A. Edward Siecienski: The Last Supper as Passover Meal: The Patristic View

In the eleventh century, as Christian East and West were splintering apart, a debate emerged about the type of bread to be used in the Eucharist — leavened (East) or unleavened (West).In this controversy both sides used the Scriptures to justify their respective positions, the Latins maintaining that according to the synoptic gospels the Last Supper was a Passover meal and thus Jesus would have used unleavened bread for the institution of then eucharist, while the East, using the Johannine chronology, held that the Last Supper was held before Passover, which is why the Bible speaks of Jesus using artos or regular bread. The problem of dating of the Last Supper was not new, and many of the church fathers had already spoken, directly or indirectly, about the issue in their commentaries on the Scriptures and in some of the “harmonies” of the gospels attempted in the patristic period. Among the Latin fathers Tertullian, Jerome, and Augustine all addressed the issue, as did Origen, Chrysostom, and John of Damascus in the Greek-speaking East. This paper addresses the dating of the Last Supper, especially in relation to the Passover, in the patristic corpus, asks whether the fathers ever achieved any consensus on the issue, and lastly what role this consensus (if any) played in later debates about the type of bread to be used in the Eucharist.