Anointing Jesus’s Feet like the Passover Lamb?

Shane Willard, The Chosen, and Pseudo-History

This is part of a series on pop history and the Bible. If you’d like to read a fact check on Caesarea Philippi and the “Gates of Hades,” you can read that here.

For a review of The Bema Podcast, look here.

For Lois Tverberg and Our Rabbi Jesus, look here.

Photo by Sam Carter on Unsplash

In the first scene of the season finale of Season 4 of The Chosen, King David parades into Jerusalem in a way that obviously foreshadows the Triumphal Entry, then sets about the business of preparing a sheep for the Passover ceremony. The sheep is selected six days ahead of time, and, he explains, they must anoint his feet before they bring him into the house for the six days before the ceremony. Later in the episode we see Mary of Bethany anoint Jesus’s feet, for his burial – just like the sheep, Jesus will also be sacrificed.

So of course I had to start looking around for where this idea comes from - that the anointing at Bethany corresponded, by action and by date, to a Passover ritual.

The website Bible Reference has this on Mark:

On the day families were putting oil on the feet of the lambs they'd chosen for the Passover sacrifice, Mary anointed Jesus' feet. Now another woman is anointing Jesus' head on the night families are anointing the heads of their lambs. It may be that only the women really understand that Jesus is going to die (Mark 14:8).

And if you google around you can find a million other sermons that make this claim.

The earliest source I can find for this claim is a guy named Shane Willard who (YOU GUESSED IT) promises to teach the Bible from a Hebraic/Jewish perspective. You can see the transcript of his sermon here and see more about his ministry here. Shane Willard’s credentials are obliquely stated on his website (he’s “mentored by a pastor with rabbinic training”) and you can access his streaming service of Bible history for twenty-five dollars a month. I watched a few of his sermons that are available online for free and I can’t really speak to whether the quality is generally worth it, but I will say it’s not at all clear that this is “Bible history” that’s worth paying for in itself. Willard may be a charming speaker, but I am not persuaded he is competent to teach history – as we’ll see here.

According to Willard, a lamb would be selected six days before the sacrifice for five days of inspections. The first inspection would be on the feet of the animal, and the animal’s feet would be anointed, then two days before the sacrifice the head would be anointed to confirm they were free of disease. This corresponds to the idea that the anointing of Mary of Bethany in John is a distinct rite from the anointing of an anonymous woman in the Synoptics. 

So anyway: it seem that this is our guy and a possible Patient Zero for the oft-repeated claim that six days before Passover, a lamb would be selected and anointed on its feet, or its head, or both, and this is why the anointing(s?) of Jesus at Bethany happened.

So is The Chosen right? Is Shane Willard? Do you anoint a lamb for Passover?

At first glance, this claim – that the feet of a Passover lamb were anointed a week before the sacrifice – had a ring of plausibility to me. More than the other Gospels, John likes to insist that Jesus is the Passover lamb. He’s called the Lamb of God, he’s sacrificed on Preparation Day before the Passover feast (not after, as in the other three Gospels), and the sponge used to give Jesus wine on the cross is hoisted on a hyssop branch instead of a reed (John 19:29) – the branch used to spread blood on the door in Exodus (12:22). 

But then I started looking for it.

Head, Feet, Whatever

Okay, so who anointed Jesus, why, and on what part of his body?

Mark 14:3 has a woman at Bethany at the home of “Simon the leper,” pouring expensive ointment on Jesus’s head. Matthew has the same thing (26:6-7). Luke has a “sinful woman” at the home of Simon the Pharisee anointing Jesus’s feet with oil (Luke 7:37-38) and wiping them with her hair and tears. John has Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus and Martha, anointing Jesus’s feet six days before Passover and wiping them with her hair (12:1-3).

So we have a few different versions of a story here. Mark, Matthew, and John have the event take place close to the death of Jesus, before Passover. Mark, Matthew, and Luke agree the home belonged to someone named Simon, though Mark and Matthew say it was “Simon the Leper,” and Luke has it as “Simon the Pharisee.” John says it was at Lazarus’s house. For Mark and Matthew, the woman is an anonymous woman. For Luke it is a sinful woman. For John it is Mary of Bethany, whose sinning track record goes uncommented upon. (John has at least three Marys in John 19:25 – Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary the wife of Cleopas, and Mary Magdalene; it seems that Mary the sister of Lazarus and Martha in Bethany may be a fourth Mary, according to John 11:1-2). Luke and John have the woman/Mary wiping Jesus’s feet with her hair. For Mark and Matthew, Jesus’s anointing is on his head (which is the traditional place to anoint a king or priest in the Hebrew Bible), but for John and Luke, the anointing is on his feet. In Mark, it happens two days before the Passover (14:1-2) but John has it six days before (John 11:1-5). 

Now, The Chosen specifically depicts the lamb’s feet getting anointed six days before the sacrifice. But of course Willard has to make space for two different anointings – one on the hoof and one on the head – because he needs each anointing by a woman (six days and two days before the crucifixion) to be historical. 

So did they?

The Passover Lamb- Six Days, Five Days, Two Days

The earliest source we have for the Passover lamb sacrifice is Exodus 12. In Exodus 12, the lamb or goat sacrificed must be a year old, without flaws, and the animal must be roasted. The Passover shouldn’t be conflated with the Day of Atonement offering, which is the specific sacrifice made for the sin of the people – this is the “scapegoat” ritual in which one goat is sacrificed and one is turned out in the desert, which is referenced in Mark 15, Matt 27, Luke 23, and John 18 when Barabbas is set loose and Jesus is crucified. (No lambs in that sacrifice.) An unblemished lamb is also an acceptable sacrifice for an unintentional sin or a careless oath according to Lev 4:32 and Lev 5:6. Lambs can also be used to purify lepers (Lev 14:10), a firstfruits offering (23:12), or cleansing a person who broke a Nazarite vow (Num 6:10). 

Now, both The Chosen and Willard say this lamb is not any of those other lambs – it’s the Passover offering. I wasn’t able to find any reference in the Bible to anointing a lamb before any sacrifice, and that includes the Passover sacrifice. Is there a later tradition in view?

The next place I looked was the idea of the “lamb selection day,” before Passover. This idea that Palm Sunday corresponds to the day you pick out your Passover lamb shows up in a few modern sources. It’s also a claim that’s been made by Ray Vander Laan – that by riding the donkey into Jerusalem Jesus is making himself available as a Passover lamb to choose. In John, Palm Sunday is said to be five days before the Passover (John 12:12).

Now, unlike Willard, Vander Laan actually has a plausible historical source for the idea that the selection of the lamb is five days before Passover. That’s the idea that the lamb is selected on Exod 12:3, which is the tenth day of Nisan. One keeps watch over the lamb until the 14th, on which day the lamb is sacrificed. However, it’s hard to find evidence that this interval was practiced in Jesus’s day. The Mishnah says that this practice only occurred one time, during the Passover in Egypt (m. Pesh 9:5), so at least by the time of the Mishnah, it was over. So if this was observed in the first century, or any other time before the Mishnah (and it’s a big “if”), it’s five days, not six. There’s a plausible link in the Bible itself between Palm Sunday and selecting the lamb, but perhaps not a first century link. There is not a link between the day of Jesus’s anointing and the day a lamb is selected, or a lamb anointing day, or anything like it. Mary’s anointing in John does not correspond to the day of picking the lamb; Palm Sunday does.

There are no rites I can find anywhere for the idea that a lamb is inspected for five days and anointed two days before the service. I checked the Mishnah, both Talmuds, Josephus, Philo, Melito of Sardis, and Justin Martyr, as well as a number of critical commentaries on John and Exodus. I was not able to find anything. What I was able to find was a lot of sermons an popular writings making this claim. On every sermon I was able to find that makes this reference, the source is always Shane Willard himself. I cannot find any historical sources for this claim at all. Some sources pulled the Bible Reference page, which also does not list any sources. On this point, Willard either has a source that no one else has, or he is simply wrong. 

Anointing the Passover Lamb: Debunked?

So to break this down quickly:

1. A lamb is selected five days before sacrifice – possible but unconfirmed. Implied in the earliest Exodus narrative but not attested as part of first century practice and disavowed by the time of the Mishnah.

2. A lamb is anointed six days before sacrifice on the feet – likely debunked. No sources found. 

3. A lamb is anointed two days before sacrifice on the head – likely debunked. No sources found. 

Since I couldn’t find any references to lamb anointing in any critical commentaries on Exodus, Mark, or John, nor in the Mishnah, nor any other sources, to me this looks like this: the idea of anointing a Passover lamb emerged to explain the anointing scenes in the Gospels, not the other way around. To me this looks like the idea is that, if Jesus was anointed, then it MUST have been as a sacrifice, and therefore it MUST correspond to a first century Jewish ritual.

But that’s just wrong. Anointing isn’t usually a sacrificial measure in the ancient world. It marks kings, priests, and corpses, all of which are already treated textually as allusions in at least three of the Gospels (Luke is the odd man out here). There is no need to look through sacrifice rituals to find a reference to anointing, and if you do look, you won’t find one.

I don’t know exactly where The Chosen got the idea of the lamb’s feet being anointed but if it’s Willard or a source that referred to him, I would urge them to look again into this. While I can’t prove it, my suspicion is that Willard (or one of his sources, or someone he works with, or someone before him he heard speak)¹ has invented a Jewish custom to explain a coherence problem in the Gospels – namely, when was Jesus anointed, and on what part of his body. Historically there’s no reason Jesus couldn’t have been anointed twice, though I think the simpler historical explanation is that this is just a story that has changed in its telling over time, as Fiorenza has it.

I think there are better explanations for why John has Mary anointing Jesus’s feet:

1. John insists that the people who want to make Jesus king are misunderstanding him (John 6:15). If Mary anointed Jesus’s head, we might be under the impression that she, also, was confused about Jesus’s role by trying to anoint him like a normal king.

2. Mary washes Jesus’s feet in a way that mimics how Jesus will eventually wash his disciples’ feet and how he will command them to wash each other’s feet in John 13. Mary takes the position of a slave by cleaning Jesus’s feet and using her hair to clean them - wiping one’s hands on a slave’s body or hair was apparently common (and incredibly gross) banquet practice in the ancient world (Keener, Gospel of John, 2:863), and John has also said he is not worthy to take off Jesus’s shoes (1:27). Mary is put in the same category as Jesus, John, and the instruction given to the disciples by performing a humble act of service for Jesus.

3. The part of Jesus’ body may not be as important as the expense of the perfume and significance for burial. We might see that Mary foreshadows Nicodemus, who also gives an extravagant gift of spices to prepare Jesus’ body for burial (19:39). 

And that looks like a good enough explanation to me.

1. Editor’s note: the fact that Willard is the earliest source I can find for this claim means that the possibility of an aural source (Willard heard it in a sermon) remains a very live one. The originator of the story may well be unrecoverable with a Google search. If anyone knows of a textual source that makes this claim, I would LOVE to look at it for a follow up!

EDITOR’S NOTE JULY 2nd: A member of the ministry has told me that Willard heard it from the pastor who studied with the rabbi mentioned in the above text. So this pastor (whose name I haven’t yet been able to confirm) is the earliest record I can find.