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.
“The Last Supper was on Wednesday, April 1, AD 33, with the crucifixion on Friday, April 3, AD 33,” Humphreys writes in his new book, “The Mystery of the Last Supper” that was published last Thursday . Humphreys 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.
With his book, Humphreys wades into a murky, centuries-old debate over the chronology of Jesus’ last days. Among others who have weighed in recently is Pope Benedict XVI, whose book, “Jesus of Nazareth: Part Two,” considered the evidence that the Last Supper might have been held earlier in the week. He said it seemed unlikely. The Gospels of the New Testament are in agreement that Jesus held a Last Supper, was tried and convicted, was crucified on a Friday and arose on Sunday.
In 1953, a French researcher, Annie Jaubert, concluded that the official Passover indeed began Friday night, but that Jesus was probably relying on an ancient priestly calendar that had the holiday beginning on Tuesday evening. In other words, the Gospels were in agreement — Passover began Friday night, but Jesus had already celebrated it. In his Holy Thursday homily in 2007, the pope Benedict seemed to tentatively endorse that view, but he ultimately rejected it in his book this year. Instead, he said Jesus was celebrating “his Passover” because he knew he would die before the actual holiday. “And in this sense he both did and did not celebrate the Passover,” the pope wrote.
To draw his conclusions, Humphreys delved into an even older calendar, one that Hebrew people had been using since 3000 B.C. and had largely — but not entirely —abandoned by the time Jesus was alive. He employed an astrophysicist, Graeme Waddington of Oxford University, to help calculate what that calendar would have looked like around the time of Jesus’ death.
What he found, Humphreys said, was that Passover would have begun on Wednesday evening in AD 33. For a variety of reasons, he believes Jesus used that calendar.
SOURCE: LA Times
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