SCJR 16, no. 1 (2021): 1-3   

 

 

Matthew Colvin  

The Lost Supper:  

Revisiting Passover and  

the Origins of the Eucharist 
 

(Lanham: Lexington Books / Fortress Academic, 2019), hardcover, 173 + xiii pp. 

 

 

BRUCE CHILTON  
 chilton@bard.edu 

Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504 

 

 

The second-century bishop Melito of Sardis was a master of typological inter-

pretation. His approach, extending that of St Paul, involved seeing diverse elements 

in the Scriptures of Israel as “types,” or indirect representations, of the complete 

reality manifest in Christ. Melito’s Peri Pascha, a rhetorical tour de force on Pass-

over, identified the significance of what happened to the biblical people of Israel 

as applying fully to Christ, who is “the Pascha of our salvation” (Peri Pascha 69). 

Melito even derives the meaning of the feast from the Greek verb paskhein, to argue 
that its true sense is that of the suffering of the Lord (Peri Pascha 46-47). 

Colvin embraces a suggestion published in 1966 by David Daube that focused 

on Melito’s statement that the Lord is the one who “reached from heaven” (aphi-

komenos ek ouranou [Peri Pascha 66, cf. 86]) to take on suffering so as to kill 

death itself. This profound confidence in the pre-existence of Christ, richly devel-

oped by Melito, was taken in a different, historical direction by Daube, who 

associated the aorist participle of aphikneomai with the aphiqoman of Judaism’s 

Passover. The aphiqoman is a piece of unleavened bread hidden during the meal 

so as to be consumed at the end; the term is usually derived from the Greek epiko-

mon, a reference to something after dinner. In this reconstruction, the Haggadah in 

the time of Jesus already associated the unleavened bread with the messiah, so that 

Jesus identified himself as he messiah when he said “This is my body” (28, in Col-
vin’s citation of Daube).  

If Melito indeed thought in those terms, the typology might or might not have 

related to what practitioners of the Haggadah thought. The origins of the Haggadah, 

and the practice of hiding the aphiqoman until the close of the meal, are not fully 

clarified and of uncertain date. Nonetheless Colvin follows the lead of Israel Yuval 

and Deborah Bleicher Carmichael in building out Daube’s case (itself a recapitula-

tion of Robert Eisler’s argument from 1925). 

 



               

               Chilton: Matthew Colvin’s The Lost Supper                                                          2 
 

 

               

    

Colvin tries to argue that this meaning of the aphiqoman lies in plain sight, if 

only we look past the differing meanings accorded the Eucharist within the New 

Testament and early Christian literature. He claims that an “emphasis on diversity 

has led many scholars to turn away from analysis of the Jewish cultural an d lin-

guistic background” (xi). This, of course, is a misleading statement, since many 

scholars of the New Testament, from Hans Lietzmann to the present writer, have 
related the practice of different meals in Judaism to Eucharistic practice. Indeed, a 

shortcoming of much scholarship on the Eucharist is the apparent assumption that 

Passover presents the only case of a theologically significant meal in Judaism. 

Colvin’s appeal to univocal origins leads him simply to cancel the dispute over 

the difference between the calendars of John and the Synoptics by appeal to the 

work of Theodor Zahn in 1908 (17-18). Colvin argues that the appearance of a 

discrepancy over when Christ died is a simple mistake that generations of scholars 

have made in regard to the reference to the day of preparation in John.1 That is not 

the day before Passover, he argues, but Friday in the week of Passover. His limited 

remarks, however, do not take account of the overt statement, only found in John, 

that correlates the paschal offering with the death of Christ in that in both those 
cases not a bone was broken (Exodus 12:46; John 19:36). Melito alludes to this 

connection (Peri Pascha 12), but it eludes Colvin’s notice.  

In addition, to blandly maintain that because it is possible to translate Mark’s 

Gospel into Aramaic, it was written in Aramaic (2) takes no account of long estab-

lished features of Markan style in Koine. Such shortcuts follow a stream of recent 

British Evangelicalism, reflected in Colvin’s argument against diversity: “the 

church in the apostolic age was highly mobile and interconnected” (1). This is one 

of the few assertions I have encountered during the past year to the effect that 

greater mobility and interconnectedness guarantee greater unity. In any case the 

variance of Eucharistic presentations among the Gospels, Paul, and the Didache 

finds no focused discussion here. 

Colvin presses his unitary Christianity back to Jesus himself, arguing that 
“This is my body” means that the aphiqoman is the messiah, with whom he identi-

fies himself (24-35, 56). Yet any Haggadah that Jesus used would of course have 

been framed prior to the destruction of the Temple, an event which exerted a pro-

found influence on the practice of the Passover. In order to speak of religious meals 

(and not only paschal celebrations) in Second Temple Judaism, account would need 

to be taken of the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example. They, of course, inevitably bring 

us into the deep diversity of Judaism within that period. The principal scholar of 

that variety, Jacob Neusner (including Neusner’s analysis that problematizes refer-

ence to the “messiah”) is not discussed in this regard, and his work with Lawrence 

Schiffman, in A Comparative Handbook to the Gospel of Mark. Comparisons with 

                                                           
1 At moments I have attempted to soften some of my criticism of Colvin’s work. But then I run across 

sentences such as, “It is truly remarkable how so simple an omission of philological due diligence has 

grown legs and traveled through the scholarship” (18 n. 16). Zahn’s argument represents more ad hoc 

reasoning than philology, and to accuse the many scholars who have declined to follow him as lacking 

in “due diligence” is captious. 

 



             

              3                                           Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 16, no. 1 (2021) 
 

 
 

Pseudepigrapha, the Qumran Scrolls, and Rabbinic Literature: The New Testa-

ment Gospels in their Judaic Contexts 1 (2009; of which I was general editor) seems 

not to have been consulted. 

Although the argument of this book is not worked out in the historical and 

philological terms it sets out for itself, the author takes us through a selective survey 

of a vast country. If his mapping appears incomplete, he nonetheless shows us what 
an interesting journey awaits the willing traveler, and some of his textual discussion 

is fascinating. 

Most relevant for readers of Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations, however, 

is Colvin’s failure to discuss the argument that the aphiqoman relates to the messiah 

and to Jesus within the practice and apologetic of Messianic Judaism.2 This devel-

opment is all the more pertinent in light of Melito’s development of the charge of 

Israel’s role in Christ’s suffering and death, an emphatic dimension of Peri Pascha. 

Subtlety is not evident when he makes Israel responsible for the crucifixion (Peri 

Pascha 75); why Melito should not actually mention the aphiqoman or its alleged 

meaning remains a mystery according to the hypothesis under review.  

Although the argument of this book is framed as if it were historical, in fact it 
is rooted in typology. Colvin happily cites Paul as providing the “coup de grace” 

of his argument, since Paul identified Christ and Passover (119). That, however, is 

after all an example of Pauline typology. 

Typological argument still has its attraction, as its deployment in contempo-

rary Messianic Judaism illustrates. To make a typological argument of this sort into 

an historical argument, however, would require that the origins of the Haggadah be 

elucidated; that the practice, etymology, and dating of the aphiqoman be deter-

mined; and that Judaic meal practices be assessed. All the while, the issue of the 

degree to which typology may be inherently supersessionist needs to be addressed, 

as does the prospect that transferring typology into history exacerbates any super-

sessionist tendencies. Fortunately, all these are vectors of analysis that have been 

explored, and those intrigued by suggestions in the present book may readily look 
into them further.  

 

 

 

                                                           
2 See John Dulin, “Reversing Rupture: Evangelicals' Practice of Jewish Rituals and Processes of Protestant 

Inclusion,” Anthropological Quarterly 88 (2015): 601-34, as well as the widely cited article by Paul Sumner, 

“He Who is Coming. The Hidden Afikoman,” Hebrew Streams, http://www.hebrew-streams.org/works/juda-

ism/afikoman.html.  

http://www.hebrew-streams.org/works/judaism/afikoman.html
http://www.hebrew-streams.org/works/judaism/afikoman.html