22And they (were) eating and he took bread, and he
said a blessing, and broke (the bread) and gave (it) to them and said, ‘Take!
This it/is my body.’ 23And he took a cup and said a blessing and
gave (it) to them, and all of them drank in it, 24And he said to
them, ‘This (is/was) my blood, it (is) of the covenant, shed for many.’
Thus Jesus ‘took’ the unleavened ‘bread’, and ‘said
a blessing’, a blessing of God, not of the bread. He ‘broke’ it and started to
share it out, with his interpretation of it. His actual words were something
very like this:
nesubhū! denāh hū’ gishmī
Take! This it/is body-my.
As other interpretations looked back to the
redemption of Israel at the Exodus, so this one looks forward to Jesus’ redemptive
death. The Aramaic nesubhū simply means ‘take’, and begins
the process of sharing the bread—it is not seriously different in Aramaic,
English and Greek. The instruction to take of the bread which Jesus had broken
must indicate some kind of shared experience. This was always true of the
unleavened bread, as well as the lamb or goat, and the bitter herbs. The whole
feast of Passover was an experience of shared redemption in the past, often
accompanied by the shared experience of looking forward to redemption in the
future. In the Passover context, the identification of the unleavened bread as
Jesus’ body is necessarily symbolic. This is facilitated by the Aramaic word hū’,
which is not part of the verb to be, and which I have consequently translated twice,
with ‘it’ as well as with ‘it’. The
Aramaic gishmī means ‘my body’, it just has the words attached to each
other in a different order from natural English. We may infer that Jesus
deliberately symbolized his intention that his followers, who already knew that
he intended to die, should share in the benefits of his redemptive death.
Jesus next took a large enough cup to be passed
round the whole group. He blessed God again, and they all drank some of the
wine before he interpreted it. Jesus then began the symbolic interpretation of
the wine as his blood, probably using the Aramaic words demī denāh,
literally ‘blood-my this’. There is again no direct Aramaic equivalent for ‘is’.
The symbolic context is too strong for anyone to have seriously felt that they
had drunk blood. At the same time, this was a potential problem, sensibly
reduced by giving the interpretation after they had all drunk from the
common cup. The imagery is necessarily sacrificial, looking forward to the
redemptive significance of Jesus’ forthcoming death, just as they looked
backwards to the redemption from Egypt.
The second statement expands somewhat on the scope
of Jesus’ death: dī qayāmā’ hū’, ‘of the covenant it’. This
indicates that Jesus’ death is important in the relationship between God and
his people, Israel. When the people of Israel took upon themselves the
observance of the Law, Moses thew sacrificial blood over them and declared, ‘Behold
the blood of the covenant . . .’ (Exod. 24.8). The blood shed at circumcision
could be called the blood of the covenant, and the blood of the Passover
sacrifice had been fundamental in the deliverance of Israel from Egypt. A later
source was able to draw on this same complex of tradition and declare,
But the Holy One, Blessed be He, said, ‘By the
merit of the blood of the covenant of circumcision and of the blood of Passover
I have redeemed you out of Egypt, and by their merit you will be redeemed at
the end of the fourth kingdom’.
(Sayings of Rabbi
Eliezer, Chapter 29)
Jesus’ interpretation also looks back and forward.
His death would be important in the relationship between God and Israel. This
is pushed somewhat further with the rest of the sentence, mitheshēdh
‘al siggī’īn, ‘shed for many’. The word siggī’īn, ‘many’, must be
interpreted with care, as at Mark 10.45. It is not a direct reference to
Gentiles, nor is it a deliberate restriction of the covenant to ethnically
Jewish people. Basically, however, the covenant was between God and Israel, and
that is the context in which Jesus himself saw his redemptive death.
One further saying of Jesus is recorded:
25Amen I’m telling you that we will not add to drink
from the fruit of the vine until the day on which I drink it and it (will be)
new in the kingdom of God.
Here, with the words ‘we will not add to drink’, I
have translated the most difficult reading, that of ancient Greek manuscripts
which have preserved the idiom of Jesus’ original, and perfectly normal,
Aramaic. He meant, ‘we will not drink again’. Mark translated it literally.
Most scribes, however, altered it because it is exactly as peculiar in Greek as
it is in English, and that is why most manuscripts read normal Greek for ‘I
will not drink’ or ‘I will not drink again’. The saying has an eschatological reference
. . . The death of Jesus, and the deaths of any disciples who would die with
him, would enable God to redeem Israel. That would be the coming of the
kingdom, with the resurrection of the dead and the judgment of the twelve
tribes of Israel by Peter, Jacob, John and the other members of the Twelve.
Jesus meant that it would happen very soon. (Maurice Casey, Jesus of
Nazareth: An Independent Historian’s Account of His Life and Teaching [London:
T&T Clark International, 2010], 433-35)
