The Last Supper

In the Christian faith, the Last Supper was the last meal Jesus shared with his apostles before his death. The Last Supper has been the subject of many different paintings, perhaps the most famous by Leonardo da Vinci. Christians celebrate the related events quasi-annually (annually on a Lunar Calendar) as Maundy Thursday.

In the New Testament

Chronology

The meal is discussed at length in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 22 of the Bible. It was the seder for the Passover, and it was in the morning of the same day the Paschal lamb, for the meal, had been sacrificed (see also: Korban).

However, under the Jewish method of reckoning time, the day was considered to begin straight after dusk, and so the Passover feast would be regarded as ocurring on the day after the lamb was sacrificed. This implies that either the synoptic gospels are not written with an awareness of the Jewish method of time reckoning (Kilgallen 264), or that they used the literary technique of telescoping events that actually happened on different days into just happening on single ones (Brown et al. 625).

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