Editing Last Supper (section)

===Date===
[[File:Icon last supper.jpg|thumb|13th century [[Eastern Orthodox Church|Orthodox]] Russian [[icon]] from 1497]]
{{See also|Chronology of Jesus}}
Historians estimate that the date of the crucifixion fell in the range AD 30–36.{{sfn|Barnett|2002|pp=19-21}}{{sfn | Riesner | 1998 | pp=19-27}}{{sfn | Köstenberger|Kellum|Quarles |2009 | pp=77-79}} [[Isaac Newton]] and [[Colin Humphreys]] have ruled out the years 31, 32, 35, and 36 on astronomical grounds, leaving 7 April AD 30 and 3 April AD 33 as possible crucifixion dates.{{sfn|Humphreys|2011|pp=62-63}} {{harvnb|Humphreys|2011|pp=72, 189}} proposes narrowing down the date of the Last Supper as having occurred in the evening of Wednesday, 1 April AD 33, by revising Annie Jaubert's double-Passover theory.

Historically, various attempts to reconcile the three synoptic accounts with John have been made, some of which are indicated in the Last Supper by Francis Mershman in the 1912 ''[[Catholic Encyclopedia]]''.{{Sfn|Mershman|1912}} The [[Maundy Thursday]] church tradition assumes that the Last Supper was held on the evening before the crucifixion day (although, strictly speaking, in no Gospel is it unequivocally said that this meal took place on the night before Jesus died).{{sfn|Green|1990|p=333}}

A new approach to resolve this contrast was undertaken in the wake of the excavations at [[Qumran]] in the 1950s when Annie Jaubert argued that there were two Passover feast dates: while the official Jewish lunar calendar had Passover begin on a Friday evening in the year that Jesus died, a solar calendar was also used, for instance by the [[Essene]] community at [[Qumran]], which always had the Passover feast begin on a Tuesday evening. According to Jaubert, Jesus would have celebrated the Passover on Tuesday, and the Jewish authorities three days later, on Friday.<ref>{{Cite web |title=The Last Supper, Paul and Qumran: The Tail that Wagged the Dog {{!}} Bible Interp |url=https://bibleinterp.arizona.edu/articles/last-supper-paul-and-qumran-tail-wagged-dog |access-date=2024-03-28 |website=bibleinterp.arizona.edu}}</ref>
Humphreys has disagreed with Jaubert's proposal on the grounds that the Qumran solar Passover would always fall {{em|after}} the official Jewish lunar Passover. He agrees with the approach of two Passover dates, and argues that the Last Supper took place on the evening of Wednesday 1 April 33, based on his recent discovery of the Essene, [[Samaritan]], and [[Zealots (Judea)|Zealot]] {{em|lunar}} calendar, which is based on Egyptian reckoning.{{sfn|Humphreys|2011|pp=162, 168}}{{sfn|Narayana|2011}}

In a review of Humphreys' book, the Bible scholar William R Telford points out that the non-astronomical parts of his argument are based on the assumption that the chronologies described in the New Testament are historical and based on eyewitness testimony. In doing so, Telford says, Humphreys has built an argument upon unsound premises which "does violence to the nature of the biblical texts, whose mixture of fact and fiction, tradition and redaction, history and myth all make the rigid application of the scientific tool of astronomy to their putative data a misconstrued enterprise."{{sfn|Telford|2015|pp=371-376}}