Jesus’s Covenant Ceremony: Exodus 24 and the Synoptic Accounts of the Lord’s Supper

Abstract To interpret the role and importance of the Lord’s Supper accounts in the Synoptic Gospels well, it is necessary to understand the role and importance of the covenant sacrifice ceremony in the Exodus narrative (Exod 24:1–11). While Jesus’s echo of Moses’s words of institution from the scene is well-known, the importance of the Exodus scene for the gospels scene extends beyond these words. There are multiple intriguing parallels between the two stories—in their placement in their respective narratives, in a significant number of plot details, and in their importance both for the original participants and for later readers. Just as Moses’s covenant ceremony is a climax of the Exodus narrative, the Lord’s Supper scene opens the climactic sequence in the synoptic narratives. All of these parallels work to show that the Lord’s Supper scene provides the central interpretation of the meaning of Jesus’s death in the Synoptics, the covenant sacrifice for the community of Jesus’s followers. Individual features of each of the gospel accounts integrate the connections between the parallel scenes with larger thematic elements of the gospel narratives.