The Date of the Last Supper

The date of Jesus’ crucifixion is a knotty issue indeed, but a new book by Professor Colin Humphreys of Cambridge (The Mystery of the Last Supper) claims to clear up the confusion by appealing to a little-known fact; namely, that Jews in Jesus’ day used two different calendars. Essentially, Humphreys argues that the constricted and contorted chronology of Holy Week that has been the staple of Church custom for centuries is based on two fundamentally mistaken assumptions: (1) that the chronologies of the Synoptic (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) accounts of Jesus’ final week can be harmonized with the Johannine account; and (2) that the biblical accounts of Jesus’ final week, with the Last Supper on Thursday, crucifixion on Friday, and resurrection on Sunday, derived from a single Jewish calendar that lies behind the biblical narratives. Humphreys argues that both assumptions are incorrect. He suggests that the events of Holy Week were more protracted than the attempt to harmonize the Gospel accounts would suggest, and that there is evidence that two, not one, Jewish calendars were in use in Jesus’ time.