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 CLEMENS LEONHARD

THE JEWISH PESACH

AND THE ORIGINS OF THE CHRISTIAN EASTER

w
DE

G
 STUDIA JUDAICA
F O R S C H U N G E N ZUR W I S S E N S C H A F T
DES J U D E N T U M S

HERAUSGEGEBEN VON
E. L. E H R L I C H U N D G. S T E M B E R G E R

BAND XXXV

W A L T E R DE G R U Y T E R · B E R L I N · N E W Y O R K
 THE JEWISH PESACH
AND THE ORIGINS
OF THE CHRISTIAN EASTER

OPEN QUESTIONS IN CURRENT RESEARCH

BY
CLEMENS LEONHARD

W A L T E R DE G R U Y T E R · B E R L I N · N E W Y O R K
 ® Printed on acid-free paper which falls "within the guidelines of the ANSI
to ensure permanence and durability.

ISBN-13: 978-3-11-018857-8
ISBN-10: 3-11-018857-0
ISSN 0585-5306

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;

detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

© Copyright 2006 by Walter de Gruytcr G m b H & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin

All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. N o part of this book
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permis-
sion in writing from the publisher.
Printed in Germany
Cover Design: Christopher Schneider
 Contents

Contents V
Foreword IX
1 Questions, Methods, and Sources 1
1.1 The Origins of Pesach and Easter 1
1.2 'The Creation of a New Festival is Almost Unimaginable' 4
1.3 Sources and Approaches 9
2 The Egyptian Pesach 15
2.1 Exodus 12 and the Origins of Pesach 15
2.1.1 'Our Fathers Had Three Altars in Egypt' 15
2.1.2 Reading Exodus 12 in the Liturgies 24
2.1.3 Pesach Without Exodus 27
2.1.4 Exodus 12 and Domestic Liturgies in the First Century 31
2.1.5 Samaritans and Beta Esrael: Reconstruction of Liturgies 39
2.1.6 Melito's Peri Pascha 42
2.2 An 'Optical Illusion' 56
2.2.1 A Nomadic Ritual 56
2.2.2 'Surely There was not Holden such a Passover from
the Days of the Judges that Judged Israel' 59
2.2.3 Layers in the Text of Exodus 12 60
2.2.4 The Liturgy of Exodus 12 62
2.3 Conclusions 69
Excursus: The Impact of the Narrative of Exodus 12 70
3 The Date of the Haggada 73
3.1 Seder Without Haggada 74
3.1.1 A Pre-Maccabean Date for the Haggada? 74
3.1.2 The Seder 76
3.2 The Haggada According to the Palestinian Rite 89
3.2.1 The Palestinian Haggada and the Mishna 92
3.2.2 Recitation of Rubrics 94
3.2.3 Creating Liturgical Text 95
3.2.4 Constructing Ritual out of Text 99
3.2.5 The Basic Elements of the Haggada 100
3.2.6 The Additions of the Babylonian Haggada 102
VI Contents

3.2.7 The'Midrash'to Deut 26.5-8 107

3.3 Conclusions 117
4 Easter Sunday 119
4.1 Sunday and Easter Sunday 121
4.1.1 Pliny 122
4.1.2 Ignatius 124
4.1.3 The Didache 129
4.1.4 Barnabas and the Christian Sunday 136
4.1.5 Conclusions 139
4.2 A Christian Understanding of the Omer Ritual 140
4.2.1 Early Sources on Firstfruits and Challa 141
4.2.2 The Omer and Christ 150
4.2.3 Conclusions 158
4.3 Fifty Days Easter Sunday 159
4.3.1 'Hippolytus' and Pentecost 161
4.3.2 A Jewish Background for the Christian Pentecost? 166
4.3.3 Tertullian and the Emergence of the Christian Pentecost 172
4.3.4 Ά Kind of Festival' According to the Acta Pauli 183
4.3.5 The Emergence of the Christian Pentecost 186
4.4 The Seventh Day of the Festival of Unleavened Bread 188
4.4.1 The Third Day 189
4.4.2 The Seventh Day 192
4.4.3 Conclusions 204
4.5 A Christianized Festival of Unleavened Bread 205
4.5.1 The Expositio Officiorum Ecclesiae 206
4.5.2 Aphrahat 210
4.5.3 Diataxis and Didascalia 217
4.5.4 The Gospel of Peter 224
4.5.5 Conclusions 229
4.6 Qumran Calendars and Commemorations at Festivals 230
4.6.1 The Meaning of Time and the 364-Day Calendar 232
4.6.2 Essenes and Christians 246
4.6.3 Liturgical Realities Behind the 364-Day Calendar(s) 250
4.6.4 Jesus' Pesach in the Night of Wednesday 267
4.6.5 Conclusions 292
4.7 Why is this Night Different From the Rest of Holy Week? 293
4.7.1 The 'Service of the Resurrection' 296
4.7.2 The Easter Vigil and the Quartodeciman Pascha 301
4.7.3 Conclusions 313
4.8 Easter Sunday 314
 Contents VII

5 The Targum Expansion of the Four Nights 317

5.1 The Text of the Targum Expansion 318
5.2 Contexts of the Palestinian Targum Tradition 325
5.2.1 Forgotten Traditions? 325
5.2.2 The Oldest Aramaic Translations of the Bible 329
5.2.3 Remarks on the Liturgical Background of the Translations 331
5.3 The Form and the Genre of the Text 353
5.4 The 'Four Nights' and Their Parallels 361
5.4.1 Important Nights 361
5.4.2 Remarks on Abra(ha)m's Night(s) 375
5.4.3 The Nights of Creation, the Exodus, and the Messiah 391
5.4.4 Observations on the 'Four Nights' in Christianity 408
5.5 Conclusions 422
6 General Conclusions 425
6.1 The Egyptian Pesach as Interpretation of Pesach and Easter 425
6.2 The Geonic Haggada 427
6.3 The Sunday 429
6.4 The Omer 429
6.5 Pentecost 430
6.6 The Seventh Day of the Festival of Unleavened Bread 430
6.7 The Week of Unleavened Bread in Christianity 431
6.8 Calendars of Qumran and Christianity 432
6.9 Easter Sunday 433
6.10 The Targum Expansion of the 'Four Nights' 433
6.11 Towards a History of Pesach and Easter 435
6.12 Perspectives for Further Research 436
7 Bibliography 439
7.1 Abbreviations 439
7.2 Sources 439
7.3 Studies and Editions 441
8 Indices 483
 Foreword

The foundation for this study was laid by Hans Jörg Auf der Maur's interest in
the liturgy and meaning of Easter in all its manifestations and throughout its
history. As a most open-minded scholar, he generously supported and moti-
vated his students and the members of his institute while providing a maxi-
mum of intellectual and practical freedom. Harald Buchinger joined the in-
stitute and this discourse before myself and had already become an erudite
expert in many questions when I became employed there in 1993. After Hans
Jörg Auf der Maur's untimely death in 1999, Harald Buchinger continued to
share his insights and observations about Pesah and Easter and many other
issues with me in numerous and long discussions. I am most grateful for the
contributions of these two scholars and the atmosphere of support and friend-
ship that characterized the Institut für Liturgiewissenschaft in Vienna. A little
later, Michael Margoni-Kögler joined the institute as an assistant and entered
into the discourse as a friend and scholar.
My interests in Jewish studies were greatly enhanced by Tirzah Meacham
in a course that she gave in Toronto during the academic year of 1992-93. Af-
ter my stay in Toronto, I returned to Vienna and joined the 'Privatissima' of
reading Talmud and Midrash, directed by Günter Stemberger. Günter Stem-
berger soon took a very active part in the shaping of my career giving advice
and support. Thus, I was able to follow his suggestion to apply for the Gov-
ernment of Israel scholarship in 1997-98. In this year of studies at the Hebrew
University, I also met scholars who continued the discourse about issues of
Christianity and Judaism with me, among them: Menahem Kister, Serge Ru-
zer, Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, Guy G. Stroumsa, and Israel Y. Yuval.
The idea to set up the project that eventually led to the composition of the
following study emerged in discussions with Harald Buchinger and was sup-
ported by Günter Stemberger. The question that stood at the beginning of all
planning was, however, posed by Israel Yuval with the publication of his
seminal article on the early history of Pesah and Easter (1995/96), that I studied
soon after its appearance when Hans Jörg Auf der Maur and Günter Stember-
ger gave a joint seminar on Pesah and Easter. Menahem Kister also supported
me with encouragement and advice during my years in Jerusalem. Joseph Ya-
χ Foreword

halom allowed me to take part in his course that introduced me into the won-
derful world of classical piyyut. In Jerusalem, I was fortunate to meet Michael
Rand, who shared many elements of his expertise in Jewish poetry and liturgy
with me, invited me to New York several times and established further im-
portant scholarly contacts for me. I am also most grateful to him and Tamar
Marvin for improving the English style of several chapters of this book.
During the last three years, I was allowed to join the Seminar for Early Li-
turgical History at the North American Academy of Liturgy. In three con-
secutive meetings, the members of the seminar patiently studied my lengthy
texts. Their supportive as well as critical remarks were incorporated into the
respective chapters of the following study. Apart from the Hebrew University
in Jerusalem, the Academy provided the finest scholarly environment for the
discussion of my theses. I was also allowed to read a paper in front of a most
learned audience at the Hebrew University and took great profit from critical
remarks and suggestions.
Drafts to several sections and chapters were meticulously studied by col-
leagues who offered valuable comments and suggestions and found many er-
rors and inconsistencies. Thus, Günter Stemberger read and corrected earlier
versions of almost the whole book at different occasions in English or German.
He read texts most carefully and quickly and answered many questions in
long conversations in Vienna and in hundreds of emails. Gerard Rouwhorst
took much time for reading and discussing especially the material that con-
cerns Christian sources, but also those on Jewish liturgy. His insights some-
times required the rewriting of whole sections. Harald Buchinger and Daniel
Stökl Ben Ezra read parts of it, but also contributed greatly to my general un-
derstanding of the subject in many conversations and emails. Albert Gerhards,
Michael Rand, Michael Margoni-Kögler and many others helped me with re-
marks about details and their reading and evaluation of portions of the text.
Just before I received the generous grant of the Osterreichische Akademie
der Wissenschaften to work three years on this project, I was invited to read a
paper at the Sonderforschungsbereich in Bonn. There, I realized many com-
mon interests with Albert Gerhards, who kept in contact with me about my
research projects and eventually invited me as a guest researcher to his insti-
tute on the basis of the scholarship of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung.
While some of my time in Bonn was spent for the finalization of the Habilita-
tionsschrift, I greatly profited from the work at the Seminar für Liturgiewis-
senschaft in Bonn.
I am grateful to the members of the Katholisch-theologische Fakultät at the
Rheinische Friedrich Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn who accepted this study as
 Foreword XI

a Habilitationsschrift and me as a member of the faculty. Albert Gerhards and

Heinzgerd Brakmann wrote the expert's opinions. Their insightful remarks
and points of criticism helped me in the process of the reworking of this text.
In this context, I also thank Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich and Günter Stemberger as
well as the publishing house de Gruyter for accepting the manuscript for
Studia Judaica.
This study was composed based on the treasures of libraries in Vienna, Je-
rusalem, Bonn, and Köln and profited greatly from the generosity of the re-
spective universities as well as the daily help of their staffs. I should like to
extend my special thanks to Andreas Weyringer and Alfred Friedl who gener-
ously devoted their time and the budget of their library to the support of this
work in all its ramifications and preparatory stages.

Münster, October 2006

Clemens Leonhard
 1 Questions, Methods, and Sources

1.1 The Origins of Pesach and Easter

Long before Biblical Israel began to commit to writing what would eventually
become the centerpiece of its collective cultural memory, it shared with other
peoples the performance of a sacrifice according to the primordial customs that
are reflected in Exodus 12. Israel continued to do so throughout all epochs of
its history. In peace and stability as well as in times of destruction and exile,
this celebration helped to maintain Israel's identity as the people that was cre-
ated by the common experience of the Exodus from Egypt. Being the most
important and best attested festival of all periods of the history of the Jewish
people, it was of course taken over and integrated into Christianity at its very
beginning. Christians redefined it in a Christological way. This was done in
order to preserve its fundamental theological message in its new context. It
could, however, also serve as a cultic enactment of the difference to Judaism.
The theologies and liturgies of the Jewish Pesah and the Christian Easter ex-
press and preserve the common origins and hence the theological, as well as
historical relationship of the two religions. While Judaism continues to cele-
brate the festival until today more or less as it was customary in Second Tem-
ple times, the Christian redefinition tends to hide the fundamental identity of
the two festivals.
The preceding paragraph is not corroborated by available data. It is one of
the aims of this book to falsify its contents. Any unbiased observer of the
Christian and Jewish liturgies of Pesah and Easter will hardly get the impres-
sion that this is basically one and the same festival. It is true that some simi-
larities become visible upon very close inspection and by means of several
theories of liturgical change. Nevertheless, they only enforce the question of
how two such blatantly different systems of rituals can be claimed to derive
from the same 'roots'.1 Thus, modern (conservative or orthodox) Jews and

1 The idea of common 'roots' of Judaism and Christianity emerges quite early (espe-
cially, if Sulpicius gleaned his observations from Tacitus, cf. Stern and De Senneville-
2 Questions, Methods, and Sources

presumably most Christians do not read the same Biblical texts in the liturgies
of Pesah and Easter. Except for very recent adaptations, Christians do not cele-
brate a kind of seder in their families. Jews do not keep a vigil in the syna-
gogues. The Christian structure of liturgical time reflects texts of the New and
not of the Old Testament and the festival periods only rarely overlap in Juda-
ism and not even in all denominations of Christianity. It is true that identity
does not imply similarity. Yet, it is clear that the burden of proof lies on
whomever claims that the two festivals are identical against their overwhelm-
ing dissimilarity.
At this point, one might answer that two millennia of liturgical develop-
ment forced the branches of the tree apart, although its trunk is one and the
same. A look at the roots of the celebration is, however, likewise inconclusive.
The texts of the Old Testament do not support the idea that Pesah was cele-
brated throughout Israel's history. The Bible contains several narratives of its
re-institution after a long time of neglect. Exodus 12 tells the story how it was
given as a commandment to the people and celebrated for the first time. Being
the most detailed account about the festival, this text is normally pillaged in
search for its own prehistory. While specialists for the literary structure of the
Pentateuch tend to find signs of more recent layers in this text, it has become a
cliche to affirm that the very late text should preserve information about very
early liturgies. Indeed, its liturgy is said to antedate even the epoch of its in-
stitution narrative, Exodus 12. In the wake of Julius Wellhausen's postulate
that 'festivals of ancient Israel must be based on the way of life of shepherds',2
it seems evident that the chapters of Exodus 12f are designed to create the illu-
sion that Moses' legislation only provided an etiology for an otherwise wide-
spread and primordial ritual that was kept by Israel already for a long time.
Thus, the ritual of the Pesah was only reinterpreted, but not invented at the
time of the Exodus from Egypt. These and similar claims depict the Pesah as a
Near Eastern nomadic custom whose cultural reverberations can be seen in

Grave 1999, 41). Yet, it is expressed in the context of the desired elimination of both.
Thus, Sulpicius Severus claims that Titus supported the destruction of the Temple in
Jerusalem in order to destroy Judaism and Christianity: Christianos ex Iudaeis extitis-
se: radice sublata stirpem facile perituram; Stern 1980, 64-67 no. 282; 2.30.4 SC 441.294.
2 'Altisraelitische Feste müssen das Hirtenleben zur Grundlage gehabt haben'; 1927, 88;
cf. Wambacq 1980, 31-54. 33; 1976, 206-224, 301-326; 1981, 499-518. According to
Wambacq, the Pesah existed as a ritual of nomadic clans in the later history of Israel
or in the Diaspora only.
 The Origins of Pesach and Easter 3

19th century Palestine as well as in customs of Berbers in Morocco.3 It seems

that modern scholarship succeeded in proving what early Christian apologists
could only claim - that Passover actually never was a genuine element of Isra-
el's culture.
It is true that the opposition 'syncretism' versus 'the pristine purity of
one's religious identity' is nothing but a value-judgment about features shared
between different groups and hence irrelevant for the description of the devel-
opment of religious systems. One who continues to accept the premises stated
in the first paragraph of this section, would in any case be asked why the Pe-
sah, as it is described in Exodus 12, is apparently not attested as a ritual in the
Dead Sea scrolls, why it hardly influenced the rabbinic seder, and why the rit-
uals of the Christian Easter have nothing in common with it.
Unfortunately, New Testament texts do not provide the material to answer
the questions that are posed by the historian today. Thus, they encourage re-
constructions of elaborate liturgical 'backgrounds'. The narratives of the last
supper are, indeed, undetermined enough to allow one to add the rituals of
Exodus 12, the Pesah Haggada, as well as elements of fourth century Christian
celebrations of Easter in order to replenish the event with any detail that one
should want to have been present in that situation. Actually, such a procedure
would invalidate the New Testament as a meaningful element for the recon-
struction of the development of the Christian Easter. If Jesus and the apostles
(or the Christian communities for whom the Gospels were written) performed
what can be found in the Old Testament and in the Haggada, the testimony
about them only proves what has been known in advance: the cliche of the
stability of all liturgies.

3 Dahm 2003, 156-160 remarks that the name of the ritual 'tfaska' be related to nOD and
that 'four Jews' be represented by certain liturgical 'roles' within the large ritual com-
plex, I.e. n. 223. Dahm does not wonder whether she thus interprets the Biblical Pe-
sah by means of a ritual that has actually been influenced by the Jewish Pesah. Fur-
thermore, one may ask why a modern Moroccan ritual should explain a Biblical ritual
better than any other offering that can be observed in the Mediterranean and the Mid-
dle East. The conclusions regarding the Biblical Pesah could as well be derived from
the observation of many other rituals. Thus, incidental scraps of anthropological in-
formation are used to illustrate the point that social functions of groups are reflected
in rituals. Cf. n. 130 on p. 59 below.
4 Questions, Methods, and Sources

1.2 'The Creation of a New Festival is Almost Unimaginable'

The present study is not built upon the axiom that liturgies are 'stable', 'con-
servative', or tend to develop slowly in a continuous or even 'natural' way.
This does not mean that observations of tendencies in the history of rituals by
scholars of religion or liturgy are disregarded. While the study of more recent
phenomena can rely on more abundant documentation, the early history of the
liturgies is faced with highly diverse sources on the one hand and, sometimes,
the absence of any documentation on the other. In this context, a scholar's po-
sition towards the likelihood of liturgical change as well as its preconditions
exerts a high influence on his or her way of dealing with the silence of the
sources. The invention of the printing press has enabled texts like the Hagga-
da of Pesah or the Canon Romanus of the Catholic mass to preserve their con-
tents over many centuries almost unaltered. Nevertheless, the Catholic church
has proven at least since the second Vatican council that stability versus flexi-
bility of liturgical texts4 is not dependent upon technical progress. Further-
more, oral traditions may in some circumstances be remarkably stable, too. It
is true that the absence of certain technical equipment does not indicate the
degree of stability or change of rituals during the time period under consid-
eration. Liturgies may or may not have been 'stable'. In the present study, a
claim of the alleged immutability of rituals and customs will not be regarded
as a sufficient reason for filling gaps in the documentation.
Jan van Goudoever says: 'De tous les elements de la liturgie, les fetes sont
peut-etre le plus permanent: il est pratiquement impossible de changer la date
ou la forme des anciennes fetes, et la creation d'une nouvelle fete religieuse est
presque inconcevable'.5 This and similar postulates entice scholars into dating
back the origins of an abundance of festivals that are only attested in more re-
cent sources. For a festival is never 'created' or 'emerges', but can only be re-
interpreted. The high importance of the Pesah in the Middle Ages seems to
indicate that it must have originated in prehistoric times. If Pesah was always
kept in Israel and if festivals do not change, why did early Christianity de-
velop a liturgy of Easter that is hardly comparable with the seder and which

4 While the historians of liturgical texts face a relative uniformity (apart from some
survivals in the margins), the musicologist will hardly share the notion that 'the mass'
remained unaltered between 1570 and 1970.
5 Van Goudoever 1967, 213f (two obvious typing errors are corrected).
 'The Creation of a New Festival is Almost Unimaginable' 5

did not leave any trace in the Christian traditions?6 The following study at-
tempts to trace some of the threads of the development of Pesah and Easter. It
has, however, a vital interest in a basic continuity of its very subject. As a heu-
ristic thesis, a form of 'Pesah' will be searched in each epoch. In contrast to
van Goudoever, one must, however, be prepared to admit that it might not be
found in some.
Fritz West says in a summary of his earlier studies about Anton Baum-
stark's approach: 'Since the evidence for the early liturgy is fragmentary, the
historian of the liturgy cannot write a history of it based solely upon direct
evidence. Given this circumstance, the historian is left with a stark choice: ei-
ther to despair of the task of writing a history of the liturgy or to use inferential
reasoning.'7 He goes on to describe how Anton Baumstark used the second
method based on the assumption of 'the organic nature of the liturgy'. Several
scholars found, nevertheless, ways between despair and inference. Since it is
an important challenge for research to understand the history of Pesah and
Easter, 'despair' must not reach the point where it suggests the abandonment
of the subject. Nevertheless, the expectation of a high degree of 'despair' is the
most promising prerequisite for a fecund assessment of the data in the con-
temporary situation of research.
This hints to the fact that several methods and aims of the history of litur-
gies have been developed. This introduction cannot present a sophisticated
theory of research in liturgical studies. Being aware of this limitation, five
'points of interest' (far from even resembling something like 'hermeneutic
principles') may be noted in advance. While they clearly govern the choice of
sources and the mode of presentation, they are themselves put to the test indi-
rectly by the extent to which this endeavor succeeds in convincing its readers
that the positions taken are sound and that its subjects are, consequently, un-
derstood better than before.
First, the following study is not a comprehensive history of Pesah and
Easter. It provides prolegomena to a history of these festivals and indicates
directions for future syntheses. Nevertheless, it suggests answers to its most
important questions. Thus, its general aim is historical synthesis and recon-

6 The claim that Christians took over and refashioned the Biblical ('Jewish') Pe-
sah emerges in the 4th cent.; cf. for Eusebius, Buchinger 2004, 199-202 and the remarks
on p. 47 and n. 95. Such as the idea that preceded it - that Christians should not keep
a celebration like Exod 12 or like the 'Jews' allegedly do - it is profoundly anti-Jewish.
7 West 2001,174.
6 Questions, Methods, and Sources

struction, and the formulation of theses that help to understand the character
of the sources.
Second, it advocates a 'hermeneutic of suspicion'. This does not exclude
the necessity to take at least some of the sources seriously enough in order to
infer from them elements of the development of Pesah and Easter. As almost
all conclusions are based on textual evidence, it is tempting to deconstruct all
sources as biased and to describe the history of these liturgies as sequence of
statements that reveal their writers' strategies in (mis-) leading their readers.8
The balance between discarding most sources as unhistorical on the one hand
and generalizing every scrap of evidence on the other must be achieved anew
in each individual case. Positivistic deconstructions may help the modern
reader to reach a sound hermeneutic distance to his or her sources. As soon as
this is achieved, one has to reduce that distance again, in order not to miss the
tiny details in their structures. Sometimes, important insights can be derived
from the plain sense of the most biased texts.9
Third, the following approach attempts to find at least bits of a relative, if
not absolute chronology of texts and developments under discussion in order
to establish elements of what can eventually be integrated into a comprehen-
sive history of Pesah and Easter. Thus, much ink and paper is used to estab-
lish arguments about dates. The presumptions that liturgies grow 'slowly',
hardly develop at all, do not change in general, etc. supports what comes to be
regarded as gross anachronisms in the following pages. This must not be con-
fused with a positivistic use of manuscript evidence. Attestation in manu-
scripts is not the most important guideline for the establishment of the age of a
text. Texts may have been composed centuries before they first appear in ex-
tant manuscripts. One must formulate hypotheses about the age of certain
texts and phenomena in a dialogue with the sources, in order to enable the
falsification of the conclusions of such a study. This is especially important for
Jewish sources, which are (at least in the discourse about the history of the
Christian liturgies) sometimes regarded as 'undatable' and hence either ig-
nored or presumed to have been available within the whole period under con-

8 Karl Gerlach's approach is commented upon below, p. 277.

9 Tertullian's theological interpretation of Pentecost opens new ways to understand its
origins and meaning in the early church, cf. ch. 4.3.5. Another example can be found
on p. 80. It can be seen as extreme positivism as well as a sign of utmost naivety, to in-
fer from Raba's statement, that 'he' would not say ma nishtana during this seder at all.
However, only if the text is read in this simple way, it has any meaning for the history
of Pesah.
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