What Did Jesus Eat? Bread, Fish, Wine and the Passover in the Gospels

The Gospels record Jesus eating bread and fish, drinking wine, and keeping the Passover, the feast at which a lamb was eaten. After his resurrection he ate a piece of broiled fish (Luke 24:42–43). Beyond that he ate what Jews in Galilee ate: bread of barley or wheat, olives, figs, grapes and fish from the lake.

The Gospels never set out his daily menu. They name a food when a meal matters to the story: a miracle, an argument with the Pharisees, the Last Supper, or the proof that he had risen in the body. And most of those meals are shared: he blessed and broke bread for five thousand on a hillside, for the Twelve on the night before he suffered, and for two disciples at Emmaus, who went back and told “how he was known of them in breaking of bread” (Luke 24:35). So whenever we ask what Jesus ate, we soon find ourselves asking whom he ate with.

• Bread. He went “into the house of one of the chief Pharisees to eat bread on the sabbath day” (Luke 14:1). At the Last Supper he “took bread, and blessed, and brake it” (Mark 14:22), and at Emmaus, after the resurrection, “he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them” (Luke 24:30).
• Barley loaves and fish. When he fed the five thousand, the food came from a boy with “five barley loaves, and two small fishes” (John 6:9). He gave thanks and shared them out, and “they did all eat, and were filled” (Matthew 14:20).
• Broiled fish. After the resurrection the disciples “gave him a piece of a broiled fish,” and “he took it, and did eat before them” (Luke 24:42–43). By the Sea of Galilee the disciples found fish cooking on “a fire of coals,” and Jesus gave them bread and fish (John 21:9–13).
• Wine. At the Last Supper he gave thanks over the cup, and “they all drank of it.” He then said, “I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine, until that day that I drink it new in the kingdom of God” (Mark 14:23–25). At a wedding in Cana he turned water into wine (John 2:1–11).
• The Passover. “With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer,” he told the Twelve (Luke 22:15).
• Figs. Walking from Bethany “he was hungry” and went to a fig tree, but “found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet” (Mark 11:12–13).
• Water. At the well in Samaria he asked a woman, “Give me to drink” (John 4:7).

He ate fish, and the Gospels say so plainly (Luke 24:43), but the lamb is only implied. Matthew, Mark and Luke call the Last Supper the Passover, prepared on “the first day of unleavened bread, when they killed the passover” (Mark 14:12), and the Law of Moses said that the lamb was to be eaten “roast with fire, and unleavened bread; and with bitter herbs” (Exodus 12:8). Yet the Gospels do not describe the lamb on the table, and they name no other meat that Jesus ate.

So Jesus was not a vegetarian, and Luke’s Gospel makes his eating of fish the proof that he had a real body after the resurrection.

John’s Gospel, though, sets the Last Supper on a different day. On the morning of the crucifixion, the men who brought Jesus to Pilate would not enter the judgment hall “lest they should be defiled; but that they might eat the passover” (John 18:28), and John calls that day “the preparation of the passover” (John 19:14). So in John’s account the Last Supper came before the Passover meal, and the Gospels do not explain the difference.

He ate bread of barley or wheat, the grains of the country Deuteronomy calls “a land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive, and honey” (Deuteronomy 8:8), and the loaves in John’s account of the feeding miracle are barley. The Gospels use “to eat bread” to mean having a meal: once the crowds pressed in so closely that Jesus and his disciples “could not so much as eat bread” (Mark 3:20).

At Passover the Law required unleavened bread for seven days, from “the fourteenth day of the month at even” (Exodus 12:15–18), so if the Last Supper was a Passover meal, the bread Jesus broke was unleavened. Whether that should decide the bread at the altar is something the churches answer differently. The Code of Canon Law directs that “according to the ancient tradition of the Latin Church, the priest is to use unleavened bread” at Mass (canon 926). The Orthodox Church uses leavened bread, and the Orthodox Church in America explains that “in the Christian East there is no concern for using the exact type of bread used at the Last Supper.”

The Gospels name bread and wine at the Last Supper. They also mention a shared dish: the betrayer is “one of the twelve, that dippeth with me in the dish” (Mark 14:20), and in John, Jesus dips a piece of bread, “a sop,” and gives it to Judas (John 13:26). Whether lamb and bitter herbs were on the table depends on how the meal is dated, as above.

On the cross he was offered drink more than once, and he refused the first and took the last. At the start, “they gave him to drink wine mingled with myrrh: but he received it not” (Mark 15:23); Matthew says he tasted it “and would not drink” (Matthew 27:34). Near the end he said, “I thirst,” and a sponge of vinegar, a sour wine, was put to his mouth: “When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished” (John 19:28–30).

After he rose he ate broiled fish. When the disciples thought they were seeing a spirit, Jesus asked, “Have ye here any meat?” and ate the fish in front of them (Luke 24:41–43). He had just told them that “a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have” (Luke 24:39). By the lake he gave them bread and fish (John 21:13), and Peter later spoke of the disciples as those “who did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead” (Acts 10:41).

The King James Version adds “and of an honeycomb” to Luke 24:42. Many manuscripts do not have those words, and modern translations such as the English Standard Version leave them out and note that “some manuscripts add” them. Clement of Alexandria seems to have known the longer reading. In The Instructor he retells the passage and then adds that “those who feed according to the Word are not debarred from dainties in the shape of honey-combs.” So whether Jesus ate honeycomb depends on which text of Luke we follow.

Early Christian writers used these meals as evidence of a bodily resurrection. Ignatius of Antioch wrote to the church at Smyrna that “after his resurrection He ate and drank with them, as being possessed of flesh” (Epistle to the Smyrnaeans, chapter 3).

In the desert he ate nothing at all. Luke says that during his forty days of temptation “he did eat nothing: and when they were ended, he afterward hungered” (Luke 4:2). Matthew says that he “fasted forty days and forty nights” (Matthew 4:2), and that when the devil left him, “angels came and ministered unto him” (Matthew 4:11), without saying what they brought. Jesus answered the first temptation with a line from Deuteronomy: “Man shall not live by bread alone” (Matthew 4:4).

Galileans lived on bread, olive oil, fruit and fish. The Jewish historian Josephus, who governed Galilee for the Jewish rebels in the war against Rome, describes the plain of Gennesaret beside the lake, where walnuts, palms, figs and olives grew together. The land, he says, “supplies men with the principal fruits, with grapes and figs continually, during ten months of the year.” The lake itself held “several kinds of fish,” he writes, different “both to the taste and the sight from those elsewhere” (The Jewish War, book 3, chapter 10). The Greek geographer Strabo notes that at Taricheae, a town on the lake, “the lake supplies excellent fish for pickling” (Geography 16.2.45).

The Old Testament names more of the foods of the land. The food brought to David in the wilderness included “wheat, and barley, and flour, and parched corn, and beans, and lentiles, and parched pulse, and honey, and butter, and sheep, and cheese of kine” (2 Samuel 17:28–29). Jesus speaks of a son asking his father for bread, a fish or an egg (Luke 11:11–12).

Some foods common in the region now were not there at all in his day. Tomatoes, potatoes and corn (maize) came from the Americas and reached the rest of the world only after Columbus’s voyages began in 1492. Rice is never mentioned in the Bible; the Talmud later records rabbis debating which blessing to say over rice and rice bread (Berakhot 37a), but nothing in the Gospels suggests that Jesus ate it.

The Gospels never show him eating anything the Law of Moses forbade, such as pork (Leviticus 11:7) or fish without “fins and scales” (Deuteronomy 14:9–10). After the resurrection Peter could still say, “I have never eaten any thing that is common or unclean” (Acts 10:14).

When there was a quarrel over food, it was about how food was eaten. The Pharisees objected that his disciples ate “with defiled, that is to say, with unwashen, hands” (Mark 7:2), and one Pharisee who invited Jesus to dinner “marvelled that he had not first washed before dinner” (Luke 11:38). Jesus answered that what goes into a man “cannot defile him; Because it entereth not into his heart, but into the belly” (Mark 7:18–19). The words that follow are translated in two ways: the King James Version reads “purging all meats,” as part of the saying, while modern translations such as the English Standard Version take them as the Gospel writer’s comment, “(Thus he declared all foods clean.)”

The churches answer from the same passages, though not all in the same way. The apostles in Jerusalem asked Gentile believers only to “abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication” (Acts 15:29), and Paul told the church in Rome, “Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not” (Romans 14:3). Catholics learn from their Catechism that Jesus “perfects the dietary law” by declaring all foods clean (paragraph 582), while Seventh-day Adventists are taught by their church to “abstain from the unclean foods identified in the Scriptures” (Fundamental Belief 22).

He ate with other people, and he gave thanks first: before feeding the crowd he “looked up to heaven, and blessed, and brake the loaves” (Mark 6:41). The details of his meals suggest that diners reclined: a woman came into a Pharisee’s house and “stood at his feet behind him weeping” (Luke 7:38), and at the Last Supper a disciple was “leaning on Jesus’ bosom” (John 13:23).

What drew the most comment was the company he kept. The scribes and Pharisees asked, “How is it that he eateth and drinketh with publicans and sinners?” (Mark 2:16). Jesus himself set his habits beside those of John the Baptist, who lived on “locusts and wild honey” (Mark 1:6): “John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, He hath a devil. The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber” (Matthew 11:18–19).

Nothing in the Gospels suggests that he was. The Essenes were a strict Jewish sect of Jesus’ time, never mentioned in the New Testament, and Josephus describes their meals: members bathed in cold water beforehand, then ate together “in an apartment of their own, into which it is not permitted to any of another sect to enter,” with a priest saying grace (The Jewish War, book 2, chapter 8). Jesus, by contrast, ate in the homes of Pharisees and tax collectors, skipped the washing before dinner, and was accused of eating with sinners. His table stayed open to the end and beyond it: by the lake, with fish laid on a fire of coals, the risen Lord called his friends to eat with him. “Come and dine” (John 21:12).

---

• What does Passover represent in the Bible?
• Eating pork: what the Bible says
• Bread in Scripture
• Fish in the Bible