Paul mentions the night of the arrest once. In the eleventh chapter of 1 Corinthians, correcting the way the Corinthians conduct their common meal, he recites the tradition of the Lord’s Supper and introduces it with a sentence that uses the same verb twice: “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread” (11:23). The English hides the repetition. Paul handed on the tradition, paredōka, and Jesus was handed over on that night, paredideto, and both are forms of paradidōmi, the verb this series has followed through the Gethsemane accounts, where English Bibles render it “betray” whenever Judas is its subject.

The second instance carries the weight of this essay. Paredideto is an imperfect passive, “he was being handed over,” and Paul gives it no agent, so the place in the sentence where Judas, the high priests, Pilate, or God might have stood is left empty. A man who had spent fifteen days with Cephas (Galatians 1:18), and who knew a tradition precise enough to fix the supper to a particular night, leaves blank the subject of the verb on which the whole account turns.

In the essay on 1 Corinthians 2:2 I argued, and then had to concede, that a doubled reference there was ordinary Greek emphasis and could not bear the weight of a grammatical encoding. The verb in 11:23 is a better candidate, for reasons that come from Paul’s own usage, and it also faces objections that need weighing before the argument can stand.

What Paul Does Elsewhere

When Paul speaks of Christ being handed over in his own theological voice, he usually supplies the agent. God “did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us” (Romans 8:32), where paredōken has God as its subject. The Son of God “loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20), where the participle paradontos takes Christ as its subject and heauton as its object. In both places the verb is active, the giver is named, and the act is interpreted, as God’s generosity in the first case and Christ’s love in the second.

The pattern has an exception I owe the reader, since in an earlier note I said that Paul always names the agent, and the claim went too far. Romans 4:25 says that Jesus “was handed over to death for our trespasses,” paredōthē, a passive with no agent. The sentence echoes the Greek of Isaiah 53:12, where the servant’s soul “was handed over to death” and he “was handed over because of their sins,” and many scholars think Paul is quoting a formula older than his letter. Romans 4:25 shows that Paul could leave the agent of the handing over unexpressed.

The exception sharpens the question more than it settles it. In Romans 4:25 the agentless passive belongs to a scriptural formula about the meaning of the death, phrased in Isaiah’s words and pointing toward God’s purpose. In 1 Corinthians 11:23 it belongs to the one sentence in Paul’s letters that places the handing over in time, on a night, before a meal, among people at a table. The theological statements name God or Christ or borrow Isaiah’s passive, while the single historical reference names no one, so the line between Paul’s interpretation of the event and his report of it falls at the point where the agent disappears.

The Ordinary Explanations

Two explanations account for the passive without any hidden purpose, and both deserve a full hearing.

The first is the divine passive. Joachim Jeremias argued that Jewish speech of the period often used the passive to describe God’s action without naming God, out of reverence, and that the sayings of Jesus are full of the device. On that reading “he was handed over” means “God handed him over,” as Romans 8:32 says in so many words, and Paul’s silence about the agent is a form of piety. The explanation has force. It strains, though, in the setting of 11:23, since Paul names God freely elsewhere as the one who gave up his Son, and a reverential passive in the one historical sentence, where human hands were certainly involved, conceals more than piety would require. In the Gospel accounts the verb has human subjects throughout, Judas handing Jesus to the priests, the priests handing him to Pilate, Pilate handing him over to be crucified, and a reader who knew those stories would hear a human chain in Paul’s passive whether or not Paul meant God.

The second explanation is that Paul did not choose the wording. He says that he received this tradition and is passing it on, and the formula of 11:23–25 stands close in wording to Luke 22:19–20, which suggests that both draw on a liturgical text older than either. If the passive came with the formula, Paul’s only choice was to keep it. The Gospels show that the passive had a long life in the tradition, since the passion predictions use it again and again: “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands” (Mark 9:31), and in Gethsemane itself, “the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners” (14:41).

That observation moves the question back a stage without removing it. If the passive belongs to the earliest liturgical memory, then the earliest memory declined to name the one who handed Jesus over, while the later accounts named him again and again, and the question becomes one about the tradition and not only about Paul. A community that remembered a betrayal by one of its own might be expected to name him at the table where the night was commemorated, much as the Passover liturgy, in its later rabbinic form, names Pharaoh at the meal this supper echoes. The supper tradition keeps the night and leaves the agent unnamed.

What the Gospels Supply

The Gospels fill the blank. Mark introduces Judas in the list of the Twelve as the one “who betrayed him” (3:19), and in Gethsemane he is ho paradidous, the one handing him over (14:42, 44). Matthew adds the price and the remorse, Luke adds Satan entering him, and John adds the purse he stole from and Satan once more. By the end of the century the empty subject of Paul’s verb had been filled with a name, a motive, and a damnation.

Paul’s letters never mention Judas, and a further detail in 1 Corinthians suggests that the silence reaches beyond the supper. In the list of resurrection appearances Paul writes that Christ appeared “to the twelve” (15:5). Matthew and Luke, writing later, take care to say “the eleven” after the betrayal (Matthew 28:16; Luke 24:9, 33), since on their account one of the Twelve was gone. Later scribes noticed the difference, and several Western witnesses to 1 Corinthians change Paul’s “twelve” to “eleven,” correcting him toward the Gospels. The ordinary explanation is that “the Twelve” had become a fixed name for the group, used whatever its membership, as a parliament keeps its name when a seat stands vacant, and the explanation is reasonable. It still leaves Paul’s earliest list without any mark of a lost member, so that the one letter mentioning both the night of the handing over and the circle of the Twelve shows no awareness that one of the Twelve did the handing over.

Whether Paul knew the Judas story and declined to tell it, knew a version in which the handing over meant something else, or did not know it at all, I cannot say. The silence is compatible with each, and the argument of this essay rests on the grammar of one verb more than on a guess about what Paul knew.

A Second Witness in Galatians

If 11:23 shows the grammar falling silent at the arrest, Galatians 2 shows it breaking at the Jerusalem leadership. Paul’s account of his second visit to Jerusalem contains two of the roughest sentences in his letters, and both concern the people who held authority there.

The first comes in 2:4–5, where Paul explains why Titus was not compelled to be circumcised: “But because of false believers secretly brought in, who slipped in to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus, so that they might enslave us, we did not submit to them even for a moment.” The Greek opens with a cause that never attaches to a main verb, and translators have to supply one. The second follows at once: “And from those who were supposed to be acknowledged leaders (what they actually were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality), those leaders contributed nothing to me” (2:6). Paul begins a sentence with “from those reputed to be something,” abandons it for a parenthesis about their standing, and restarts with a new subject, so the sentence he began never ends. Inside the parenthesis is the phrase hopoioi pote ēsan, which the NRSV renders “what they actually were.” The enclitic pote can mean “ever” or “once,” and readers who take it in the second sense hear Paul saying “whatever they once were,” a past standing that, for James, Cephas, and John, can hardly be anything other than their place beside Jesus in his lifetime or, in James’s case, his kinship.

Anger explains broken grammar, and Galatians is an angry letter. Paul’s sentences break elsewhere too, as in Romans 5:12, where a comparison between Adam and Christ begins with “just as” and never reaches its “so also,” a famous anacoluthon in a passage with no Jerusalem politics in it at all. Broken syntax proves nothing by itself. What gives Galatians 2 its interest is where the breaks fall: both within a few sentences, both at the moment Paul must describe the standing of the Jerusalem leaders and the people who came from their circle, and one of them turning on a word that may point back to what those leaders had been before Paul ever met them.

What the Grammar Can Show

The encoding thesis developed in The Composite Paul holds that Paul’s protective translation works on three levels, doctrine, narrative sequence, and grammar. For the grammatical level to carry weight, an example has to pass three tests. The construction must depart from Paul’s own habit, so that the oddity is measured against his practice rather than against a modern expectation. It must resist the ordinary explanations, or at least strain them. And it must fall on content the composite reconstruction needs, the night of the arrest, the Jerusalem authorities, or the earthly identity of the figure the tradition calls Jesus.

1 Corinthians 11:23 passes the first test against Romans 8:32 and Galatians 2:20, imperfectly, because Romans 4:25 shows Paul using the same passive without an agent. It strains the ordinary explanations without defeating them, since a divine passive and a received formula can each account for the wording. It passes the third test without qualification. The verb is paradidōmi, the act at the center of this series’ reading of Gethsemane, where the chapter on Judas argued that the Gospels’ “betray” renders a verb of handing over and that the handing over may have been a transfer more than a treachery.

On the composite reading, the agentless passive does a particular piece of work. If the man who handed Jesus over was the figure this series calls the Radical, and the handing over was the transfer the Judas chapters reconstruct, the earliest liturgical memory faced two sentences it could not say. It could not name him as a betrayer, since on this reading that would have been false, and it could not name him as the one who took the Teacher’s place, since that would have exposed what the tradition was protecting. The passive says neither. It keeps the night, the bread, the cup, and the handing over, and it leaves the agent’s place empty, in the way a palimpsest keeps the faint outline of an erased line while the new text runs around it.

The reading is a hypothesis, and the essay owes its readers a statement of what would count against it. If Paul’s letters named Judas anywhere, or if the supper formula could be shown to have carried a named agent in an older form that Paul shortened for ordinary reasons, the argument would lose its footing. If other early formulas about the arrest show the same blank where the Gospels later put a name, the pattern would grow stronger. The agentless paradidotai of the passion predictions already points that way, though it can also be read as a divine passive, and for the present the grammar allows the composite reading as one explanation among several without singling it out.

The Night Without a Name

Paul wrote the supper tradition into his letter to correct a meal that had gone wrong in Corinth, where some ate their fill and drank too much while others went hungry and those who had nothing were shamed (11:21–22), and he reached for the night of the handing over to remind the Corinthians what the meal was for. He needed no one’s name to make that point, and the blank in his sentence may be nothing more than economy. It may also be the oldest surviving trace of a reticence the later accounts abandoned, a community that remembered the night in detail and declined to say who had done the handing over.

The grammar alone cannot choose between those readings. What it does establish is narrower and firmer than anything the essay on 1 Corinthians 2:2 could offer. In the only sentence where Paul places the arrest on a particular night, the verb the Gospels would later fill with Judas’s name has no subject, and in the same sentence Paul uses the same verb with himself as subject for handing on the tradition, naming himself as the one who handed the tradition on and leaving unnamed the one who handed Jesus over, so that readers ever since have filled the second blank from the Gospels without noticing that Paul filled only the first.

References

Scripture quotations follow the New Revised Standard Version.

Jeremias, Joachim. New Testament Theology: The Proclamation of Jesus. Translated by John Bowden. London: SCM Press, 1971.

Metzger, Bruce M. A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament. 2nd ed. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994. (1 Corinthians 15:5.)

Rahlfs, Alfred, and Robert Hanhart, eds. Septuaginta. Rev. ed. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2006. (Isaiah 53:12.)