The Last Supper followed the same fixed 'four cups' structure as the modern Passover Seder, and Jesus deliberately skipped the fourth cup to drink it later on the cross.

Wine cups at the Last Supper are solidly attested: Jesus and the disciples drink together and sing a hymn afterward (Matthew 26:30), consistent with a Passover-style meal involving more than one cup. Paul and Luke both describe Jesus taking "the cup after supper" (1 Corinthians 11:25; Luke 22:20), which fits naturally with a specific cup late in a longer Passover sequence. None of that is in dispute.

What is genuinely uncertain is whether the detailed, numbered four-cup liturgy familiar from modern Seders (the cup of sanctification, the cup of plagues, the cup of blessing, the cup of praise) existed in exactly that fixed form when Jesus ate this meal. That structure is first written down in the Mishnah, tractate Pesachim chapter 10, compiled roughly around 200 AD, about a century and a half after the crucifixion. Philo of Alexandria, writing during Jesus's own lifetime (c. 20 BC-50 AD), describes the Passover ritual in detail and never mentions four cups at all. Scholars are genuinely split: some point to real overlap between the New Testament's meal descriptions and the Mishnah's later account as evidence of continuity; others argue the fixed four-cup liturgy took its final shape only after the Temple's destruction in 70 AD, when Passover shifted from a temple sacrifice to a home-based meal and needed a new liturgical shape.

The popular teaching most associated with Scott Hahn's book The Fourth Cup takes this real-but-uncertain background and turns it into a precise plot point: Jesus stopping mid-meal specifically to withhold the fourth cup until He drinks sour wine on the cross. That's a theologically rich way to read the crucifixion, and it isn't invented from nothing, but it isn't demonstrated first-century history either, and it sits on top of an unresolved dating question (the Synoptic Gospels and John don't even agree on whether the Last Supper was the Passover meal itself or the night before it). The honest verdict: real cups, a real Exodus link, a defensible typological reading, presented by some teachers as settled ancient practice when it's really a later liturgical structure read back onto an earlier and less precisely documented meal.