“Upper Room” (Last Supper & Pentecost) & Archaeology

The “upper room” on Mt. Zion in Jerusalem is where the Last Supper took place (Mk 14:15; Lk 22:10-12), and is also the site of the day of Pentecost (Acts 1:12-14; 2:1-4; + 2:44?): where the disciples and the Blessed Virgin Mary were present. It was probably where the risen Jesus appeared to the disciples (Lk 24:33, 36), and showed St. Thomas His wounds (Jn 20:19-29). It may have also been the same place as “the house of Mary, the mother of John whose other name was Mark, where many were gathered together and were praying” (Acts 12:12; the only mention of this particular Mary in the NT). St. Peter went there after an angel released him from prison.

What we regard as the upper room, or “Cenacle” today (literally a second floor) actually dates from about the fourteenth century. It has Gothic-era columns. On the first floor is what is reputed to be King David’s tomb. I visited both in 2014, assuming that the existing first floor must have been the original upper room. So what do we know about the original building? Archaeologist, biblical scholar, and Benedictine monk Bargil Pixner (1921-2002)  wrote about this topic in his article, “Church of the Apostles Found on Mt. Zion” (Biblical Archaeological Review, May/June 1990). He writes:

The structure in which the traditional tomb of David is located on Mt. Zion is really a Roman-period synagogue and not the tomb of David. . . . this was not a usual Jewish synagogue, but a Judeo-Christian Synagogue.

King David’s actual tomb would have been in what is now the City of David, east of Mt. Zion and south of the Temple Mount. Archaeologists determined this after 1838, when Hezekiah’s Tunnel was discovered. King Hezekiah ordered its construction in order to bring water into Jerusalem, in the eighth century B.C., before an Assyrian siege (2 Kgs 18:13-19:37; 2 Chr 32). The Bible locates the tomb of David in the City of David: the ancient settlement overlooking the Kidron Valley (1 Kgs 2:10; Neh 3:14–16), and identified as such today in the popular archaeological site of the same name.

The original synagogue that currently houses the reputed tomb of King David was probably built in the late first century, after the Romans had destroyed Jerusalem, including (presumably) the original upper room structure. It was likely built by Jewish Christians, remembering that its location was the site of the original upper room. What became of that house? Pixner gives his theory:

In 70 A.D. the Roman general Titus suppressed the First Jewish Revolt (66-70 A.D.) by utterly destroying Jerusalem and burning the Temple. The first-century historian Josephus tells us that the destruction reached the farthest corners of the city and was so complete that someone passing by would not know a city ever stood there. [Jewish War, 7:3-4]

This destruction, indeed, included the western hill, Mt. Zion (Zion III). In 1983, during an excavation in the Dormition Abbey, the building on Mt. Zion adjacent to this ancient Judeo-Christian synagogue, I found coins, dating from the second and third years of the First Jewish Revolt (67 and 68 A.D.), on the steps of a ritual bath lying under huge layers of destruction debris, and in the remains of an oven. Thus, it is safe to conclude that the building that stood on the site of the adjacent Judeo-Christian synagogue also fell victim to the Roman onslaught. . . .

Why was this ancient Judeo-Christian synagogue on Mt. Zion (Zion III) called the Church of the Apostles?

Bishop Epiphanius (315-403 A.D.), a native of the Holy Land, transmitted to us the following information: When the Roman emperor Hadrian visited Jerusalem in 130/131 A.D., there was standing on Mt. Zion “a small church of God. It marked the site of the Hypero-on (Upper Room) to which the disciples returned from the Mount of Olives after the Lord had been taken up [see Acts 1:13]. It had been built on that part of Sion.”

The ancient sanctuary on Mt. Zion known to Epiphanius could only have been a Judeo-Christian synagogue, for the building of Christian “churches” was made possible only after Constantine’s Edict of Milan (313 A.D.).

Evidence from a Patriarch of Alexandria, Euthychius (896-940 A.D.), who collected ancient historical sources. suggests that the “Church of the Apostles” (originally a Jewish Christian synagogue) was built starting in 73 AD — “the fourth year of the emperor Vespasian” — under the leadership of Simon Bar-Kleopha, second bishop of Jerusalem after James. It may have included stones from the destroyed temple. Pixner recounts the later history of the site:

Above the remaining walls of the Church of the Apostles, the Crusaders built a second floor. The room on this floor, known as the cenacle, commemorated both the Last Supper and the Pentecost event described in Acts 2. This may have been the actual site of the Upper Room, referred to in Acts . . .

When the Crusaders were forced to leave Jerusalem after their defeat at the Horns of Hattin near Tiberias in 1187 A.D., they entrusted their church on Mt. Zion to Syrian Christians. The Syrian Christians were forced to abandon the Last Supper room when the entire complex on Mt. Zion was destroyed by order of one of the Ayubic sultans of Damascus a few decades later (1219 A.D.). Christian pilgrims of the 13th and early 14th centuries lament in their journals that the Church of the Apostles and the cenacle were in a state of disrepair. . . .

Between 1335 and 1337 A.D. the Franciscan fathers, who had just recently arrived in the Holy Land, purchased the site on Mt. Zion from the Saracens. . . . The Franciscan friars repaired the roof of the cenacle (the Upper Room) in the 14th century, strengthening it with a gothic rib vaulting. . . . By the middle of the 16th century, the Franciscans were violently forced to abandon Mt. Zion completely.

See also:

“Can the Cenacle on Mount Zion Really be the ‘Upper Room’ of Jesus’s Last Supper?” (David Christian Clausen, 2016?)

This is section 163 of my free online book, The Word Set in Stone: “Volume Two”: More Evidence of Archaeology, Science, and History Backing Up the Bible.