Matthew Grey
Dr. Matthew Grey is a professor of ancient scripture and an affiliate faculty member of the ancient Near Eastern studies program at Brigham Young University. He received an M.A. in archaeology and the history of antiquity from Andrews University in 2005, an M.St. in Jewish studies (with an emphasis on Judaism in the Greco-Roman world) from the University of Oxford in 2006, and a Ph.D. in ancient Mediterranean religions (with an emphasis on archaeology and the history of early Judaism) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2011. For almost twenty years, he has conducted archaeological research relating to the world of the New Testament in Israel, Jordan, and Italy; since 2011, he has supervised excavations at the Roman-era village and synagogue at Huqoq (in Israel’s Galilee region); and he has been an associate research fellow at the William F. Albright Institute for Archaeological Research in Jerusalem.
Presenter at
Bible & Archaeology Fest XXVII, November 22 – 24, 2024
Excavating the Last Supper: Archaeological Perspectives on Dining Practices in First-Century Jerusalem and the Early Jesus Movement
The story of Jesus’s Last Supper with his disciples is one of the most iconic moments in the New Testament Gospels. For almost two thousand years it has been the subject of Christian art and commentary attempting to imagine the Upper Room, its urban setting, and the manner of dining among Jesus’s disciples. In recent decades, however, archaeological research has significantly refined our understanding of variegated dining customs in early Judaism, among pilgrims in first-century Jerusalem, and within the early Jesus movement. In this presentation, Matthew Gray will discuss the latest developments in this research and offer some archaeological perspectives on how the Gospel writers may have envisioned the room, furnishings, and dining activities of Jesus’s most famous meal.
