(N.Morgan) A recent discovery has turned the archeology world on its head! They may have found the Holy Grail the goblet Jesus and his disciples drank from at the Last Supper. Could this be the very cup that touched Our Lord’s lips? In their newly published book “Los Reyes del Grial” (“The Kings of the Grail”), medieval history lecturer Margarita Torres and art historian José Miguel Ortega del Rio claim the Holy Grail rests inside the Basilica of San Isidoro in the northern Spanish city of León. The historians say that a three-year investigation led to their conclusion that the hallowed cup that Jesus Christ supposedly drank from at the Last Supper and that was used to collect his precious blood is a jewel-encrusted goblet that has long been known as the chalice of the Infanta Doña Urraca in honor of the daughter of King Ferdinand I, ruler of León and Castile from 1037 to 1065.
The chalice, made of gold and onyx and sprinkled with precious stones, is actually two goblets fused together, one turned up, the other down. Torres and del Rio say the upper half is made of agate and missing a fragment, exactly as described in the Egyptian parchments. The co-authors report that scientific dating has placed the origin of the cup between 200 B.C. and 100 A.D. As the Irish Times reports, the co-authors concede they cannot definitively prove that the chalice actually touched Jesus’s lips, only that it is the vessel that early Christians revered as the one used at the Last Supper. “The only chalice that could be considered the chalice of Christ is that which made the journey to Cairo and then from Cairo to León—and that is this chalice,” Torres told the newspaper. Since the book’s publication last week, the basilica has been inundated with visitors, forcing curators to remove the relic from display until they can find a larger exhibition space to accommodate the crowds.
My only dispute with this claim that this is the chalice Our Lord drank from, is that He and his disciples were poor and the cup was probably a plain, wooden vessel, like the one pictured above. So could they have really found the grail? Or is this another mistake?