3/22/2025 – In the 28-minute video embedded below, Dr. James Tabor shared yesterday, he explains why he believes Paul’s version of the Last Supper changed the meal from Jesus showing his disciples they again share a meal when the Kingdom comes. Paul changed it to be a ritual for the Corinthians who had turned the meal into a drunken party that disenfranchised the poor. Jesus’s intent was to provide hope for the Kingdom and a future meal. The handout he uses in the video is in his directory in Dropbox.
The hand provides the scriptures he cites and in particular those in Luke where his view is that Luke preserves the original meal and then adds Paul’s body-and-blood lines as the second cup of wine. Thereby giving a cup-bread-cup scenario. He also points out that in the Jewish messianc feast the cup is always first as cited in Luke but not Mark and Matthew.
Luke 22:14-30 And when the hour came, he sat at table, and the apostles with him. 15 And he said to them, “I have earnestly desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer; 16 for I tell you I shall not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.” 17 And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he said, “Take this, and divide it among yourselves; 18 for I tell you that from now on I shall not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.” 19 And he took bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it and gave it to them [, saying, “This is my body] which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” 20 And likewise the cup after supper, saying, “This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood. 21 But behold the hand of him who betrays me is with me on the table.
Luke 22:28 “You are those who have continued with me in my trials; 29 and I assign to you, as my Father assigned to me, a kingdom, 30 that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom, and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.
[The strikeouts and red emphasis above is in Tabor’s pdf paper. The bold emphasis is this web guy.]
Extracts from the transcript are below.
At the end of Tabor’s talk he shared his views of Jesus’ messianic hope and the scriptures on which Jesus based that hope. That part of his talk is in the italicized paragraphs below taken from my transcript of the Youtube video.
…let’s continue to try to uncover and recover what can we say about Jesus the Jew, the first century figure of Jesus, the historical Jesus, as we scholars refer to him, and what was it like on the night he was betrayed, because I think we’re getting very close to it in this video, and it does include then his prophetic vision of the future, which is often left out.
Paul’s version just closes with, you know the Lord’s death till he comes, whereas the original version, at least as I’ve recovered it here in this process that I’ve gone over with you, actually recovers the hope, the messianic hope that was embedded deeply into everything that Jesus said and did from what we could tell, because he’s living and breathing these texts.
The messianic text of the Hebrew Bible is:
- Isaiah 11, and you will find there that the main task of the Messiah is to regather the tribes of Israel, to gather the nations and pull them back to the one God, and turn them to the way of the ancient Torah.
- Isaiah 2,
- Jeremiah 16,
- Jeremiah 3,
- Jeremiah 30 and 31.
[Formatting the above paragraph into a bullet list is by this web guy.]
These are the texts about the new covenant. These are the texts that Jesus lived and breathed and stood for, and we can’t leave them out for a version of what was later called Christianity, that I think, frankly, traces back more to Paul. But I wouldn’t credit Paul with the whole edifice of Christianity because that would include the Church Fathers and lots of other material in the New Testament that goes way beyond the historical Jesus.
