The Last Supper as Passover
In a talk that highlighted the importance of rigorous, scholarly investigation, Princeton History Professor Anthony Grafton made a compelling case on Monday that the Christian discovery of a Jewish Jesus began in the Renaissance. A leading cultural and intellectual historian of Renaissance Europe, Grafton suggested that it was 16th-century scholar Joseph Scaliger, in particular, who helped transform the discourse around the sacred Christian meal. Using ancient Jewish sources and texts, Scaliger contended that the Last Supper was in fact a Passover Seder. “Others who wrote about the relationship between Passover and the Last Supper looked at contemporary practice,” said Grafton. “Scaliger set out to reconstruct the Seder of the Second Temple period … taking fragment after fragment of what he sees as the period sources and putting them together with a commentary.” Painters of the Renaissance who depicted images of the Last Supper were not engaged in serious scholarship, but in an artistic,...