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Who Lies Sleeping?

The Messianic Meal 2

Interpreting the Feedings
The Last Supper

Abstract

Jesus has a reputation of being a wine bibber and glutton, always entertaining, eating and drinking. It is the Christian way of disguising that Jesus always conducted “masses” with his converts in the form of the messianic meal, called by Christians, the Eucharist. But, early on, it degenerated. Years after the Last Supper no miraculous event had occurred and the messianic meal of the Essenes degenerated among gentiles into a free meal and a chance to get drunk. Paul had to give them a deeply venerable way of thinking about it. Urging decorum, he told them it was a sacred meal involving the body of Christ, and falsely explained its origins at the Last Supper. He gave as his new interpretation of old Essene liturgy that Jesus told his disciples to break bread and pass a cup “in remembrance of him”.

Interpreting the Feedings

In Mark 8:14-8:21, a speech of Jesus in which he likens the kingdom of God to bread is used by the evangelist as another occasion to denigrate the chosen disciples as idiots. Inserted as it is here, it seems to occur on a boat but of course it did not.

Disciples who supposedly have just witnessed two miraculous mass feedings squabble because they have only one loaf of bread with them. You have to admit that this is laying it on a bit thick. Jesus spoke about leaven as part of the mass registration of the Nazarenes. Many of these people would have been Hellenized Jews—Jews who had largely lapsed in Jewish practice under the influence of Romano-Greek culture—but, in view of the coming kingdom, glad to be accepted as part of the chosen. These were the sinners and tax collectors. They could not be expected necessarily to understand common scriptural symbolism let alone the arcane speeches of the Nazarene. (Where genuine misunderstandings are recorded in Mark they are not the misunderstandings of the apostles but of ordinary disciples.)

Note that Mark expressly says that an underlying meaning is to be perceived here—Jesus tells us so—proving once again that allegorical meanings have to be sought in the parables. Mark records a trace of Jesus’s parabolic speech. It is about the kingdom of God expressed as baskets of the life giving bread and the tiny remnant of God, the elect or perfect, the seven loaves which will trigger its introduction. First he warns against Pharisaism and Sadducaism, inevitably using a bread and growth metaphor.

Leaven is a small piece of dough used to prove the new bread—to make it rise. It has not been baked so is corruptible—it can ferment or become fusty. (Leaven therefore represents evil in the surviving Jewish tradition—the rabbinic.) The leaven of the Pharisees and the Herodians (Sadducees) is corrupt and can yield no bread of life—no entry to the kingdom of God. So it is with their teaching of the kingdom. Matthew gives the correct interpretation in 16:12. By mentioning two of Josephus’s philosophies of the Jews, Mark implies that Jesus belongs to the third main philosophy, the Essenes.

Whereas Mark has been keen to explain parables for his readers, he fails to do so here because to do so would remove the miraculous elements from the feeding miracles. It is because the true interpretation is so much at variance with the Marcan illusion that Christian scholars label this as a particularly difficult passage. Being interpreted, this means they can make no sense of it as scholars that does not impinge upon their beliefs as Christians.

The Last Supper

The Romans had counter attacked, the temple was lost, Galilaeans were killed and the Tower of Siloam had collapsed. The Nazarenes had been beaten but Jesus was not about to surrender. He had done all he thought was necessary and now expected God’s miracle, prophesied in Zechariah 14:4. It was likely to happen on the anniversary of the previous visitation—Passover night. Shortly they would go armed to the Mount of Olives overlooking the city to wait for it. The Nazarenes had temporarily freed the Holy City from its enemies. Now it was up to God to complete the task as he had promised. Jesus wants his men to wait and watch for the signs of the miracle.

The basic tradition here is genuine. Jesus withdrew to take a meal with his closest associates. We know it as the “Last Supper.” If the meal was a Passover meal, it was an unusual one. There is no mention of lamb being served, and, indeed, how would fugitives have got the lamb sacrificed by the Levites at the temple ready for a Passover supper in a secret location. Nor is there mention of bitter herbs or the dip called “haroseth,” though this might be implied (Mk 14:20). These problems do not arise in both John’s gospel and the Talmud because they say that Jesus was hanged on the day before the Passover.

The Essene ritual meal was for only the pure and Jesus believed that God would intervene only if they were all sufficiently pure of spirit. The community, whether in the monastery or the camps, was bonded by this common meal. Only the perfect were allowed to partake of it and, in particular, to partake of the new wine which is to say the unfermented grape juice of the congregation. The Community Rule says that whenever as many as ten members of the community gathered for a meal they took their seats in the order of their rank, and the priest presided. No one could touch the bread or new wine until the priest had stretched out his hand to bless them.

But in the Rule of the Congregation at a meeting of ten or more “men of renown,” leaders of the council of the community, the messiah is present and takes bread and wine after the priest but before the others did according to their seniority. Since the sacred meal anticipates the banquet in the kingdom at the end of days, they assume the participation of the messiah to be symbolic—he was present only in spirit. But, from the description, it sounds as if the messiah were really there—the Nasi, on ceremonial occasions playing the role of the messiah.

Jesus, the prophet, priest and prince, treats the Last Supper as a messianic meal not a Passover meal, though for an Essene it was both. It was the last chance and the best one for a miracle, and so he was, for once, sure that God’s appointed time for the visitation had come and pledges to his disciples:

Verily, I say unto you, I will no more drink of the fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.

The statement Luke puts in the mouth of Jesus on the cross belongs here:

Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.

A Jewish day begins at sunset, and the Essene one might have begun at sun up, so a miracle which happened in the early hours of the morning, as Jesus expected, would have been on the same day. Jesus would not partake in another ritual meal before the miracle happens. His next meal would be the prophesied messianic meal in the kingdom, after the general resurrection.

The messianic meal comes from Isaiah 25:6 where only two items of the menu are mentioned—fat things full of marrow and wine on the lees. As a priest in the service of God, Jesus was not allowed wine (Lev 10:9) and prophets could drink no wine according to Amos 2:12 because they were Nazarites, dedicated to God. Jesus was both priest and prophet. In Mark, the fruit of the vine is unfermented grape juice not alcoholic wine and one suspects that is what “wine on the lees” means. It is unracked and probably unfermented wine. Essenes were a priestly order and were Nazarites: they did not drink wine.

Now if the Nazarene leadership were to accept the prophet’s description of the messianic meal, lamb would have been included as a fat thing full of marrow but in fact the Essenes went by Hosea’s dictum (Hos 6:6):

I desire mercy not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.

This is echoed several times in the Dead Sea literature. For the Nazarenes, the Passover meal probably did not include the fat thing anyway for the Passover meal and the messianic meal on this occasion were one and the same thing, but governed by Essene observances not rabbinic. The Last Supper is not the Passover meal of rabbinic Judaism but an Essene messianic meal dressed up later by Christians according to Paul’s prescription in 1 Corinthians 11:23-26:

The Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread and when he had given thanks, he break it and said: Take, Eat: This is my body which is broken for you: This do in remembrance of me. After the same manner he also took the cup when he had supped, saying, This cup is the New Testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink, in remembrance of me.

Paul was writing about 20 years before Mark so the symbolism of the tradition came from Paul—who had never known Jesus when he was alive—though not the idea of the meal itself.

Luke 22:19 follows Mark 14:22 except in some words which are close to Paul’s wording in 1 Corinthians 11:24, specifically using “eucharisteo,” “gave thanks,” instead of the “blessed” of Mark and Mathew. Luke also elaborates Mark in verse 20: “and the cup in like manner after supper” following 1 Corinthians 11:25. Some copyists saw the implication that these instructions had come from Paul not Jesus and deliberately omitted “after supper” from the verse.

Paul gives no clue that the meal was originally the Passover meal whereas it’s close affinity with the Essene messianic meal is undeniable. Jesus could have had no purpose in devising such a ritual because, for him, the miracle inaugurating the kingdom was due within hours.

Paul’s liturgy seems to follow Essene ritual quite closely, which would suggest that Paul knew it well. It is quite likely Paul trained as an Essene himself. His New Testament is not the collection of books that Christians revere but the “New Covenant” that God made with his “elect,” the Essenes. The word “testament” is the same as “covenant” in Greek. The Old Covenant was that of God with the Israelites and was sanctified with a sprinkling of blood (Ex 24:8).

In 2 Corinthians 3:1-3, Paul sneers at people arriving in Corinth with letters of recommendation authorizing them to preach the gospel. Plainly these are emissaries from the Essene Jerusalem Church intent on correcting Paul’s errors. Paul alludes to Jeremiah 31:33, the passage that suggested the founding of a New Covenant in which the law would be inscribed on the hearts of God’s people—the Essenes. He implies that because the Corinthian converts have had Christ written on their hearts through Paul’s preaching, no other letters were necessary. Paul quite often uses the beliefs of the Essenes, suitably turned, to score points off the envoys of the Jerusalem Church. Paul effectively redefines the New Covenant as the New Testament, neatly pinching it from the Essenes. It all shows that Paul was totally familiar with Essene ways of thinking, a result of his three years in “Arabia.”

Paul’s blood of the New Covenant in the liturgy of the eucharist must therefore go back to the messianic meal, but he Paganized it to make it closer to the practices that gentiles understood. Essenes before Jesus sanctified the New Covenant with the new wine symbolizing the blood of the Old Covenant, not the blood of Jesus. In Jeremiah 31:30-31, sour grapes, which set your teeth on edge, are used as a metaphor for sin. That might be why the New Covenanters drank new wine—unfermented grape juice. It symbolized their sin and reminded them that they had to strive for perfection. It is doubtful though that this “blood,” even symbolically, would have been drunk by Jews for whom such a thought would have been abhorrent. Some wine would simply have been sprinkled to symbolize the covenant, but it would have been drunk simply as wine. Paul introduced the drinking of it in the Pagan fashion.

The meal as an institution therefore preceded the Last Supper and evidence occurs in the gospels in the ritual nature of eating and drinking in several passages, some of which precede the last supper. They use the same ritual formula involving the same four verbs “took,” “blessed,” “broke” and “gave,” used in order. They appear, unsurprisingly in the Last Supper accounts beginning with Mark 14:22:

And as they did eat, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and brake it, and gave to them, and said, Take, eat: this is my body.

Matthew 26:26 repeats the formula exactly and Luke 22:19 with evident regard to Paul, as we noted. But they had also appeared in Mark 6:41—during the mass feeding!

And when he had taken the five loaves and the two fishes, he looked up to heaven, and blessed, and brake the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before them; and the two fishes divided he among them all.

Matthew 14:19 and Luke 9:16 have exactly the same formula. In Luke 24:30, Jesus, on the road to Emmaus, after the crucifixion meets two Nazarenes:

And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight.

The liturgical formula appears again in the non-canonical Gospel of the Hebrews 9 in which Jesus and James the Just partake of the bread and wine.

Plainly, a fixed liturgy is associated with a special meal and, because it was used at the mass feedings, it preceded the Last Supper and was not instituted in the way that Christians believed, but was inherited by the Nazarenes from the Essenes. The two Nazarenes did not recognize “Jesus” until he performed the ritual associated with the messianic meal! Yet, they were not present at the Last Supper nor could have known about Christ’s instructions.

Both the Community Rule (1QS 6:5) and the Messianic Rule (1QSa 2:20) are explicit that the presiding priest at the messianic meal takes the bread first and blesses it before anyone else can take any. The first two verbs in the ritual are therefore certain in the Essene ritual. The others might be inferred since the obvious way to ensure that no one else takes the bread improperly is for the presiding priest to give portions to the others lower in rank, and so on down the line.

Typically, the scholars quibble about whether the source was Pagan or Jewish, rarely considering that both had their influence, through Paul. Much scholarly opinion agrees that the eucharistic ritual grew out of Jewish sources rather than Pagan ones, though similar rituals occurred in Pagan religions too, but scholarship typically neglects the obvious source, the Essenes, because it is too likely to provide the answers. E J Kilmartin says all the elements of the eucharist were “native to Jewish thought and hence point to a Palestinian origin completely independent of Greek mystery religions,” except that Paul’s words put an unmistakeably Pagan interpretation on to the otherwise Essene “elements”. So, R Bultmann, who finds the origin of the eucharistic words in the gentile Church, is also correct.

In 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, Paul gives no indication of the origin of the words he proposes and authoritative scholars agree that they were used in conjunction with the derivative of the messianic meal celebrated by the first gentile Christians, and the myth of their institution at the Last Supper was invented to account for them. Paul shows negligible interest in the teachings of Jesus except for this one significant example, so this too will be Paul’s not Jesus’s invention.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.