Last Supper

Where 1 April AD 33 comes from

This date is one man’s reconstruction. Colin Humphreys, a Cambridge materials scientist, places the Last Supper on Wednesday, 1 April AD 33, two days before his preferred crucifixion date of Friday, 3 April. No New Testament text supplies April 1, or AD 33.

Christian tradition puts the meal on Thursday evening. Humphreys moves it to Wednesday by proposing that Jesus followed a reconstructed pre-exilic lunar calendar retained by some Jewish groups, while the official calendar placed Passover later; Cambridge presented the argument explicitly as his new proposed solution.

New Testament scholar William Telford argues that Humphreys’s astronomical precision rests on unsound assumptions about the historical and eyewitness character of the Gospel chronologies.

The meal the Gospels describe

Luke has Peter and John prepare a Passover meal in a furnished upstairs room in Jerusalem. Jesus then ate with the apostles, distributed bread and wine, interpreted them as his body and a new covenant in his blood, and warned that a betrayer was at the table.

John tells it differently. During supper Jesus removed his outer robe, tied on a towel and washed his disciples’ feet — and John narrates no bread-and-wine institution at all.

From the table to Gethsemane

Mark says that after the meal Jesus and his followers sang a hymn and went out to the Mount of Olives. At Gethsemane, Judas arrived with an armed group and identified Jesus with a kiss; Jesus was arrested and his followers fled.

Humphreys’s Wednesday creates an extra day in that sequence: legal proceedings occupy Thursday, and the crucifixion follows on Friday, 3 April. Accepting an AD 33 crucifixion, however, does not by itself establish that the meal happened on 1 April.