SYDNEY
INTELLECTUAL
HISTORY
NETWORK
AND
SYDNEY IDEAS
HOW JESUS CELEBRATED PASSOVER:
RENAISSANCE SCHOLARS AND THE
JEWISH ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY
Professor Anthony Grafton, Princeton University
Wednesday 13 August 2014
6-7:30 pm
The Great Hall
Quadrangle
The University of Sydney
In the 14th and 15th centuries, patrons and painters multiplied images of the Last
Supper across Europe: images that represented Jesus’s last meal as a Christian event.
In the same period, however, Christian scholars also began to wonder what it meant
that Jesus had celebrated the Jewish Passover with his disciples. Some tried to
recreate the rituals in which the Savior would have taken part. As Christians learned
more about Passover and applied their new knowledge to the Last Supper, their vision
of that founding event in Christianity shifted in radical ways. This lecture uses multiple
forms of evidence to explore that shift - and the wider ways in which early modern
scholars and artists recast the story of Christian origins.
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Professor Grafton’s special interests lie in the cultural history of Renaissance Europe,
the history of books and readers, the history of scholarship and education in the West
from Antiquity to the 19th century, and the history of science from Antiquity to the
Renaissance. He joined the Princeton History Department in 1975 after earning his
A.B. (1971) and Ph.D. (1975) in history from the University of Chicago and spending
a year at University College London, where he studied with Arnaldo Momigliano.
Professor Grafton is the author of ten books and the coauthor, editor, coeditor, or
translator of nine others. In 2011 he served as President of the American Historical
Association. At Princeton he is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History.
Free and open to all with online registration requested:
http://whatson.sydney.edu.au/events/published/sydney-ideas-professor-anthony-grafton
Image: Leonardo da Vinci, Italian. 1494-1498, Last supper, Tempera and oil on plaster, 181 × 346 in.