Was Holy Thursday really on Wednesday?

One scholar thinks so — and is suggesting that we got the date of the Last Supper wrong.

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

One of the most famous meals in history is commemorated a day late, a new book by a Cambridge University physicist claims.

Professor Sir Colin Humphreys, who was knighted last year for his contribution to science, argues that the last supper Jesus Christ shared with his disciples occurred on Wednesday, April 1, AD33, rather than on a Thursday as traditionally celebrated in most Christian churches.

The theory would explain the apparent inconsistencies between the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke – which say the Last Supper was a Passover meal – and that of John, which says Jesus was tried and executed before the Jewish festival. It would explain another puzzle: why the Bible has not allowed enough time for all events recorded between the Last Supper and the Crucifixion.

Sir Colin’s book, The Mystery of the Last Supper, out this week, uses astronomy to re-create calendars, plus detail drawn from texts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls to propose a timeline for Jesus’s final days.

”The claim I make is that we’re misinterpreting some parts of the Gospels because we don’t understand sufficiently life in the first century AD,” he said.

Sir Colin argues that Jesus celebrated Passover early using the pre-exilic calendar, dating from before the Jewish exile to Babylon, but still used by some marginal groups in society at the time. It would have been understood by early Christians as operating alongside the official Jewish calendar, he said.

Pope Benedict XVI spoke of a similar theory in 2007, when he said Jesus probably celebrated the meal with his disciples according to the Qumran calendar, at least a day before mainstream observances.

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