Authenticity and Scholarship

Tradition identifies the Santo Caliz as the cup of the Last Supper, and its defenders rest their case chiefly on the antiquity of the agate bowl. The archaeologist Antonio Beltran, in a study published in 1960 and often cited since, concluded that the cup was carved in a workshop of the eastern Mediterranean in the second or first century BC, which places it in a plausible time and region for a vessel that could have been used in first-century Jerusalem. That, however, is the limit of what the evidence supports: an ancient cup of the right kind is not the same as the cup of Jesus, and the documented history of this particular object reaches back only to the medieval Aragonese court, with the earlier chain resting on legend. No test can connect the agate to the Last Supper. The chalice is therefore classed as debated, the most credible Grail claimant, an authentic antique, but not demonstrably the cup of Christ.