It’s often assumed that the doctrinal cause of the “Great Schism” between Catholics and Eastern Orthodox was the papacy, the filioque, or some combination of the two. However, few are aware of the fact that the Latin West’s use of unleavened bread in the Holy Eucharist, as opposed to leavened bread, was among the central reasons the Eastern Orthodox initially gave in defense of their schism.
As the Eastern Orthodox scholar Edward Siecienski remarks, “it is a historical fact that the debate over eucharistic bread, and not the filioque or the power of the pope, was the immediate cause of the schism that eventually split the Christian world” (116). Siecienski even documents how, from the eleventh century all the way until the fifteenth-century Council of Florence, the use of unleavened bread was included on nearly every list of “Latin errors” that the Eastern Orthodox came up with (8).
Although this issue is (almost) entirely absent from modern Catholic-Orthodox ecumenical dialogue, it nonetheless remains a theological point on which Eastern Orthodoxy has rested its credibility. Here, I seek to prove that this historic Orthodox critique of Catholicism is both historically and theologically unsound. I’ll also reflect on what this means for the claims of Eastern Orthodoxy.
Most scholars locate the origin of this dispute over leavened versus unleavened eucharistic bread in the New Testament. This is because the question largely depends on what kind of bread was originally used by Jesus at the Last Supper. This then raises questions about “the dating of the Last Supper,” a subject that’s complicated, because the dating appears to differ between “the Synoptic Gospels’ consideration of it as a Passover celebration” and “the Gospel of John, according to which it took place just before the Passover Festival” (4).
Here’s why that matters. Since Matthew, Mark, and Luke clearly identify the Last Supper as a Passover meal (Matt. 26:17-18, Mark 14:12, Luke 22:7-8), at which no leaven could be present (cf. Exod. 12:15), one may conclude that the Eucharist was originally celebrated with unleavened bread. However, since John can be read as locating the Last Supper on the day before Passover (13:1; cf. 18:28, 19:14), and since the word used for the eucharistic “bread” is ubiquitously ἄρτον (arton), which is the word for
“common bread” and not “unleavened bread,” one may just as easily conclude that the Eucharist was originally celebrated with leavened bread.
So which is it?
Since this subject “is easily the most disputed chronological issue in New Testament studies” (251, Kindle ed.), addressing all of the different perspectives and nuances would require a full-fledged academic article. However, thankfully, Brant Pitre has already treated the dating of the Last Supper at length in chapter 4 of his book Jesus and the Last Supper, from which I will draw for the remainder of this article.
Mark 14:12 and Luke 22:7-11 clearly teach that the Last Supper was held on the evening after the Passover lambs were slain, which is 15 Nisan on the Jewish calendar (it will be important to remember that, in ancient timekeeping, “one day” is not necessarily twenty-four hours, but rather any cycle of sunlight and darkness. Thus, the Passover lambs were slain in the afternoon on 14 Nisan, and the Passover meal was eaten that same evening, but since it was the evening, it would be considered 15 Nisan). As such, if John 13:1 really says that the Supper was held the day before, on 14 Nisan, this is a blatant contradiction. However, Pitre points out that there’s a problem with this “contradiction hypothesis.” Namely, it fails to take into account the different senses in which the word “Passover” was used in first-century Judea.
During this time, the word “Passover” could mean one of four things:
- The Passover lamb — sacrificed in the afternoon, on 14 Nisan
- The Passover meal — eaten in the evening, on 15 Nisan
- The Passover peace offering — offered and eaten during 15-21 Nisan
- The Passover week — 15-21 Nisan, the seven-day feast
The meaning of any particular use of the word “Passover” therefore depended on its context. With this in mind, let’s look at John 13:1, which says that the Last Supper began “before the feast of the Passover.” According to many modern commentators, “the feast of the Passover” here refers to 14 Nisan, the day the Passover lambs were slain. However, Pitre points out that this contradicts the way the Old Testament speaks about “the feast” of Passover. Consider this passage from the Book of Numbers: “On the fourteenth day of the first month is the Lord’s Passover, and on the fifteenth day of this month is a feast. Seven days shall unleavened bread be eaten” (28:16-17).
The Lord’s Passover was indeed on 14 Nisan. However, “the feast” of Passover took place afterward, on 15 Nisan. That this was still believed by Jews of the Second Temple period is further shown by the Book of Jubilees:
Remember the commandment which the Lord commanded you concerning Passover, that you observe it in its time, on the fourteenth of the first month . . . so that you might eat it during the night on the evening of the fifteenth from the time of sunset. For on this night there was the beginning of the feast” (49:1-2).
Once again, we see that Passover (the slaying of the lambs) takes place on 14 Nisan, but the actual “feast” of Passover happens that evening, on 15 Nisan.
Thus, when St. John says that the Last Supper began just “before the feast of the Passover,” we see that he’s placing it at the exact same time as the Synoptics: in the late afternoon on 14 Nisan—i.e. after the Passover lambs were slain, and “just before” the evening of 15 Nisan. If this is the case, then one can see how John is actually highlighting the Last Supper as a Passover meal, just like the Synoptics. John begins his Last Supper narrative by placing it right before “the feast,” showing “the supper” that happens immediately afterward to be the Passover feast itself (13:2-4).
Pitre documents how there are several more details in John’s account of the Supper that make sense only if it is a Passover meal—the reclining posture of Jesus and the disciples (13:23-25), the dipping of the morsel by Jesus (vv. 26-27), giving alms during the festal meal (v. 29), the last-minute purchase of something for the feast (vv. 29-30). These are all highly unusual behaviors for an ordinary dinner, but they’re exactly what we would expect during a religious festival like Passover.
Once we understand this context, we can easily see how John 18:28 and 19:14 don’t contradict the Synoptics, either. John has already informed us that the Passover meal took place at the Last Supper, on Thursday evening, and so when he speaks of “the Passover” being eaten after our Lord’s passion on Friday (18:28), he must be referring to the Passover peace offerings that were eaten every day of the celebration.
Likewise, when John says our Lord’s trial took place during “the day of preparation for the Passover” (19:14), he’s certainly not contradicting his own chronology. Instead, Pitre points out that the Greek really says that our Lord stood before Pilate on “the preparation of the Passover,” not the “day” of preparation “for” the Passover. This is significant, because the Greek word “preparation” simply was the first-century Jewish word for the day before the Sabbath—Friday! This can be seen explicitly in Mark 15:42: “It was Preparation, that is, the day before the Sabbath,” and Luke 23:54: “It was the day of Preparation, and the Sabbath was beginning,” and even Josephus’s Antiquities (16.163): “[Jews] need not give bond on the Sabbath or the Preparation for it.” Far from proving that John’s chronology contradicts the Synoptics’, John 19:14 actually demonstrates that they are identical: the Crucifixion took place on “the Preparation of the Passover”—that is, the Friday of Passover week, meaning the Last Supper took place the day before on “the feast of the Passover.”
Therefore, the teaching of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is that the Last Supper truly was a Passover meal. But that isn’t all it was. On the night he gave himself up for the life of the world, our Lord did more than just celebrate an ordinary Passover. On that glorious night, Jesus showed his apostles how they were to open his sacrifice to all generations of Christians through the Most Holy Eucharist, and he taught them to do this using unleavened bread.
We know this because according to Exodus 12:15, God’s people were, by divine law, forbidden to consume leaven during the entire week of Passover. Contrary to popular sentiment, Jesus and the apostles were no lawbreakers. It therefore follows that not only at the Last Supper, but even after the Resurrection, when Jesus broke eucharistic bread with his disciples on the road to Emmaus, he must have been using unleavened bread (Luke 24:13-35).
Acts 10:9-16 indeed attests that it was only after Pentecost that the apostles started gaining awareness of certain Old Covenant ceremonial laws being relaxed, and a Jew being told to eat leavened bread during the very week when God’s law forbade just that would have been around as scandalous as Peter being commanded to eat unclean animals (Acts 10:13). Thus, the fact that none of the disciples raised questions about the kind of bread being consumed at the Last Supper or on the road to Emmaus strongly supports the thesis that it was unleavened bread in both cases.
At this point, we can circle back to a popular Eastern Orthodox argument in favor of the “apostolic origin” of leavened bread in the Eucharist: the fact that the New Testament exclusively uses the word ἄρτον, “common bread,” in reference to the Lord’s Supper, instead of ἀζύµους (azymous), “unleavened bread.” Given what’s been shown above, we know that the usage of this word in the Last Supper narratives, and even in Luke 24:30-34, was not intended to mean that leavened bread was being used in the Supper. Since all leaven had to be removed from the house in preparation for Passover week (Exod. 12:15), ἄρτον could only have referred to unleavened bread in those contexts.
Indeed, something Pitre discusses in his book is how the New Testament connects the bread used in the Last Supper to the “bread of the presence” spoken of in Leviticus 24:5-7 (see 120-147). This could shed light on why the Evangelists referred to the Eucharist as ἄρτον rather than ἀζύµους. Despite the Septuagint (Exod. 25:30, 39:17), and even the New Testament itself (Matt. 12:4, Mark 2:26, Luke 6:4) using the word αρτος, “common bread,” to describe the old covenant “bread of presence,” we know from Leviticus 2:11 that it had to be unleavened, since no leaven could be offered in the presence of God. This is something that all ancient Jewish commentators noticed and agreed on (e.g., Philo, Special Laws 2.158-61; Josephus, Antiquities 3.255; Babylonian Talmud, Menahot 5a.). Thus, if the bread of presence could simply be called “common bread” in the first century, even though everyone knew that it was unleavened, so too could the Gospels refer to the eucharistic bread as ἄρτον without thereby denying that it was unleavened.
As Edward Siecienski explains, it likely wasn’t until “after the second and third centuries, [that] Christians became more scrupulous about differentiating ἄρτον (bread) from unleavened bread in order to distinguish their rites from those of the Jews.” The fact of the matter is, there really isn’t anything significant about a first-century Christian referring to the eucharistic bread as ἄρτον. Although later generations of Christians would add significance to this word and connect it exclusively to leavened bread, this isn’t something that Jesus and the apostles did. This is why it’s important for us to distinguish between noble Christian practices that developed early versus truly apostolic traditions.
Next time, I’ll closely examine St. Paul’s teachings on the Eucharist in 1 Corinthians and argue that they almost definitively prove the Catholic position on unleavened bread being the original and apostolic matter of the Holy Eucharist. I’ll also explain why this fact is devastating for the historic claims of Eastern Orthodoxy.