respectively that the Last Supper is intended consciously to institute a new Passover meal with Jesus’ identifying his coming death as functioning redemptively in the role of the Passover lamb, and that the Eucharistic meal represents an ingathering of participants to the banquet of the kingdom, and moreover at the Last Supper Jesus ‘describes his own post-mortem destination as the banquet of the heavenly kingdom of God’ (p. 447).
This is a rich and rewarding book to read. There are many fascinating insights that are presented with great clarity. Pitre succeeds in showing that Eucharistic ideas are not foreign to first-century Judaism with an emphasis on participating in the heavenly banquet. Moreover, portraying Jesus as a prophet like Moses would have been plausible within the life of the early Church, where the rich theological significance would have been clearly seen. Notwithstanding these important insights, the arguments for seeing the historical Jesus as the source of these words and acts do not appear to be equally compelling. More often it seems preferable to view these associations with Moses or the ideas of Jesus’ death parallel to the redemptive Passover lamb as theological reflections of post-Easter believers. This book will occasion much debate, and its rich coverage of the topic will ensure that all who read it will be better informed to discuss the central questions that it raises.