By Fr John Flader
Question: Do we know where in Jerusalem the Upper Room was, where Our Lord celebrated the Last Supper with his disciples on Holy Thursday?
Answer: The average visitor to the Holy Land will visit a site long regarded as the place of the Upper Room, or Cenacle.
The word cenacle, by the way, comes from the Latin word cenaculum, or dining room.
But there is another place which also claims to be where Our Lord celebrated the Last Supper.
Let us begin with the more commonly accepted place. It is located on Mount Zion, just south of the Old City walls.
From there it is about a 25-minute walk down above the Kidron Valley to the garden of Gethsemane at the base of the Mount of Olives.
Our Lord often went there with his disciples (Lk 22:39). a fair walk from the Upper Room.
Today it is part of a Gothic-style building which has on the ground floor what is regarded as the tomb of King David.
Nearby is the Church of the Dormition, where Our Lady is thought to have died or at least finished her earthly life.
According to the tradition, when she died, the apostles carried her body down to what is today called the Church of the Tomb of Mary, a subterranean church very near the Garden of Gethsemane.
Our Lady would have been assumed into heaven from that Tomb.
How much credibility does this site of the Upper Room have?
Since the fourth century, pilgrims have reported visiting a building on Mount Zion which commemorated the Last Supper.
Before that, the building appears to have been a Jewish synagogue. According to Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis, who wrote towards the end of the fourth century, the building and its environs were spared during the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70.
Much uncertainty surrounds the early history of the Cenacle.
The lowest courses of foundation stones are believed to be from the late Roman period, from 135 to 325.
Bargil Pixner, a twentieth-century biblical scholar and archaeologist, dates the stones rather to the Herodian period, in the first century. He also believes that the original building was destroyed by Titus in the year 70 and was rebuilt in the second half of the first century.
Many scholars identify the Cenacle as the remains of a no-longer-extant five-aisled Hagia Sion (Holy Zion) basilica built by Emperor Theodosius I around the year 380.
Sixth-century artistic representations, such as some mosaics in Madaba, Jordan, and in the basilica of St Mary Major in Rome, depict a smaller structure to the south of this basilica.
This would suggest that the Cenacle was independent from, and possibly earlier than, the Hagia Sion. The basilica, and possibly the Cenacle, was later damaged by the Persians in 614, and they were both destroyed and rebuilt several times over the course of history.
In 1524 the Ottoman Turks converted the Cenacle into a mosque, elements of which remain to this day.
Only in 1831 were Christians again allowed to celebrate Mass there.
In 2000, Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass in the Cenacle.
Today the room remains empty and Masses are celebrated in the nearby monastery of the Franciscans, in a chapel known as the Cenacolino.
The other site that claims to be the place of the Last Supper is the monastery of St Mark the Evangelist and the Virgin Mary.
Today it is a Syriac Orthodox monastery in the Armenian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. According to a Syriac inscription discovered in 1940, the monastery is located on the site of the house of Mary, the mother of St Mark, the evangelist, and it claims to be the first church in Christianity. The inscription says that the house was converted into a church dedicated to the Mother of God by the apostles after Jesus’ Ascension into heaven and it was rebuilt in 73.
Kept in the monastery is an icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary traditionally attributed to St Luke.
Near the entrance is a sign saying that this is the place where Our Lord celebrated the Last Supper.
St Peter went to this house when he was freed from prison by an angel (cf. Acts 12:12).
While one cannot be certain which of these two sites is the actual place of the Last Supper, the tradition for the one on Mount Zion seems to be stronger.
