We have a Jenkins server taking care of CI for an Android project. In the server we were using Java 7, but since we updated a few dependencies we needed Java 8 to run some Gradle plugins. After the change, we suddenly started to get this error in the builds:

* What went wrong:
A problem occurred evaluating project ':my-project-app'.
> java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: com/android/build/gradle/AppPlugin : Unsupported major.minor version 52.0

After googling it, I found the following SO answer, pointing us to the need of Java 8 (major version 52): How to fix java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: Unsupported major.minor version.

So, given that:

1. server has both Java 7 and Java 8 installed
2. Jenkins is configured to run using Java 7, and changing may pose some problems (and currently any failure could put our schedule in jeopardy)

we decided to just run Gradle script using Java 8. To configure it, the following change was done to the configuration of the job: in section Build Environment, enable Inject environment variables to the build process and add the following to Properties Content:

JAVA_HOME=(path_to_jdk)

in our case:

JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-oracle

And hit Rebuild!