Where was the Last Supper?

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Accepted Answer

The Gospels do not say where the house stood, only that it was inside Jerusalem. Tradition since the fourth century places it on the south-western hill, today's Mount Zion, just outside the Zion Gate of the Old City, where the Cenacle, a Gothic hall of the Crusader period, is shown as the upper room; the map point stands on that hill, about 800 m south-west of the Jerusalem point and about 1.3 km from Gethsemane in a straight line. The site is likely rather than proven. The night of the supper, the eve of the Passover or the feast itself, is treated in the question on the date of the crucifixion. Mark tells how the room was found: Jesus sent two disciples into the city, where “there shall meet you a man bearing a pitcher of water: follow him”, and the master of the house “will shew you a large upper room furnished and prepared”. Luke repeats the sign of the pitcher; Matthew says only “Go into the city to such a man”. The owner is never named. After the Ascension the apostles “went up into an upper room, where abode both Peter, and James, and John, and Andrew”; at Pentecost a sound from heaven “filled all the house where they were sitting”; and later Peter, freed from prison, came “to the house of Mary the mother of John, whose surname was Mark; where many were gathered together praying”. Christian tradition took these as one house and one room, though Luke's words do not say so. The tradition goes back to the fourth century. Cyril of Jerusalem, about 350, spoke of the upper church of the apostles where the Spirit came down; Epiphanius wrote that when Hadrian came to Jerusalem he found a small church of God still standing on Zion, where the disciples had gone up to the upper room; Egeria in the 380s describes Pentecost kept in Sion. The basilica of Holy Sion rose there late in the fourth century; the Persians burnt it in 614, the Crusaders rebuilt it, and their hall is the Cenacle of today, with the cenotaph venerated as David's tomb beneath it; the Franciscans held it from the 1330s until the Ottomans made it a mosque in the sixteenth century. Bargil Pixner argued in 1990 that walls under the Cenacle belong to a Jewish-Christian synagogue, and later that the house stood in an Essene quarter; many scholars find both unproven.