WEEK
5
To Die For

“Nothing in Christianity is original.”
—Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, 2003

I always know when it’s Passover because a box of matzo invariably materializes in the Office kitchen. I don’t know who brings it; I never see anyone eating from it; and a week later the box is empty. Very strange. This season of celebrating miracle and mysticism, of Passover and Easter, is also a season of bread, unleavened and rich, so I couldn’t help noticing how in one work of art, the mystery and the bread coincided.

Contrary to popular opinion, the biggest mystery to be found among Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings isn’t Mona Lisa’s smile. Nor is it a thin yarn about secret codes that reveal the existence of Jesus’s descendants or some such nonsense. This true-life puzzle is in plain sight, in arguably Leonardo’s greatest painting, The Last Supper. Look at a reproduction, the larger the better. Notice the dinner rolls. The world’s most famous representation of the final meal Jesus shared with his disciples shows a table strewn with plump, unmistakably leavened dinner rolls to die for. So what’s wrong with this picture? It was Passover. Jesus was a Jew. What’s he doing eating leavened bread? There’s nary a matzo in sight!

Matzo, of course, is a variety of unleavened bread. You might say strenuously unleavened bread. Not only is it made without yeast, but it must go from mixing to oven in no more than eighteen minutes, Jewish tradition specifying eighteen minutes as the time it takes for the leavening process to begin, even without the addition of yeast.

Christianity in effect co-opted bread as an important religious symbol when Jesus uttered the famous words at the Last Supper, speaking of bread as his body, an event Christians continue to commemorate in the form of Holy Communion. In the Catholic Church and some Protestant denominations, the bread that is eaten at Communion is unleavened; more accurately, it’s an ultrathin wafer with the consistency of blotting paper that has the annoying knack of sticking to the roof of your mouth. Yet it wasn’t always this way. The bread used to be leavened bread, as it still is today in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Around the year 1000, the pope, reasoning that the bread at the Last Supper must have been unleavened, given that it was Passover (and certainly Jesus was already in enough trouble with the temple priests that he would not have been eating leavened bread at Passover), transformed the Eucharist bread into the unleavened wafer.*

The pope’s argument for unleavened Communion bread seems pretty convincing, even as it makes for a poor gastronomic experience. Why, then, does the Orthodox Church use leavened bread to mark this holiest of holy Christian ceremonies? Partly it’s because risen bread is symbolic of the Resurrection and the ascension to heaven of all believers. But how do they get around Passover? Well, they cite scripture that suggests the Last Supper actually took place the day before Passover. It has also been suggested that the Orthodox Church had another motivation: unleavened bread is the symbolic bread of the Jews, representing a tradition from which the church was quite happy to make a clean break.

Of course, the leavening of the bread at the Last Supper is the least of the bread debates between churches. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council decreed that when blessed bread is eaten during the Eucharist, it literally becomes, through transubstantiation, the flesh of Christ, a doctrine the Catholic Church holds firmly to today, and a belief that contributed to the Protestant separation from the Church of Rome.

Ecumenical debates aside, it is traditional in many parts of the world to celebrate the end of Lent with a special, rich Easter bread, often made with eggs, butter, and sugar, and I had a sudden urge to do the same, to participate in this worldwide celebration of bread. (This was as close as I came to celebrating Easter these days, not having been to church for two years.) Maybe I was also looking for an excuse not to make peasant bread, after the previous week’s disappointment with the spring water, which had produced a loaf indistinguishable from the first three.

The Easter bread I was making, from Carol Field’s The Italian Baker, was said to be adapted from “an old Roman recipe.” (Hmm. Pre- or post-Crucifixion Rome? I wondered.) Surprisingly, the ancient recipe started with a poolish (my guess is that the poolish was part of said adaptation) and was loaded with sugar, butter, eggs, orange zest, and vanilla. It was a nice change and a nice bread, if a bit blander than I expected.

As for the lovely dinner rolls in The Last Supper, painted five centuries after the Catholic Church decreed that bread eaten at the Last Supper was unleavened, what was Leonardo up to there? While searching for an answer, I read some silly theory that if you view these dinner rolls as musical notes on a staff, they form a vaguely Gregorian-chant-like tune—or is it the Beatles’ “Yesterday”? In any event, that doesn’t explain why Leonardo chose to depict leavened bread. I think we can be fairly certain it wasn’t a blunder on the part of the genius scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician, and writer. Was it, then, a slap in the face to the pope? A nod to the Eastern Orthodox Church? I have no idea. I do have a great idea for a novel, however.