The answer is: "Maybe." And you can quote me on that. Jonathan Klawans lays out evidence on both sides of the question in "Was Jesus' Last Supper a Seder" in the Biblical Archaeology Review.
The Synoptic Gospels indicate that Jesus' final meal was on Passover:
On the first day of Unleavened Bread, when the Passover lamb is sacrificed, his disciples said to him, "Where do you want us to go and make the preparations for you to eat the Passover?" So he sent two of his disciples, saying to them, "Go into the city, and a man carrying a jar of water will meet you; follow him, and wherever he enters, say to the owner of the house, 'The Teacher asks, Where is my guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?' He will show you a large room upstairs, furnished and ready. Make preparations for us there." So the disciples set out and went to the city, and found everything as he had told them; and they prepared the Passover meal. (Mark 14:12-16)On the first day of Unleavened Bread the disciples came to Jesus, saying, "Where do you want us to make the preparations for you to eat the Passover?" He said, "Go into the city to a certain man, and say to him, 'The Teacher says, My time is near; I will keep the Passover at your house with my disciples.'" So the disciples did as Jesus had directed them, and they prepared the Passover meal. (Matthew 26:17-19)
Then came the day of Unleavened Bread, on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed. So Jesus sent Peter and John, saying, "Go and prepare the Passover meal for us that we may eat it." They asked him, "Where do you want us to make preparations for it?" "Listen," he said to them, "when you have entered the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you; follow him into the house he enters and say to the owner of the house, 'The teacher asks you, "Where is the guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?"' He will show you a large room upstairs, already furnished. Make preparations for us there." So they went and found everything as he had told them; and they prepared the Passover meal. (Luke 22:7-13)
Now it was the day of Preparation for the Passover; and it was about noon. He said to the Jews, "Here is your King!" They cried out, "Away with him! Away with him! Crucify him!" Pilate asked them, "Shall I crucify your King?" The chief priests answered, "We have no king but the emperor." Then he handed him over to them to be crucified. So they took Jesus. (John 19:14-16)
Now, let's say for the sake of argument that the Synoptic Gospels are correct and that Jesus' last meal with his disciples was a Passover meal. Was it a seder? What is a seder?
The seder is a rabbinic refinement of the festival observance inaugurated in Exodus. The Bible records several phases of evolution for the observance of Passover. The first Passover in Exodus 12 is the pre-Exodus Passover. Exodus 13 provides the instructions for subsequent observances -- for example, they no longer have to eat with their sandals on, staffs in their hands, eating hurriedly as on the night of deliverance. The other books of the Torah continue discuss the Passover as one of the three pilgrimage festivals.
It may surprise you to know that there is no mention of the Israelites or Judeans observing Passover after the division of the monarchy. It may be that they did so and it was simply unnecessary to record or document the observance. But it may also be that they did not. Since the Bible was written and assembled beginning in the monarchy while the Temple was standing starting with older oral traditions and the Bible didn't exist as a complete collection until after the time of Jesus, individual people, people and some communities didn't have a Torah scroll on hand with all of the ritual instructions and explanations. When Jesus talks about the Scripture in Luke 24:44, he identifies it as, "the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms." That means that Job, Proverbs, Ruth, Esther, the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Ezra, Nehemiah, Chronicles and Daniel (who was not considered a prophet in Jewish tradition) were not yet part of the Scriptural tradition at the time of Jesus or even at the time the Lukan Gospel was written.
When written scrolls were produced, different communities had different scrolls, no one community had all of the scrolls that would eventually be in the Bible, although many would have had the Torah. Perhaps, not even monarchs had those scrolls. And, arguably, one reason the Bible was produced was to establish, regulate and standardize religious practices. To illustrate the point, there is a story in 2 Kings 22 about the production and discovery of the first portion of a Torah scroll. I find it very significant that as soon as the Prophet Huldah verified the scroll as the word of God the next thing the community did in 2 Kings 23 was observe the Passover.
There is then another gap in the text: no mention of Passover until the exiles return from Babylon hundreds of years later. Indeed, many biblical scholars believe the written text of the Bible was produced in earnest during the Babylonian exile to reform Israelite religious practice and return them to the religious traditions of Exodus and the wilderness, including the observance of Passover.
The Bible doesn't describe the actual Passover meals in the accounts of 2 Kings 23 and Ezra 6:19-22. The biblical texts focus on the kosher slaughtering of the lambs, the timing of the pilgrimage and sacrifice and the joy of the celebration, not the family dinner table.
What happens at the table, the order -- that's the meaning of the rabbinic Hebrew word seder -- was not authoritatively standardized out until the rabbinic period. The rabbinic period is after the time of Jesus, inaugurated by the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E., leading to the development of a completely prayer-based Judaism instead of the combination of prayer and sacrifice that characterized Second Temple Judaism.
However, that the steps of the seder were codified after the time of Jesus doesn't mean that some of them weren't older practices. For example, many of the blessings that accompany Passover seders are also part of ordinary meals. And the three essential aspects of the seder as clarified by Rabbi Gamaliel (most likely the Elder): the sacrifice, the unleavened bread and the bitter herbs are all drawn from the biblical narrative and could have easily been in practice before the rabbinic codification.
It is possible that Jesus' last meal was a regular, but perhaps not ordinary, meal. The wine, bread and hymn would have been standard for meals. None of the Gospels specify that the bread Jesus used was unleavened. (There eventually arose a dispute in the church over whether to use leavened or unleavened bread in the Sacrament and practice varies widely.) There is no description of Jesus and his disciples eating lamb or bitter herbs, nor is it specified that their bread is unleavened.
One indication that Jewish first followers of Jesus regarded the meal as not being a Passover festival meal was the institution of the Lord's Supper as a weekly and even daily practice, like other meals. In addition, one of the earliest Christian witnesses, the Didache (or Apostle's Teaching), alluded to in Acts 2:42 the early form of the Eucharistic prayers closely resemble the traditional Jewish blessings said after meals, Birkat haMazon. The Didache is where Christians find the refrain in the Lord's Prayer, "for thine is the power and the glory," which is not present in many New Testament manuscripts.
And concerning the thanks-giving [Eucharist], give thanks thus: first, concerning the cup: "We thank you, our Father, for the holy vine of your son David, which you have made known to us through your son Jesus; to you be the glory forever. " And concerning the broken bread: "We thank you, our Father, for the life and knowledge which you have made known to us through your son Jesus; to you be the glory forever. As this broken bread was once scattered on the mountains, and gathered together became one, so may your congregation be gathered together from the ends of the earth into your kingdom; for yours is the glory and the power, through Jesus Christ, forever." But let no one eat or drink of your thanks-giving except those who have been baptized in the name of the Lord, for the Lord has said, "Do not give that which is holy to the dogs." (9:1-5)
Lastly, the association of Jesus last day and meal with Passover was made in earnest and deliberately by the early church.
Early Christians struggled over whether and how to observe Passover and over when to observe the Resurrection (should it always be on Sunday or on what ever day on the solar Julian -- then Gregorian -- calendar the 15th of Nisan on the Jewish lunar calendar fell?). The church struggled with this issue (the Quartodeciman controversy) for at least 500 years. The Gospels may represent this struggle with their differing portrayals of when Jesus and the disciples ate that meal.
So then, was Jesus' last supper a Passover seder? I don't know. Maybe. I actually think so. But either the evangelists didn't know or didn't care or the fact of the matter was subordinate to the ultimate truth they saw themselves communicating. The Gospels vote 3-to-1 in favor of the pre-rabbinic seder.
Follow Rev. Wil Gafney, Ph.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@WilGafney
Fr. John W. Morris
There is only one church in all of Christiandom that follow John's chronology, the Church of St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco.
For over twenty five years the congregation has celebrated the Last Supper on Tuesday evenings of Holy Week. The form of the Eucharist is a "Feast of Friends" in the form of the Eucharist of the Didache and the chaburah meal. Like the chaburah meal it is a pot-luck. At the end of the meal members wash each others feet as Jesus did at his Last Chaburah Supper.
Unfortunately, the term "pre-rabbinic seder" in not helpful here in determining what kind of meal this was since it was not a Passover meal. The most helpful term is "chaburah".
The chaburah meal is one of the various types of Jewish meals of the era. A chaburah was a group of men that meet weekly or perhaps less frequently for conversation and a meal, particularly a group of disciples with their rabbi. These were essentially pot lucks with everyone chipping in to pay for the meal. "Chaburah" is related to the Hebrew word chaver, comrade, which appears in the well-known round, "Shalom chaverim" (Shalom, comrades)
This chaburah meal was basically in the form of the usual main daily meal in households - each kind of food was blessed as it was brought in, and the whole meal ended with a long Blessing or Benediction recited by the head of the household or host, in this case Jesus. On special occasions at the chaburah meal the Blessing was recited over a special cup of wine known appropriately as "the cup of blessing." This is what we find in the Last Supper.
These separate blessings of food (bread) and wine also are the form of the Eucharist in the Didache.
So all this is evidence that the Last Supper was definitely not a Passover meal and that it took place on Tuesday not Thursday evening.
This chronology is confirmed by the Didache where we find this rule for fasting: "Let not your fasts be with the hypocrites, for they fast on Mondays and Thursday, but do you fast on Wednesdays and Fridays." (Didache 8.1) The Didache was written before the end of the first century, and the Wednesday and Friday fast is the most ancient known to the Church
The reason Christians were bidden to fast on Wednesday and Friday is given in Epiphanius' response in De Fide to a Christian about why they fast on those days.
“St. Epiphanius (+413) echoing the Teaching of the Apostles of the third century, says: “Wednesday and Friday are spent fasting until the ninth hour because when Wednesday was beginning the Lord was arrested, and on Friday he was crucified.” [Note: Wednesday begins on Tuesday evening according to Jewish reckoning.”] St. Epihanius De Fide 22" (See The Church at Prayer: The liturgy and time By Irénée Henri Dalmais, Aimé Georges Martimort, Pierre Jounel, p.22)
John's chronology is the one that best fits the facts. He was crucified on Friday which was the Preparation Day for Passover that year. The Last Supper took place not on Thursday but on Tuesday night because of the requirements of the Sanhedrin that judged and condemned Jesus.
Two rules are relevant: Friday, they could not pass judgment and issue a sentence on the same day. Second, they could not pass sentence on the day before Jewish feasts.
Therefore they would have had to have judged Jesus on Wednesday, waited on Thursday to pass sentence. The Sanhedrin had lost power under Roman Occupation to carry out capital sentences, and therefore had to turn over defendants sentenced for capital crimes to the Roman authorities to decide whether to execute them or not.
Thus the Last Supper took place on Tuesday night. After eating Jesus was arrested. On Wednesday the Sanhedrin met to judge him but could not issue a sentence because they had to wait until Thursday to do that.
Supporting this thesis is the fact that had Jesus been arrested on Thursday night there would not have been enough time to convene the Sanhedrin, have them judge and pass sentence, then hand Jesus to the Romans to decide to execute him - all before noon on Friday when he was crucified.
>>>>>To John, Jesus *is* the bread of life (in the feeding of the 5000), the pascal lamb who ‘feeds’ believers with the gift of himself when they come to him in faith. John’s account actually makes more sense than the Synoptics because Jesus’ accusers would have wanted to avoid ritual defilement in Pilate’s presence on 14 Nisan because it would preclude them from eating the Passover dinner (John 18:28).
>>>>Whatever the merits of John's theological message, it scuttles the Synoptic account (mark 14:12-17, matt 26:17-21, luke 22:7-14).
The 13th chapter of John starts by stating "Before the feast of the Passover," and follows with "And supper being ended." Then details events from the last supper to Peter being told he would deny Jesus three time. Luke, chapter 22 details these events as being before the Passover; Lk.23:54 puts the crucifixion on the preparation day for the Passover also. The 26th chapter of Mathew puts the crucifixion before the Passover also. Mark 16: states spices were purchased after the Sabbath (Passover); Lk.32:56 states he spices were prepared before the Sabbath according to the commandments.
John's writings are consistent with the other gospels putting the crucifixion before the Passover, occurring on the same day the Passover lamb was killed for the Passover. All four gospels confirm the last supper was a pre-rabinic seder, leaving little doubt of their congruence.
Often over looked is the fact that in this week there was a Passover and the Sabbath according to the commandments, with a business day between them on which spices were bought and prepared.