Posted on 06/14/2017 4:09:22 AM PDT by NYer
The Cathedral of Coria, in Extremadura, Spain, took about 250 years to build. Its history is a long and complex one, and some studies indicate that some of the building elements composing the structure date from the first century.
According to the doctoral thesis of Maria del Carmen Sanabria Sierra, writing under the direction of the renowned art historian Victor Nieto Alcaide, the cathedral may have been the first Christian temple in the entire Iberian Peninsula. A Roman mosaic found in its cloister could be the smoking gun proving it so.
The cathedral occupies the former site of a Visigothic cathedral, the city’s main mosque and an old Romanesque cathedral.
Its construction, which began in 1498 (six years after the Reconquista), was completed around 1748, but the Lisbon earthquake of November 1, 1755, seriously damaged it.
Miguel Pozo Garzón | CC
Although the church itself is an exceptional masterpiece of the Spanish Baroque (it houses both Churriguera’s and Diego Copín de Holanda’s works), it is better known as the church in which what is assumed to be the tablecloth used by Jesus and the Twelve Apostles at the Last Supper is kept.
Officially, the Church preserves this relic because of tradition, but also because there is no evidence that would settle the question on the tablecloth’s authenticity. However, recent studies have linked this tablecloth with the Shroud, explaining that they may well have been woven at the same time, and also used together in the Cenacle.
Museo Coria Cathedral
John Jackson, director of the Turin Shroud Center in Colorado and a former member of NASA, conducted a study on this tablecloth in 2014. It was Jackson himself who, analyzing the Turin Shroud, explained it might have been, originally, not a shroud but a tablecloth. When his team measured the canvas of the Coria tablecloth, they discovered its dimensions were almost identical to those of the Shroud, preserved in Turin’s Duomo. Rebecca Jackson, a member of the team, commented in this interview that, in her opinion, “the Shroud and the Coria tablecloth were used together at the Last Supper.”
“For the Jews, in the great solemnities, and [Passover] being the greatest of them all, it was common to use two tablecloths in a ritual way, to remember the journey through the desert after leaving Egypt,” she explains. “A first tablecloth on which food was deposited, was followed by a second cloth one would place on top of the plates, to prevent sand from falling into the food, as well as to keep insects at bay.”
According to an article published in the Spanish journal El Mundo, Ignacio Dols — a delegate of the Spanish Society of Sindonology — said, “Jackson’s intuition makes sense because Christ was buried in a rush. He died around three o’clock on a Friday afternoon, and was to be buried before approximately six o’clock on the same day, right before Sabbath began.”
That means in just three hours Joseph of Arimathea had to reclaim Jesus’ body from Pilate, obtain permission to bury him, transfer him to a tomb, make preparations, shroud the body, and seal the tomb. “The reasonable thing,” Dols explains, “is that he used whichever elements he had at hand, and a tablecloth of those characteristics was in fact the perfect way to shroud a body.”
Catholic ping!
Ping!
“Catholic ping!”
Because nobody but Catholics relate to, or believe in, The Last Supper.
Just wow. Not true.
No really, the Catholics invented the whole idea of the Last Supper just after they faked the moon landings.
I was being sarcastic.
Because nobody but Catholics relate to, or believe in, The Last Supper.
NYer maintains a ping list of Catholics who might be interested in articles that are posted. You've been here for 16-1/2 years. You have heard of a ping list, haven't you?
All Christians believe in the Last Supper. Leaving aside all the theology for the moment, communion dates back to this very event where we were commanded to "Do this in remembrance of me." It's an historical event that ties us directly into Christ's death and resurrection. It took place and we do it as a remembrance that it took place. And we will continue to do it until the Lord comes back.
Now whether this is the actual table cloth...who know and who cares.
I’ve got the last supper salt and pepper shakers too....
That's nothing. I've got the microwave oven the last supper was cooked in...
If you have no intellectual curiousity then perhaps this thread isn't for you.
If someone believes the story of the Last Supper is true, you can't understand why they would care if this is the actual tablecloth used?
Now that blue dye on the cloth - would that be techelet, or would that have been an insane expense for a tablecloth?
From what I was taught, in those days and in that culture, they “reclined” at the table - meaning that the table was so short it was almost level with the floor and they had to lay down next to it. Obviously, DaVinci didn’t know this, but that doesn’t make any difference for the tablecloth.
Having a go at answering my own question (thanks to Wikipedia).
Maybe the blue color is from “Asp of Jerusalem”, the woad plant.
It seems to be a lighter blue than you would get from techelet - and if techelet is made from murex, it wouldn’t be kosher anyway.
If someone is dead, you tend to focus on the memory items. I still have some of my parents stuff.
But if I discovered they were alive, I’d drop the stuff and run to them.
God is alive.
Jesus is Risen.
God’s Spirit should living in us.
Or don’t we really believe that?
Since a table isn’t mentioned in scriptural descriptions of the Passover meal, and having seen how meals are traditionally conducted in the region, I’ve always seen Leonardo’s mural as creative license, made so all the faces can be displayed, the wall space filled, and the table reflecting how people would have a meal in fifteenth century Florence. In the Middle East people eat sitting around in a circle on a carpeted floor and use bread as a means to dip into common dishes. No table doesn’t necessarily mean no cloth for the food to have rested on. But relics in general ought to be looked at with some skepticism.
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