LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - As we read the New Testament, Mark 14:12-15: Jesus' disciples asked him, "Where do you want us to go and make preparations for you to eat the Passover?" So he sent two of his disciples, telling them, "Go into the city, and a man carrying a jar of water will meet you.

"Follow him. Say to the owner of the house he enters, 'The Teacher asks: Where is my guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?' He will show you a large upper room, furnished and ready. Make preparations for us there."

While the site of the Last Supper is not known, it's very possible it stands over or near the original site of the Last Supper and/or Pentecost.

Beneath the floor of the building are Byzantine and Roman pavements and the foundations go back to at least the 2nd century AD. It is possible that the "little church of God" that existed on Mount Zion in 130 AD.

Danger and persecutions would have excluded Christian invention of a new holy place in the 2nd century, so if an active church existed in 130 it must have already been important for some time - perhaps because the upper room was nearby. In those times this was an affluent area of the city and a wealthy Christian may have opened his home for use as a church.

The Upper Room is approached by a pointed-arch entrance from the main lane on Mount Zion. It is then reached by ascending stairs immediately to the left in the courtyard. The courtyard is part of what once was a pilgrim hospice, then an Ottoman house, and now a Jewish yeshiva.

The Last Supper Room is an attractive, mostly empty rectangular room with pillars and a groin-vaulted ceiling. The capitals on the pillars are mainly 12th-century and Gothic in style. There are traces of 14th-century paint on the wall just inside to the right of the door.

The chamber retains the trappings of a mosque, including restored stained-glass Ottoman windows with Arabic inscriptions and the ornate mihrab. There are also two Arabic plaques in the wall and a Levantine dome.