The Last Supper
About 2,000 years ago, Jesus sat down with his twelve disciples in Jerusalem for a Passover meal.
It was not the lavish feast that centuries of Western Renaissance art have suggested.
The Last Supper was a first-century Jewish Passover Seder, and the menu was dictated by scripture, tradition, and the agricultural reality of Roman-era Judea.
Unleavened flatbread baked from emmer wheat. A lentil stew spiced with cumin and olive oil, the same staple found in storage jars excavated at Masada and Qumran.
Roasted lamb with bitter herbs, commanded specifically in the Book of Exodus as part of the Passover ritual.
A sweet date and nut paste called charoset, representing the mortar used by Hebrew slaves in Egypt. And wine, always diluted with water in the Roman world, because drinking it undiluted was considered uncivilized.
This was the meal. Humble, symbolic, and rooted in a tradition going back to the Exodus itself.
The reconstruction behind this post comes from the work of Italian scholars Generoso Urciuoli and Marta Berogno, who led a study for the Museum of the Cenacle in Rome, cross-referencing the Gospel texts with Jewish dietary law, Roman dining customs, and archaeological findings from the region.
© Eats History
