April 3, AD 33, 3.00 pm

THE MYSTERY OF THE LAST SUPPER
Reconstructing the final days of Jesus
By Colin J. Humphreys. Cambridge University Press. 244 pages. £14.99
ISBN 978 0 521 732 000

Scholars have said that there appear to be a number of problems in understanding what actually happened in the week of Christ’s crucifixion.

Not least of these is the fact that nothing seems to be recorded as having happened on the Wednesday and the apparent contradictions between John and the Synoptic Gospels concerning the time of the Passover meal.

Usually such difficulties are handled by saying, for example, that the Passover meal which Christ and the disciples ate together could only be loosely called a Passover and not the official Passover, for, according to John, Jesus died just as the Passover lambs were being slaughtered at the temple. Sir Colin Humphreys, the author, is Professor of Materials Science and Metallurgy at the University of Cambridge. In this book he rejects such an approach and seeks to tackle these problems while remaining faithful to the plain meaning of Scripture.

He delves not only into the Bible but into many ancient texts and some interesting applications of modern astronomical calculations to ancient chronology. He comes up with a compelling case and an intriguing theory.

I can only sketch out the argument here. Having set out the apparent problems, Professor Humphreys begins by pinpointing the actual day of Christ’s crucifixion. This is almost certainly April 3 AD 33. Given certain other considerations, this is the only viable date within the historical timeframe of Pilate’s tenure as governor, etc., for which the full moon of Passover occurred on a Friday.

The author then investigates different calendars. The official Jewish calendar was influenced by the Jewish exile and the Babylonian calendar. However, this was rather different from the calendar established by Moses in Exodus 12. The Babylonian calendar was a lunar calendar with a sunset-to-sunset day, whereas the pre-exilic calendar was a lunar calendar with a sunrise-to-sunrise day. The proposal is that John follows the official Jewish calendar, whereas the Synoptics, with more of a Galilean background, use the pre-exilic calendar of Moses, which puts the Passover (Nisan 14) on a different day.

The use of this pre-exilic calendar leads the author to the conclusion that actually the Last Supper would have taken place on the Wednesday evening with Jesus’s arrest occurring that night. This is the most controversial part of the explanation. But Humphreys argues cogently that, besides other factors, if we go by the traditional idea of the Last Supper taking place on the Thursday evening, there really is not enough time for the events of Jesus’s arrest and various trials to take place in the few hours of Friday morning before Jesus’s crucifixion at 9.00 am.

There is obviously a lot more to the book’s thesis than I have been able to briefly cover here. It makes not only for a fascinating, but also a very important read. And it comes from a position of fidelity to the Scriptures. Dismissing the jibe of the increasingly embarrassing ill-founded claims of Richard Dawkins (in this case that the Gospels are just as much fiction as The Da Vinci Code), Professor Humphreys concludes: ‘The extensive analysis in this book shows that the Gospels give a coherent and detailed factual account of the last days of Jesus, days that changed the world’. As is often the case, supposed contradictions in Scripture are unravelled through deep and persistent scholarship.