In a short work on the Passover, Rabbi George Wolf examines some of the changes that he considers the early Rabbis introduced to the Passover in response to the observance by the early church. Scholars have long studied the New Testament without a serious consideration of other literature that impinges on its understanding. Fortunately that has begun to change in the last half century. The action of Jesus Christ with his disciples the night of his betrayal has most often been seen as a point of disjuncture with the established practices of Judaism of that day. This reaches its apex with the apostle Paul who speaks of the “Lord’s Supper,” which most exegetes wish to see as the proto-eucharist and the start of a Christian festival cycle independent of the Jewish Holy Days. Wolf, like some Jewish scholars sees it differently. He sees both Jesus and Paul keeping the Passover in such a manner that it prompted the Rabbis of the second and third centuries to bring changes to the Jewish practice to distance the Jews from the emerging church. As an example, Wolf examines the use of haroset in the Seder meal, which he sees as being a red accompaniment to the meal possibly originally derived from pomegranates. Haroset is nowhere mentioned in the Biblical record but its place in the Seder dates back to the time of the destruction of the second temple in C.E. 70 when it was introduced to represent the blood of passover lamb that could no longer be killed at the temple. Initial references to this are recorded by R. Eleazar Ben Zadok, a pupil of Gamaliel II (80-115 C.E.). By the time the Mishnah was codified over a century later, Ben Zadok’s opinion on haroset had become simply a footnote to the then-accepted use of haroset to represent the clay of Egypt used by the ancient Israelites in brick-making. Wolf sees this change in understanding—from blood, which was part of the Biblical command, to clay, which was a Rabbinic command not included in Scripture—as being an attempt by the Rabbis to distance the Jewish event from that outlined in the New Testament where blood was represented by wine. Paul's references to Jesus Christ as “our Passover” (1 Corinthians 5:7) and the cup of blessing representing the blood of the covenant (1 Corinthians 10:16, 11:25) are instructive to Wolf in his considerations. The end result is that the Jewish Passover meal has no references to the blood of the lamb or the blood daubed on the lintels and threshold of a home. Wolf’s book is entitled: Lexical and Historical Contributions on the Biblical and Rabbinic Passover, (New York: G. Wolf, 1991).
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