One Meal, Two Different Timelines

A long standing question among New Testament scholars concerns the exact relationship between the Last Supper and the Jewish festival of Passover: the Synoptic Gospels describe the meal explicitly as a Passover seder, held on the appropriate evening, while John's Gospel places the crucifixion itself on the day of preparation for Passover, implying that the Last Supper in John's chronology took place the evening before the Synoptic dating would suggest, meaning Jesus would have died at roughly the time the Passover lambs were being sacrificed in the temple, a timing many scholars read as theologically significant for John's presentation of Jesus as the Passover lamb.

Various proposals have been offered to reconcile the two chronologies, including differing calendrical practices among different Jewish groups of the period, but no single explanation has achieved full scholarly consensus, and the discrepancy remains one of the more discussed chronological puzzles in Gospel studies.

Whatever the precise historical timing, the meal's theological and liturgical significance developed independently of this chronological question: Christian traditions across a very wide doctrinal range, from Catholic and Orthodox understandings of real sacramental presence to more symbolic Protestant interpretations, all trace their central shared meal practice directly back to this one narrated event.