I am always amazed at the speculations, suppositions, then followed by claims with little or no proof, that then almost always provides a negative conclusion regarding the Christian issue, put forth by some here.
Here is a good example:
"Paul was the first to introduce a eucharist meal into the new cult"
Can you truly state this as a fact? While some have already touched on other possibilities, the very claim demonstrates the careless treatment of what is the truth, or may be the truth. Even scholars with a bias against the Christian faith disagree on the interpretation of the Passover as related to Christian tradition.
The intellectually dishonest treatment of this subject by some here is very telling.
Notwithstanding: "The four texts that give us the account of the institution of the Lord?s Supper (Mark 14:22-25; Matthew 26:26-29; Luke 22:15-20,27-30; 1 Corinthians 11-23-26) suggest three theological meanings." Here is a viewpoint that I agree with:
Passover ?
God?s Festival of Redemption
By Samuele Bacchiocchi, PhD.
Passover is a fundamental symbol of redemption both in Judaism and Christianity. A study of the historical development of Passover from the Old to the New Testament offers a glimpse into the substance of the Jewish and Christian faiths. Passover, as Anthony Saldarini observes, lives in both the Jewish and Christian communities as a central ritual which expresses each community?s identity and nature. In Passover we meet Judaism and Christianity at their core, the same and yet different. No other religious ritual better reveals the organic relationship that exists between Judaism and Christianity than the Passover meal partaken of and transformed by Jesus into the very symbol of His redemption.
Passover began as a celebration of God?s deliverance of the Israelites from Egyptian bondage and became the commemoration of Christ?s of all believers from the bondage of sin. To the early Christians Christ was the Passover Lamb (1 Corinthians 5:7) who did for them what God had done in Egypt for the Israelites through the blood of the Passover lamb.
The Lord?s redemption of Israel from the bondage of Egypt and of all believers from the bondage of sin needed to be stamped indelibly on the minds and hearts of both literal and spiritual Israel. God intended that the experience of redemption should have a lasting effect upon His people of all ages. To impress upon His people the importance of remembering their redemption, God chose not only to record the event in His Word but also to institute a ceremony that would appeal to the senses of every person in every generation.
PASSOVER IN JEWISH HISTORY
Israel?s religious calendar opens with the Passover. The name Passover (Pesah in Hebrew) derives from the event it commemorates, namely, God?s passing over the Hebrew houses that had smeared blood on doorposts when He smote the land of Egypt: "The blood shall be a sign for you, upon the houses where you are; and when I see blood, I will pass over you, and no plague shall fall upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt" (Exodus 12:12).
Passover is the most important Jewish festival because it celebrates the liberation of the Israelites from Egyptian domination and oppression which resulted in their national and religious independence. To this day, the Jews celebrate Passover as the Feast of Redemption. All the other observances of the Jewish calendar revolve around this important historical event.
PASSOVER TYPOLOGY
Passover is a remarkable typological feast which celebrates the past fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant at the Exodus, and yet it points to the future fulfillment of the Messianic ingathering of all the nations. In his classic study,
The Temple, Its Ministry and Services, Alfred Edersheim points out the typological and prophetic significance of Passover and the other festivals. "Every reader of the New Testament knows how frequent are such allusions to the Exodus, the Paschal Lamb, the Paschal Supper, and the Feast of the Unleavened Bread. And that this meaning was intended from the first, not only in reference to the Passover, but to all the feasts, appears from the whole design of the Old Testament, and from the exact correspondence between the types and the antitypes. Indeed it is, so to speak, impressed upon the Old Testament by a law of internal necessity. For when God bound up the future of all nations in the history of Abraham and his seed, He made that history prophetic; and each event and every rite became, as it were, a bud, destined to open in blossom and ripen into fruit on that tree under the shadow of which all nations were to be gathered."
PASSOVER: A SACRIFICE
By sacrificing the lamb and sprinkling the blood upon the doorposts, the head of the family confessed that he and his family stood in danger and needed God?s provision of salvation. In a sense, to use the words of Alexander Maclaren, "The Passover is a gospel before the gospel." Maclaren continues by noting: "We are sometimes told that in its sacrificial ideas Christianity is still dressing in Hebrew old clothes. We believe, on the contrary, that the whole sacrificial system of Judaism had for its highest purpose to shadow forth the coming redemption. Christ is not spoken of as our Passover because the Mosaic ritual had happened to have that ceremonial; but the Mosaic ritual had that ceremonial mainly because Christ is our Passover, and by his blood shed on the cross and sprinkled on our conscience, does in spiritual reality that which the Jewish Passover only did in outward form. All other questions about the Old Testament, however interesting and hotly contested, are of secondary importance compared with this. Its chief purpose is to prophesy of Christ."
The temporary or permanent nature of Old Testament feasts is determined not by the dates of their origins, pre- or post-Moses, nor by the degree of their association with the sacrificial system, but rather by the extent to which their typology carries over with new meaning beyond the Cross. Ultimately, the criterion to determine the termination or continuity of the Old Testament feasts is the witness of the New Testament itself, validated by the testimony of the primitive church.
The New Testament unequivocally speaks of Passover in sacrificial terms. Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed (1 Corinthians 5:7). Does the fact that Christ was sacrificed as our Paschal Lamb render the celebration of Passover unnecessary? The answer is no! The New Testament infuses into the feast a new meaning and ritual.
THE LAST SUPPER AND PASSOVER
In the Gospel of John only few details of the Last Supper are given, because as Geldenhys explains, "He assumes that his readers are quite aware of the fact that this meal was the paschal repast which the Lord celebrated with His disciples on the evening before His crucifixion, and that He then instituted the Holy Communion. For this reason he merely refers to it by the single word deipnon [supper] without stating expressly what precise meal it was."
There are indications that John regarded the meal shared by Christ with His disciples as a paschal meal. The meal takes place within Jerusalem even though the city was thronged with pilgrims (John 12:12, 18, 20; 13:2; 18:1). During His last stay in Jerusalem, Jesus regularly left the holy city in the evening and went to Bethany (Mark 11:11, 19; Luke 19:29; 21:37), but at the time of the Last Supper, he remained in the overcrowded city. Why? Because it was a rule that the paschal lamb had to be eaten within the gates of Jerusalem.
The supper is held in the evening and lasts into the night (John 13:30; cf. Mark 14:17. The ordinary supper was not held at night, but in the late afternoon. The last Supper began in the evening and lasted into the night because, as Joachim Jeremias explains, the Passover had to be eaten at night ever since its institution.
Finally, after the meal Jesus did not return to Bethany as He had done the preceding nights. He walked to the Garden of Gethsemane (John 18:1-2). The reason is that custom dictated that the night of Passover had to be spent in Jerusalem (contemporary exegesis derived this command from Deuteronomy 16:7). In order to make possible the observance of this command, the city district had been enlarged to include Bethphage, Bethany, however, lay outside the enlarged city district. The above indications suggest that John, like the synoptic writers, regarded the Last Supper that Jesus shared with His disciples as a Passover meal.
A PASSOVER MEAL WITHOUT A LAMB?
Prior to the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70, it was unthinkable for a Jew to Celebrate Passover without the lamb, because it was the blood of the lamb, the symbol of divine deliverance from Egyptian bondage, that gave meaning to the feast. For Christians, however, the paschal lamb is not needed to celebrate Passover, because Jesus Himself is the true Paschal Lamb whose blood delivers us from the bondage of sin.
Jacob Jocz rightly observes that "the reference in John 6 to eating of the flesh and drinking of the blood of the Messiah has sense only in the context of the Passover meal . ..just as the Israelites were saved by the blood of the Passover and participated in the first Exodus, so the believers in the Messiah are saved by the sacrifice on the Cross to participate in the second and greater Exodus-from the slavery of sin to the freedom of the children of God."
Had Christ chosen flesh and blood from a lamb to represent His atoning sacrifice, He would have perpetuated the sacrificial system which was designed to come to an end with His death on the Cross (Matthew 27:51). By choosing instead the bread and wine (nonsacrificial elements of the Passover meal) as the emblems of His atoning death, Jesus detached the new Passover from the sacrificial system and transformed it into a fitting memorial of His redemption.
THE MEANING OF THE CHRISTIAN PASSOVER
At His Last Supper, Jesus instituted a simple but profoundly meaningful ceremony to celebrate His atoning sacrifice for sin. He instructed His disciples to celebrate Passover henceforth by partaking of unleavened bread and wine in remembrance of His body and blood. The four texts that give us the account of the institution of the Lord?s Supper (Mark 14:22-25; Matthew 26:26-29; Luke 22:15-20,27-30; 1 Corinthians 11-23-26) suggest three theological meanings.
The Christian Passover looks back at what has already happened. It is a proclamation of the death of Jesus (1 Corinthians 11:26). Through the feast, the people reenacted and reexperienced the events on which their existence as an independent nation was based. Year-by-year, Israel called out of the past into the present the experience of the Exodus deliverance and reentered into the covenant with its blessings and obligations. Parents were to take time during the Passover meal to recount to their children the events of the Exodus deliverance, so that the original meaning and potency of the event would remain continually active (Ex. 12:24-27).
In the same way the Christian Passover is an act of remembrance: "Do this in remembrance of me" (Luke 22:19; cf. 1 Corinthians 11:24). We remember Jesus as the Paschal Lamb who was sacrificed for us by partaking of the emblems of His broken body and shed blood. This simple and yet dramatic ritual enables the believer not only to conceptualize but also to internalize and appropriate the reality of Christ?s vicarious death.
The Christian Passover points to the present. Each celebration is a new confirmation of God?s covenant with His church. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many (Mark 12:24). The covenant is God?s commitment to love and save His people: "The Lord your God is God; He is the faithful God, keeping His covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commands" (Deuteronomy 7:7-9). The covenant is at the core of the Passover account. The benefits of Christ?s atoning death are mediated to believers in the present when they partake of the emblems of His blood and body.
The Christian Passover looks toward the future. It is an anticipation of the future messianic banquet. This eschatological expectation is expressed in the Gospels by Christ?s words: "I shall not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it anew in the kingdom of God" Mark 14:25: cf. Matt 26:29; Luke 22:16,18). In Paul?s letter to the Corinthians the eschatological expectation is expressed by the phrase "you proclaim the Lords death until he comes" (1 Corinthians 11:26).
OBSERVANCE OF PASSOVER IN THE APOSTOLIC CHURCH
In Biblical Calendars, Van Goudoever rightly observes that in order to understand the origin of Christian festivals, we must realize that in the first part of the first century Christians and Israelites shared the same religious tradition. They even worshipped together in the same synagogue. Christianity was in its earliest stage a sect or group among the Israelites.
?Part of this general tradition is formed by the festivals and the calendar. Of all parts of the liturgy the feasts are perhaps the most enduring: it is practically impossible to change the date and form of old festivals?We shall see that in general Christianity continued to observe the old feasts.
Indirect support for the Christian observance of Passover is provided by Paul?s exhortation to celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth (l Corinthians 5:8). In this passage, the apostle emphasizes the behavioral implications of the feasts of Passover and Unleavened Bread. Just as the Jews before Passover clear out all traces of leaven from their dwelling, so the Corinthian believers must remove from their midst the leaven of evil in order to live up to the true meaning of the feast of Unleavened Bread. They, too, have a paschal victim, Christ, who was sacrificed once and for all. Consequently, as F.W. Grosheide puts it, "We are obliged to keep the feast, i.e. the feast of unleavened bread (cf. vs. 7). ?The feast must be kept but must be done in a special wasy. They must keep the feast by leaving aside all iniquity, by parting with all sin even as the ancient Israelites did with their Leaven."
Is Paul?s emphasis on the behavioral implication of the feasts of Passover and Unleavened Bread derived from the actual observance of such feasts? Several scholars believe this to be the case. For example, in his article on Passover in the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Joachim Jeremias writes: "Behind this [1 Cor 5:7-8] there probable stands a primitive Christian Passover liturgy."
Paul did not divorce himself from the religious festivals of Judaism, because he found in them profound meaning for Christians. This point is brought out by Thomas J. Talley in The Origins of the Liturgical Year. Commenting on I Corinthians 5:7, he writes "Paul writes abound A.D. 55 from Ephesus in Asia Minor, a city with whose synagogue he had an extended relationship (Acts 19:8). Writing, possibly, from around the time of Passover, he tells the Corinthians that he intends to remain in Ephesus until Pentecost (1 Corinthians 16:8). His references to Passover and Pentecost show that these times were significant for him, and he seems to assume that they have a definite meaning for the Corinthians to whom he writes. While in this year he made no attempt to observe either festival in Jerusalem, at a later time Acts 20:16 shows him hastening to be at Jerusalem, if possible, on the day of Pentecost. All this suggests that Paul had by no means cut himself off from the liturgical festivals of Judaism. Nothing tells us how he observed Passover in Ephesus around the time of his writing of 1 Corinthians 5:7, but it is clear that already the festival had for him a new meaning established on the Cross."
INFLUENCE OF PASSOVER ON CHRISTIAN LIFE
In his First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul challenges his converts to adhere to correct moral behavior because Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed (1 Corinthians 5:7). This incidental reference to Christ as the Passover sacrifice is remarkable because the church in Corinth was heavily Gentile. This suggests that the existential meaning of Passover was well known and accepted even among the Gentiles, presumably because they observed the feast.
The Corinthian church was plagued with factional and moral problems. To bring its members back to proper Christian behavior, Paul appeals to the feasts of Passover and Unleavened Bread as a model for what Christians should be. As Anthony Saldarini points out, "The Christian community which celebrates Passover with Jesus as the Passover sacrifice must engage in behavior appropriate to the Passover festival. Contact with Christ as Redeemer at Passover demands a new way of life?Just as Temple rituals must be celebrated in a state of ritual purity, Christian life must be lived in a state of moral purity."
A NEW AND CONTINUING PASSOVER
By offering up Himself on the Cross as the true Paschal Lamb at the very time when the Passover lambs were slaughtered, Christ gave a new realism to the Feast. He made Passover commemorative, not merely of Israelites? deliverance from the bondage of sin. Being a commemoration of the Lamb that was slain to ransom men to God from every tribe and tongue and people and nation (Revelation :9), the Christian Passover has a prophetic function to nourish the hope and to strengthen the faith in the final deliverance of God?s people. The fact that the ultimate fulfillment of Passover still lies in the future shows that Passover, like the Sabbath, still remains for the people of God.
Passover is a sacrificial feast that continues in the New Testament because Christians eat their Passover sacrifice as do the Jews. The difference is that Christians do not need to sacrifice a lamb to eat their Passover because Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed (1 Corinthians 5:7); Christ fulfilled the sacrificial typology of the Passover, not by terminating the observance of the feast but by transforming it so that the festival could fittingly celebrate His redemption from sin.
Christ?s statement, "I will not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the kingdom of God" (Luke 22:16, NIV) suggests that He expected people to be eating the Passover meal during His absence until the eschatological marriage supper of the Lamb (Revelation 19:9). Christ, then, viewed His Last Supper with His disciples to be a Passover meal whose observance would continue until His Return.
