July-September 1999
Volume 2 Number 4.1

The Upper Room: Was It the Site of the First Christian Pentecost?

An upper room was the site of the Last Supper. While awaiting Pentecost the apostles stayed in an upper room. Tradition places the descent of the Holy Spirit on the first Christians in an upper room. Where did Jesus' followers meet for the first Christian Pentecost? Could it have been on the Temple Mount?

by Michael P. Germano

The Upper Room was a second story room wherein Jesus and his disciples dined together the evening of his arrest on the 14th of Nisan (Luke 22:8�10 and Mark 14:13). The evening before his Crucifixion he ate the Last Supper, washed the feet of his disciples, and instituted the first Christian Passover.

The disciples also stayed in an upper room while they remained in Jerusalem for Pentecost (Acts 1:13). There is no hint in the accounts by Luke and Mark that the Upper Room of the Last Supper was a place they stayed. In fact that probability would have been quite low. In Herodian times between 300,000 and 500,000 people would descend on Jerusalem for the pilgrim festival of Passover. Many pilgrims would stay over until Pentecost for the expense of making this pilgrimage, in both time and money, was great. Many pilgrims would be put up at private homes and synagogues and others would camp in the hills and valleys outside the city. At Passover temporary housing was at a premium. The owners of the Upper Room of the Christian Passover had made their room available for dining not as a place to stay.

When Jesus and his disciples visited Jerusalem over the three and a half years of his public ministry they stayed outside the city usually on the Mount of Olives and the Passover of his Crucifixion was no exception. Some time after the Resurrection they were found in the city staying in an upper room to which they had to enter the city and go up implying they put up in the Upper City (Acts 1:13).

According to the writer of Acts, presumably the apostle Luke, Jesus� disciples witnessed the Ascension on the Mount of Olives and then went to their quarters in Jerusalem. He wrote: 

Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a Sabbath day's journey away. And when they had entered, they went up to the upper room, where they were staying; that is, Peter and John and James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas the son of James. These all with one mind were continually devoting themselves to prayer, along with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with His brothers. (Acts 1:12�14 NASB.)

This upper room was a place where all eleven of them resided in the city. There is no hint in Acts of the location of this upper room was except that the route they took, as they descended from the Mount of Olives, required them to go up on entering Jerusalem. This was simply the reverse order of the route they took when they finished the Last Supper and walked to the Garden of Jesus� arrest as well as the route the soldiers would have taken in bringing Jesus from the arrest scene to the courtyard of the high priest in the Upper City. This route into the city would have taken them through the Gate of the Essenes and up into the Upper City.

The most likely places for them to have put up in the Upper City would have been the Essene guesthouse or the house of Mary, the mother of John Mark. If they stayed at a private house, such as with Mary, then their upper room was probably no more than a rooftop where another disciple hosted them as guests. The Essenes routinely hosted visitors and their accommodations would have been ascetic and minimal but not conducive to the apostles� belief systems. In context a private home appears more likely. The Christian tradition is that it was at this upper room where the Holy Spirit descended upon these and other disciples. In the period of the Mishna a large residential room measured 15 feet by 12 feet (Mishna Baba batha vi. 4; Kennedy and Reed 1963:402).

A large room of 300 sq. ft. would probably have been satisfactory for eleven men to sleep and store some of their possessions. However, Acts 1:20 states that 120 persons, all disciples of Jesus, were meeting together and on Pentecost the Holy Spirit descended upon them (Acts 2:1�4). For 120 people to fit into a 300 sq. ft. room, affording every person with 2.5 sq. ft., would possibly allow for a standing room only crowd and probably a little more weight than a typical residential room or rooftop could handle. This proposal won�t work as Acts 2:1 states that all 120 were seated.

Allowing a minimum of 6 sq. ft. per person for all to be seated would require at least 720 sq. ft. well over double the size of a large residential room. This still would not be a comfortable situation and when the group began to speak in foreign languages (Acts 2:4�6) and attracted a considerable crowd with whom they debated and preached to an upper room of 720 sq. ft. simply would be insufficient.

Lastly, the implication of the Greek is that the group, including women and children, actually comprised about 120 families, e.g. Greek: onoma �names� (Acts 1:15) not individuals, presumably encompassing in all about 500 people (I Corinthians 15:6). For 500 people to be seated for a religious event at 6 sq. ft. per person requires at least 3,000 sq. ft. which is a bit large for any ordinary residential upper room to accommodate. The point of this analysis is that neither the upper room of Acts 1:13 nor the Upper Room of Luke 22:8�10 and Mark 14:13 could have been the venue for the descent of the Holy Spirit.

The likely solution of the enigma raised above is that the apostles and their followers assembled on the Temple Mount (Acts 2:1), in the Royal Stoa or one of the large halls in the Temple Court available for public religious meetings. On the Day of Pentecost all were seated (Acts 2:2) in a building for Holy Day services. The notion of them meeting in the �Upper Room� where Jesus had instituted the Christian Passover by necessity is a myth. The Temple Court, a single structure about one quarter of a mile in circumference, was a massive complex with hundreds of rooms. The Royal Stoa, the colonnade at the southern wall, may have been the venue if construed as an unenclosed building. Its exposed access would allow for people in the building to be easily seen and heard from the outside the colonnade. The apostles then were immediately accessible to thousands of Jews and proselytes gathered for the festival in a massive public facility.

Symbolism was quite important in this culture. The Acts 2 account of the founding of the Church of God contains dramatic symbolism in regard to the New Covenant. The Exodus account of the giving of the Law to the people of Israel records how it was done audibly and visibly. Similarly, the writer of Acts, apparently Luke, related in Acts how God, with no less a public manifestation of power nor at less a place than the Temple Mount itself, also caused the Holy Spirit to descend upon the apostles and their followers audibly and visibly. Being the Feast of Weeks (Pentecost), many Jews had gathered on the Temple Mount for the activities of the day where some heard a loud, curious noise. The sound, reported to be a noise like a violent and rushing wind, prompted a crowd to gather to see what was going on which suggests the entire group was immediately accessible and visible to the public (Acts 2:2, 2:6). There they observed a unique and dramatic event in the history of the church�its legitimation as the new people of God�the qehal�el�the Church of God. Luke�s point was that by such an overt and manifestly public notice God placed a seal of approval, a mark of authenticity, upon the fledgling Church of God�the New Israel. It was public affirmation of this small group of Jews being set apart as the qehal�el. The parallelism was deliberate.

Of the Jews living in Jerusalem, there were visitors from many nations (Acts 2:5). Jewish pilgrims customarily remained at Jerusalem following the Passover and the Days of Unleavened Bread for the Day of Pentecost. Some of these visitors heard the apostles proclaim the �good news� of the Kingdom of God in their own native tongue, e.g. foreign or vernacular languages (Acts 2:7�8, 2:11). Their messages stressed the wonderful works or �the mighty deeds� of God (Acts 2:11). The crowd was astonished. Some sought baptism seeing these events as legitimation of the apostles as those through whom God intended to accomplish God�s Work. However, there were those who mocked and accused the apostles of being intoxicated when it was the third hour of the day, that is 9 a.m. (Acts 2:13). No matter how one feels about the veracity of the story as recorded in Acts the foregoing analysis certainly dispels the idea that the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus� disciples in the upper room.

While Jesus of Nazareth was not an Essene, the Last Supper, also known as the first Christian Passover, likely occurred in the Essene community. �To my mind� writes Bargil Pixner �this took place in the Essene guesthouse on Mount Zion on the Tuesday night� (Pixner 1992:64). If so, it could explain the persisting tradition that the first Lord�s Supper occurred in an upper room on Mt. Sion. Mackowski, concurring, held that this �must have been a very simple dining hall in keeping with the simple life of the Essenes� (Mackowski 1980:141).

The literary evidence is found in the Gospels of Luke and Mark. Both state that on of the day of the slaughtering of the Passover lambs, in reference to Nisan 14, Jesus instructed Peter and John to enter Jerusalem, presumably through the Gate of the Essenes, and to look for a man carrying a pitcher of water (Luke 22:8-10, Mark 14:13). This occurred, as Jews reckoned time at evening, at the dawn of a new day, at nightfall early Nisan 14.

They were to follow the man carrying a pitcher of water to where he entered a house and there to inquire of the oikodespore, housemaster, about the guest room50 where Jesus was to eat the Passover, that is, the first Christian Passover not the traditional Passover of the Jews observed at the beginning of Nisan 15, with his disciples. Jesus said �He will show you a large upper room furnished and ready. Make preparations for us there� (Mark 14:15; cf., Luke 22:12). The implication is that Jesus had made some prearrangement for dining there at this occasion as the housemaster apparently expected Jesus� party and had the room furnished and ready. In this ancient culture, the carrying of water in jars to homes was the chore of children and women, not Jewish men. However, an Essene man, typically a celibate monastic, would carry water as a chore since an Essene conclave would have been absent children and women to perform this menial task. The two made preparations, and when it was opsios, late, that is, at nightfall, Jesus and The Twelve came (Mark 14:16-17). They observed the Last Supper in this Upper Room.

About CE 43, as recorded in Acts, Herod Agrippa I had the apostle Peter arrested and placed in prison in Jerusalem just prior to the Passover. Peter awaited trial and summary execution. For several days the Church of God, known at that time among themselves as the qehal�el, had engaged in fervent prayer, in this case group prayer, for his release (Acts 12:5). Late at night following his escape from the place of his confinement, albeit at first a little confused, Peter went straight to the house of Mary, the mother of John Mark, where he was well-known in the household (Acts 12:14). A number of the Jerusalem brethren had gathered together at her house for a prayer vigil on Peter�s behalf. His apparent purpose was to inform the group assembled there of his release and to request that they so inform James [understood to be the brother of Jesus (Mark 6:3)] and others. The implication is that Peter did not have far to walk from the place of his incarceration to Mary�s house as it was the first place he went and his incessant knocking suggests that he feared being seen by nearby authorities.

Mary was among the earliest disciples and lived in Jerusalem apparently in the Upper City. Her son John Mark, later the author of the second Gospel, was a cousin, in the sense of a cousin first-removed, of Barnabas (Colossians 4:10) which would make her either the sister or sister-in-law of one of Barnabas� parents. John Mark at this time was probably in his early twenties. The basis of this inference is the account of John Mark, presumably about himself when about 8-12 years old, concerning the presence of a certain �young man� who at some point followed the soldiers taking Jesus to the courtyard of the high priest in the Upper City but had to escape naked when the soldiers attempted to grab him and only got his sleeping garment in CE 30 (Mark 14:50-51). This suggests, albeit it a bit speculative, that he was sleeping on the roof of his mother�s house as many people did in ancient Jerusalem, even though the nights were still cool at the time of the Passover (Luke 22:55; John 18:18), in nothing more than a linen sheet (Mark 14:52). On hearing a commotion as the soldiers went by and seeing from the roof that Jesus was in custody in the manner of a typical inquisitive 8�12 year old city boy ran down and followed the entourage. This scenario would suggest that Mary�s house was not too far from the home of the high priest in the Upper City.

The actual passage in Acts 12:12�17 is:

...he went to the house of Mary, the mother of John who was also called Mark, where many were gathered together and were praying. And when he knocked at the door of the gate, a servant-girl named Rhoda came to answer. And when she recognized Peter's voice, because of her joy she did not open the gate, but ran in and announced that Peter was standing in front of the gate. And they said to her, �You are out of your mind!� But she kept insisting that it was so. And they kept saying, �It is his angel.� But Peter continued knocking; and when they had opened the door, they saw him and were amazed. But motioning to them with his hand to be silent, he described to them how the Lord had led him out of the prison. And he said, �Report these things to James and the brethren.� And he departed and went to another place. (Acts 12:12�17 NASB.)

In the above passage at Acts 12:12 is the single reference to this Mary, a common Hebrew name, in the New Testament. She appears as a woman of means, probably a widow since no husband appears present, and the possessor of a large room house. She is mistress, it would seem, of a household sufficiently affluent to have a young domestic servant (probably a slave-girl), bearing the Greek name Rhoda, keeping the door (cf. John 18:17). Mary and her son were probably Luke�s source concerning the Acts 12 account of Peter�s coming to her house upon his ca. CE 43 escape from prison and for other episodes in the early life of the Jerusalem church as well (Marshall 1980:209-10). 

Meeks wrote:

Mark�s mother, according to Acts 12:12, had a house in Jerusalem that accommodated a meeting of the Christians. If that report is trustworthy, the family had some means, and the Latin surname, in a Jerusalem Jew, may imply some social ambition. (Meeks 1983:60�61.)

Her house was a meeting place for Jesus� followers inside the city walls of Jerusalem. Her house had a convenient location, possibly in the Upper City, an entrance-way separating the main house from the street presumably by means of a courtyard, and a first-floor room large enough for many people to assemble. If the house had the typical flat roof with parapets and stairway access from the courtyard then one could conclude that the roof served as a large upper room as well. There is no hint in Acts 12:12�17 that the group assembled for their prayer vigil had assembled on the roof or in a literal second floor enclosed upper room. For Rhoda to run from the gate into the house suggests the presence of a courtyard and the words �ran in and announced� attest to the ground floor assembly. These factors favor the later evolution of the building into a house-church and a center of life of the early church at Jerusalem.

According to Finegan:

No doubt the use of cenaculum for the upper room of the last supper and also for the upper room of the time after the ascension furthered the supposition that one and the same room was still the center of the disciples on the Day of Pentecost (Ac 2:1) is also well possible. Still later, many of the disciples were gathered together in the house of Mary, the mother of John Mark (Ac 12:12), and the further supposition that this was the house of the �upper room� is likewise not impossible although not fully demonstrable from the NT texts alone. The several combinations were affirmed, however, in early tradition... (Finegan 1992:233.)

The typical residential house in Herodian Jerusalem had a flat roof. A small house measuring 12 ft. by 9 ft. would have height of 10.5 ft. A large house, such as Mary�s, would be 12 ft. by 9 ft. with a height of 3.2 meters (Mishna Baba batha vi. 4; Kennedy and Reed 1963:402). A typical roof was not much over 1.8 meters (Dickie and Payne 1982:772). The roof was an important extension of the interior of the house. Roofs with public access required parapets (Deuteronomy 22:8) and were normally accessible by a stairway in the courtyard. As a large house possessed by a person of some means Mary�s house would have been typical of this design. During the Feast of Tabernacles the rooftops hosted temporary booths. The roof also served for various other high days and holidays (Judges 16:27) and for worship and prayer as well (II Kings 23:12; Jeremiah 19:13; 32:29; Zephaniah 1:5; Acts 10:9). Mary�s obvious hospitality and the apparent design of her large house does not rule out the Twelve staying at her house. It is highly likely that this was the case as it appears to have been in the Upper City and close to the places of the confinement of Jesus and Peter. If so, then the Acts 1 account of their going up to the Upper City to the upper room where they were staying was to Mary�s house. It is more probable than not that this was the case but it certainly is not beyond a reasonable doubt.

There are significant differences between the Upper Room accounts in Luke 22:8�10 and Mark 14:13 and the house of Mary account in Acts 12:12�17. While 13 years had passed, from the Last Supper to the time when Peter escaped and hurried to the house of Mary, the two events invite comparison. The Upper Room scenario requires a male servant carrying a pitcher of water to the house of the Upper Room and for the house to be in the charge of another man. Acts 12:12�17 certainly suggests Mary was a women of substance, with a female domestic servant and a large room house of 300 sq. ft., but there is no hint of the presence of two male servants in the house nor in the Luke 22:8-10. In the Mark 14:13 account there is no hint of the presence of Mary or any female servant. One account has a house in the possession of males with no information about females and the other account has a house in the possession of females with no information about males. There is no congruence between the two accounts. The male servant with the duty of transporting pitchers of water to a domestic residence is inconsistent with ordinary Jewish domestic life in Herodian times.

Moreover, John Mark had no compunction about reporting the piece of trivia concerning the loss of his sleeping garment while he followed the soldiers escorting Jesus to the courtyard of the high priest (Mark 14:50-51). So it would be reasonable to expect him to refer to the place of the famous Upper Room as his mother�s home if the event had occurred there. He did not nor did Luke. Moreover, if Luke was the author of both the gospel bearing his name and the book of Acts it would be reasonable for him to ties the two locations together if they were one and the same.

In the Late Roman period Origin indicated in his Commentary on Matthew that he understood the western hill to be the place of the Last Supper. The inference from his statement is that the actual house of the upper room where the disciples had taken the Last Supper was on the western hill and still in place.

He wrote:

If then we wish to receive the bread of benediction from Jesus, who is wont to give it, let us go in the city to the house of that person where Jesus celebrated the Pascha with his disciples. . . . . Let us go up to the upper part of the house. . . . After they had celebrated the feast with the master, had taken the bread of benediction and eaten the body of the Word and drunk the chalice of the action of grace, Jesus taught them to say a hymn to the Father, and from one high place to another high place, and since there are things that the faithful do not do in the valley, so they ascended, to the Mount of Olives. (Migne Patrologia Graeca 13.1736�1737; Bagatti 1971b:25; Finegan 1992:234.)

The extant literary sources from CE 70 to 325 disclose no connection between the Upper Room and the house of Mary except for the passage from Origin discussed above. Cyril of Jerusalem and Epiphanius also believed the house, which supposedly escaped the destruction Titus brought to Jerusalem in CE 70, was in the Upper City. They thought it was the meeting place for Jesus� disciples from the time of the Ascension to Pentecost (Cyril of Jerusalem Catechetical Lectures 16 [note 35]; Schaff and Wace 1989a:116; Epiphanius De Mensuris 14; Koester 1989:93). Based upon the statement of Epiphanius, that during his visit to Jerusalem Hadrian saw a small church of God on Zion, Finegan wrote �we may suppose that the private home with that �upper room� had been converted into this church, a conversion of such sort as is also arrested at Nazareth, and at other places� (Finegan 1992:233; cf. Mackowski 1980:145). He also held �that the southwestern hill of Jerusalem was the highest hill in the city and came to be called Zion or Sion� and that �this portion of the city was the least destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70" (Finegan 1992:233).

According to Hillel Geva �in short, both the literary and the archaeological evidence indicate that the city [of Jerusalem was totally destroyed in 70 C.E. Not a single building remained standing� (Geva 1997:37). 

He concluded that:

One thing is clear: Roman soldiers never inhabited the Second Temple period dwellings of the Upper City; after they finished looting and destroying the city, not even one building was still standing in this formerly elegant quarter. The Roman camp was built on the destruction layer that covered the entire hill. (Geva 1997:38.)

If the site of the Cenacle is the basic location of Mary�s house it would have been, as one of the highest spots in Jerusalem, a prestigious location. The archaeological evidence, however, regarding the Cenacle site as all of the Upper City would require the destruction of the original structure in the aftermath of the First Jewish Revolt.

The legends persist, and they are merely myths, that Mary�s house was the venue of the Acts 2 Pentecost events, the upper room where the disciples stayed, and the upper room of the first Christian Passover. The derivation of these myths apparently is from the observation and speculation of Gentile Christians, particularly the Byzantines, concerning the practices of Judeo-Christians in their synagogue on Mt. Zion. The two groups were not in fellowship with each other. The Cenacle, with its Chapel of the Holy Spirit, preserves this myth to the present day. Tour guides, poorly informed but well-meaning, consistently explain to thousands of Christian pilgrims and other tourists that the Cenacle marks the place of these events. However, the group likely met on the Temple Mount in one of the rooms available for public meetings and there is no evidence that either of the �upper room� locations were at Mary�s house or at the venue of the Cenacle.

Page last edited: 12/17/05 01:30 PM

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