Passover

The feast of deliverance

A feast remembering the departure from Egypt. Jesus dies precisely at Passover, as the Lamb; the Supper is a Passover meal.

A night that became a memory

Passover was born on a night of fear and hope. According to Exodus 12, every Israelite family in Egypt was to choose a lamb, sacrifice it at dusk, smear its blood on the doorframe, and eat the roasted meat with unleavened bread and bitter herbs, already dressed for the road. That night the Lord would pass over the marked houses: hence the Hebrew name pesach, which evokes that passing over. The feast was commanded as a perpetual memorial, and the text itself anticipates the children’s question: what does this rite mean? The answer was not an abstract lesson but a story told at home. On the Jewish lunar calendar, the lamb was slaughtered on the 14th of the month of Nisan, near the spring full moon (March or April), followed by seven days of unleavened bread. By the first century the two names had merged: Luke speaks of the feast of unleavened bread, which is called Passover.

A city bursting at the seams

Deuteronomy 16 required Passover to be kept at the place God would choose, and in Jesus’ day that meant Jerusalem. Families from Galilee walked three or four days in caravans of relatives and neighbors, like Mary and Joseph’s when Jesus was twelve. Many arrived early to complete purification rites. The city, which may have had a few tens of thousands of residents (estimates vary widely), took in several times that number of pilgrims, lodged in homes, tents and nearby villages such as Bethany. For Rome it was the tensest week of the year: a crowd celebrating liberation from one foreign empire under the eyes of another. The prefect came up from Caesarea with reinforcements, and soldiers kept watch from the Temple porticoes. Josephus reports that under the governor Cumanus (around AD 50), a soldier’s obscene gesture during Passover set off a riot in which thousands died.

Lambs in the Temple

On the afternoon of the 14th, the Temple courts became a vast sacred slaughterhouse. Each group of families and friends brought its yearling lamb or kid; the worshiper himself slaughtered it, and priests standing in rows passed the blood from hand to hand in gold and silver basins until it was poured out at the altar. According to the Mishnah, worshipers entered in three successive shifts while the Levites sang the Hallel, Psalms 113 to 118. The animal was carried home and roasted whole on a spit of pomegranate wood, with no bone broken. Josephus claims that at one Passover in the 60s the priests counted 255,600 victims, and that each animal fed ten to twenty people. The figure is almost certainly inflated, but the scene is real: smoke, singing, bleating, and an entire city eating dinner on the same night.

The table: what we know and what we don’t

What exactly did a Passover meal look like in Jesus’ time? Caution is needed here. The oldest detailed description is in the Mishnah (tractate Pesachim, chapter 10), compiled around AD 200, more than a century after the Temple and its sacrifices had ceased. It speaks of guests reclining, even the poorest, as free people; of four cups of wine; of the son’s questions; and of a rule attributed to Rabban Gamaliel about explaining three things: the lamb, the unleavened bread and the bitter herbs. Many of these elements are probably old: the Book of Jubilees, from the second century BC, already mentions wine at Passover, and the Gospels show Jesus reclining with his disciples, with bread, a cup and a hymn at the end. But the seder with its Haggadah, as celebrated today, matured after AD 70. Projecting all of it onto the Last Supper goes beyond the sources.

Jesus’ last Passover

Matthew, Mark and Luke present the Last Supper as a Passover meal: the disciples prepare the Passover on the day the lambs were slaughtered, in a borrowed upstairs room. John, however, places Jesus’ death on the Day of Preparation, exactly when the lambs were being sacrificed, and says the authorities did not enter the praetorium so that they could eat the Passover that evening. How do these fit together? There are respectable proposals: different calendars in use among Jewish groups, a broader reading of the phrase eat the Passover in John, or a meal with Passover character that Jesus held early. None settles everything, and the debate continues. What matters is that all the Gospels tie Jesus’ death to Passover. At the table, he takes the bread and cup that recalled the liberation from Egypt and gives them new meaning: my body, given for you; the new covenant in my blood.

Christ, our Passover

The first Christians were quick to understand the cross in the light of Passover. Around AD 54, a little over twenty years after the crucifixion, Paul tells the Corinthians that Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed, and uses the removal of leaven, which families did before the feast, as a picture of new life. John the Baptist introduces Jesus as the Lamb of God, and the evangelist John notes that the soldiers did not break Jesus’ legs, recalling the rule in Exodus 12 about the lamb’s bones. For Christian faith, the feast of liberation from Egypt becomes the key to a greater liberation, from sin and death. That is why in Portuguese and Spanish the celebration of the resurrection is called Páscoa or Pascua, from the Greek pascha, an echo of the Hebrew pesach. Since the Temple’s destruction in AD 70, Jewish families have held the seder without a sacrificed lamb, and the memory remains alive in both traditions.

Did you know?

• Josephus says that at one Passover in the 60s the priests counted 255,600 sacrificed animals. The number is probably exaggerated, but it conveys the scale of the feast. Josefo, Guerra Judaica 6.422-427
• According to the Mishnah, the Passover lamb was roasted whole on a spit of pomegranate wood, not on a metal spit. Mishnah, Pesachim 7.1
• By the Mishnah’s rule, on Passover night even the poorest person in Israel had to eat reclining, as a free person, and receive at least four cups of wine, even if from charity. Mishnah, Pesachim 10.1
• The authorities who brought Jesus to Pilate would not enter the praetorium, so as not to be defiled and to be able to eat the Passover: ritual purity and the feast went together. João 18:28
• The Portuguese Páscoa and Spanish Pascua come from the Greek pascha, which transcribes the Aramaic and Hebrew pesach. In many languages the Christian feast of the resurrection keeps this Jewish name. Hebrew pesach; Greek pascha (Septuagint and New Testament)

Where this shows up in the Bible

• Êxodo 12:21-27: Moses orders the blood on the doorframes and already anticipates the children’s question about what the rite means. Passover is born as a memory told at home, generation after generation. When Jesus, centuries later, says do this in remembrance of me, he is speaking to people who grew up asking and answering that question every year.
• Lucas 2:41-43: Mary and Joseph go up to Jerusalem every year for Passover, in a caravan of relatives and acquaintances. That explains how they could walk a whole day without noticing the boy was missing: in caravans, children moved among families. The episode shows a devout Galilean family, faithful to the pilgrimage.
• Marcos 14:12-16: The day the lambs were slaughtered required planning: one needed a place inside Jerusalem to eat the meal, in a city packed with pilgrims. The large upstairs room, already furnished, suggests the home of a sympathizer willing to host the group, and shows Jesus carefully preparing that night.
• Lucas 22:15-20: Jesus says he has eagerly desired to eat this Passover. Bread and cup were already part of the meal that recalled the Exodus; he interprets them in light of his own self-giving. The new covenant, sealed in his blood, appears as the continuation and fulfillment of the liberation the feast had celebrated for centuries.
• João 19:31-36: John records that the next day was a special Sabbath, coinciding with the feast, and that Jesus’ legs were not broken. For him, the detail echoes the rule of the Passover lamb: not one bone would be broken. The evangelist presents Jesus as the true Lamb, put to death at the hour of Passover.
• 1 Coríntios 5:7-8: Before the feast, Jewish families searched the house to remove all leaven. Paul draws on that household custom: if Christ, our Passover, has already been sacrificed, the church should live as a new batch of dough, without the leaven of malice. A kitchen scene becomes Christian ethics.

To go deeper

• Flavius Josephus, Jewish War, books 2 and 6
• Mishnah, tractate Pesachim (chapters 5, 7 and 10)
• Book of Jubilees, chapter 49
• Joachim Jeremias, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus
• Joachim Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus (1966)
• E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE–66 CE (1992)

Where to read in the Bible

• Exodus 12
• Luke 22:7–15
• 1 Corinthians 5:7

Connections

• linked to The Jewish feasts · factual · Levítico 23:5
• foreshadows The Crucifixion · cross-reference · 1 Corinthians 5:7
• linked to The Last Supper · stated in the text · Luke 22:15
• linked to The Crucifixion · stated in the text · John 19:14
• linked to Jesus of Nazareth · cross-reference · 1 Corinthians 5:7
• linked to The Exodus · stated in the text · Exodus 12:14

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