Last Supper was not Jesus’ last supper, researcher says
A British academic believes Jesus used a largely abandoned 3,000-year-old calendar that had Passover beginning Wednesday evening, and that the meal was indeed a Seder. So his actual last supper would probably have been jail fare.
Leonardo Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” as depicted in a 1947 Pageant of the Masters in Laguna Beach. (Los Angeles Times)
By Mitchell Landsberg, Los Angeles Times
The Last Supper was probably the next-to-last supper of Jesus’ life, a British researcher has concluded after using ancient calendars and astrological data to rethink the chronology of what Christians know as Holy Week.
Colin Humphreys, a scientist who previously explored the Exodus of the Old Testament, believes his studies show that Holy Thursday — the day that Jesus gathered his disciples for the famous supper, according to tradition — was actually a Wednesday.
Humphreys’ book, “The Mystery of the Last Supper” (Cambridge University Press), was published Thursday, a day that many Christians observed as one of the holiest of the year. That’s a mistake, according to the researcher, a professor of materials science at Cambridge University who has made a sideline of biblical research.
“The Last Supper was on Wednesday, April 1, AD 33, with the crucifixion on Friday, April 3, AD 33,” Humphreys writes. He believes that his research not only definitively establishes the dates, which have eluded most scholars, but that it resolves an apparent conflict within the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ last days.