Pesach, or Passover, is the most important holiday in the Jewish calendar, because it commemorates the Exodus, which was the event of the escape of the ancient Hebrews from Egypt where the Torah says that they had been enslaved by the pharaoh, or ruler of Egypt. Pesach is thought to mean "festive", or perhaps "leaping over"; "passover" refers to the passing over of the Hebrew houses during the last plague on the Egyptians told of in the book of Exodus. No certain evidence has ever been found for the events there described, although it seems from historical research that Rameses II was the "pharaoh of the oppression" as he is called, and that the Exodus took place under his successor, Merneptah, who was not as strong a ruler as Rameses II had been. It is easy to believe that the Egyptians would not have recorded such a defeat for their rulers, or that one of them had been drowned in the waters of the sea of reeds, which has mistakenly come to be known as the Red Sea, and that that is why we have no record of the Exodus in Egyptian annals. An interesting speculation is that the plague of darkness and the plague of hail and fire was a memory of the explosion of Santorini, a volcano near the island of Crete, which blew up in about 1500 B.C.E., which was not in the time of Moshe, however. Be that as it may, Moshe had instituted the holiday and the traditional explanation was embedded in the Hebrew scriptures by the time of Josiah, the king in the sixteenth generation of David's dynasty, who held one of the most festive Passovers in the history of the southern kingdom to celebrate the return of the nation to Yahwism.

Mark tells us that two days later there was the feast of the passover, although it is not certain two days after what. According to our reckoning it was now the fifth day of the week after Yeshua entered Jerusalem: the first was when he entered and looked around; the second was when he kicked out the moneychangers from the temple; the third was the day of his confrontations with the chief priests, scribes, and Sadducees; and the fourth was the day of his discourse against the scribes and Pharisees and the discourse on the events of the future.

The feast of Passover was also called the feast of unleavened bread because part of the ritual was that only bread not raised with yeast could be eaten. By now the chief priests and the scribes had reached their limit, probably because of the denunciatory things Yeshua had said about them; and they planned how they could arrest him secretly, and kill him. But they didn't dare to during the feast, because they were afraid of an uprising of the people if they arrested such a popular preacher.

Up to now we have heard nothing about the disciple named Judas Iscariot, except for his being mentioned in the lists of disciples by all the gospels. Nor does the gospel of John tell us anything either about Judas prior to this point; he is simply not mentioned. So it is difficult to know why it was that he went to the chief priests and made a deal to turn Yeshua over to them in an unguarded moment, when the people would not be around to protect him. Had he decided that Yeshua was a danger to the Jews in Palestine? had he become disillusioned because Yeshua had worked no sign and organized no army to throw out the Romans? was he hoping that in such a moment of danger Yeshua would finally demonstrate his military intentions and power? The surname "Iscariot" is thought to come from the Roman term sicarii, meaning "dagger-man" or assassin, which is what they called the Zealots, so that Judas may have been a Zealot himself, although he is not called one by any of the gospels. Whatever the reason, he apparently made this agreement with the chief priests, and they agreed to pay him for helping them to arrest Yeshua.

On the day of the feast, the legend is that Yeshua sent two of his disciples into the city, to find and follow a man bearing a pitcher of water, and that the man would have a room in his house where they could have the Seder, or passover celebration, together. They did so, and found the man, who remains unnamed in the gospels, and came that evening for the meal, which was hedged about with great ritual: the meal consisted of a lamb roasted whole, matzos or large crackers of unleavened bread, and red wine symbolizing the blood of the lamb; with many prayers before partaking of anything. The head of the household blessed the meat, and the wine, and the bread; and the ritual prescribed that everything must be consumed at that meal; nothing was to be left over. The head of the household poured a large cup of wine, and after blessing it, he drank from it, and then each member of the household also drank. Then he broke the unleavened bread, and served a portion to each person, and passed around a bowl of bitter herbs and another of a sauce made of dates, figs, and almonds, called haroseth, which was symbolic of the mortar which they had to make for the bricks during their slavery in Egypt. Then everyone took another cup of wine and they all chanted several of the Psalms. It was a ritual of thanksgiving.

At this last meal which the disciples had with Yeshua, he acted as the head of household, but apparently without following the Seder ceremony exactly. However, it is likely that the actual writers of the gospel narratives were not familiar with the proceedings, since none of them was living in Palestine when they wrote. Mark reports that while they were eating, Yeshua announced that he knew that one of them was going to betray him to the authorities, quoting from the 41st Psalm, verse 8:

Mark, Matthew, and Luke all report at this point that he broke the unleavened bread and passed it around, and told them that they should consider it to be his body. They also report that as he passed around the cup of wine, he told them that it was his blood. Did he really mean to tell them that they were to eat his body, and drink his blood, as the gospel of John was to say, many years later? Or did he merely mean that they were to take their bread and wine together in remembrance of him, as indeed Luke tells us he said as he passed them around:

After the passover meal, they went out of the city and across the brook Kidron to Mount Olivet. And while they were resting on the mountainside, Yeshua said to all of them, quoting from the book of Zechariah:

Luke records an enigmatic conversation between Yeshua and the disciples after the meal, following the prediction that Simon would deny him three times. He asks them all:

A   little way further up the canyon of the Kidron river was a glade called Gethsemane. It enclosed a natural cave in which Yeshua told the disciples to wait while he went apart to pray taking only Simon and Yakub and Yohan with him. Here the story rises to a peak of intense emotion: he tells the three closest disciples to wait and watch, and he goes forward and prostrates himself on the ground, praying that the hour might pass from him:

Mark and Matthew report that he returned to the other three and found them fallen asleep. He woke them up and begged them to keep awake and watch, and then went away again to repeat the same prayer. A second time he returned and found them again asleep, rubbing their eyes groggily when he woke them the second time. He went away one more time, and this time when he returned he was composed, and said to them:

There are a couple of verses in Mark here, which suggest to us that Mark may have been actually a witness of these events, and not just a ready scribe tagging along with Simon as he travelled around the Great Sea in later years reminiscing about Yeshua. It says in the gospel of Mark, following the arrest of Yeshua: