He's a teacher of medieval literature, the one students hope they don't get.

-concerning Henry Jones, Sr., Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

The first appearance of a/the "grail" (graal) in literary history is actually in the 12th century Arthurian romance Perceval. There is no mention of it being holy, nor any connection made to the Last Supper. The scene is quite eerie. Perceval arrives at the castle of the Fisher King. Treated as an honored guest, he observes a strange procession. A parade of ghostly servants carries three objects through the hall: a bleeding lance, a candelabra, and a beautiful serving dish that held a single Eucharist wafer--a grail. Perceval says nothing about the strange objects out of politeness, which proves to be the undoing of the Fisher King.

The filmmakers of Last Crusade paid attention to this; one of the options in the Grail temple at the end is a serving platter.

Although the author we call Chretien de Troyes didn't associate his grail with the Last Supper and crucifixion, the setup was there: the Eucharist wafer and the association with the bleeding lance. It certainly wasn't a stretch for the medieval imagination at a time when the Eucharist and Passion were becoming the central practice and devotional fixtures of Christianity.

The next generation of Arthurian writers, in the early 13th century, codified this "grail" as the Holy Grail, the chalice used at the Last Supper and sometimes that caught Jesus' blood at the crucifixion. Robert de Boron wrote a history of the grail's transmission from Joseph of Arimathea to Perceval that got woven into the expanding Arthurian saga by the authors of the so-called Vulgate cycle (named because it is in the vernacular or vulgar French, not Latin--no relation to the Vulgate Bible). The Vulgate cycle and its heir, the post-Vulgate cycle, were adapted and condensed in Malory Morte d'Artur, which is the version of the Arthurian story we tend to know today. And so this graal or serving platter, basically invented in the 12th century, became a legendary religious relic in popular culture with a prehistory longer than its own literary history.

"/u/sunagainstgold, I know you think the Middle Ages are the best ages, and I understand you want to talk about them as much as possible," you say. "But you haven't actually answered OP's question."

Indeed, the Last Supper story is in the gospels, whatever one thinks of their historicity in details like this one. There is no connection with the same cup being used to catch Christ's blood--nor, indeed, any mention of Jesus' followers wanting his blood, sweat, clothing. In the Gospel account, it's the Romans who "cast lots" for his clothing. And this, I will argue, links the question of the cup's lack of survival with the invention of the Holy Grail legend in medieval Europe.

One of the innovations of the early Christian cult was relics of the dead. Chris Wickham describes how early Christians' different relationship with the dead confused and worried pagan Romans. Roman religion saw dead people and bodies as polluting--cemeteries were out in the middle of nowhere. Christians saw their martyrs as tangible evidence of their righteousness--Henry Chadwick talks about how relatives of some of the martyrs often got the bodies back in the early days because the Romans were eager to be rid of the pollution, not realizing their symbolic value.

But this seems to have been an invention of late antiquity, not Greco-Roman or as I understand it ancient Jewish practice (I am open to correction on this point). The Bible itself pays little attention to the potential sacred character of physical objects associated with Jesus, his life and death.

We see a little bit of it in late antiquity. Relics of the dead become an integral part of the cult of the saints (Latin cultus, in the sense of veneration and devotion) in the early Middle Ages. The cup from the Last Supper was not immune. Early theologians actually pay occasional attention to the material of the chalice, although they don't agree: Chrysostom assumes it was stone rather than a precious metal; an early medieval pilgrim describes seeing a silver chalice (oops).

So in the early Middle Ages, there is a decent amount of attention paid to the material remnants of Jesus' life on earth in accordance with wider Christian practice. It has even been argued that the bread and wine of the Eucharist were treated as relics, that is, as the physical remainders and reminders of Jesus on earth with power to work miracles.

We see A METRIC GALAXY of it in the later Middle Ages.

Flourishing devotion to what scholars call "the humanity of Christ," that is, the physical body and lifetime of Christ especially his infancy and the Passion, becomes the focal point of a Christianity with a newly widespread appeal. Mary's breast milk, Jesus' foreskin, shards of the Cross, attempts to locate the Holy Lance (Spear of Destiny)--all of this is simmering in the high Middle Ages and will boil over by the 15th century.

That's why, in the late 12th and early 13th century, the authors of the Arthurian saga turn to this "grail", connected to religiously charged symbols (bleeding lance). They live in an era where Christians see matter as fallen and decaying but with the potential to be holy and redeemed; they are on the hunt for the material connection to their savior. Not as "evidence" or "proof" that he lived and died, but as a way to be closer to him or as an anchor of his presence still on earth.

I have argued that the "grail" in the sense of an actual cup used by Jesus--at the Last Supper or not, whatever your opinion of its historicity--would not survive except perhaps by accident, because there was no reason to pay attention to its preservation. Stone and silver vessels certainly have been turned up in archaeological digs. But there is no continuous tradition of a cup identified as the chalice or the Holy Grail (used at the Last Supper; used at the Last Supper and then to catch Christ's blood) that survives from late antiquity to today. The possibilities held in churches today, to my knowledge, are first recorded in the Middle Ages or later.

I know it seems odd to answer a question about ancient material culture with evidence from the medieval literary tradition. But I think I have shown that the conscious preservation of the cup from the Last Supper would not have been a priority of Jesus' disciples--it was early and especially late medieval Christians who so longed for it.