Last Supper book deals

A Passiontide-themed strip by Mad magazine cartoonist Glen Le Lievre

Glen Le Lievre is an Australian cartoonist who did this riff on Leonardo da Vinci for Mad Magazine in 2010:¹

Few writers are safer than I am from any charge of underanalyzing comics!² For this strip, though, my only substantial comment³ is that the caption works best if

1. if you’re kinda hazy on the details of the New Testament, or

2. if you chuckle ruefully—perhaps thinking of your own betrayals of the Lord and/or of the common human tendency to try to exploit the faith to our own advantage—and then stop thinking about the punchline.⁴

1. A post-Covid viewer who didn’t know this comic is 15 years old could be excused for thinking that one of the apostles is wearing a face mask (second to the right from Christ, or second on Christ’s own left—following Leonardo’s composition, James the Greater). But it’s actually his beard. (If you squint you might see his mouth and lower lip.) And now I’m reminded of this November 2020 meme…

2. Read more of my comics writing—if you dare!

3. Tiniest of technical notes: Where Leonardo depicts Christ with one palm visible and the other turned downward, Le Lieve depicts Christ with both palms extended—and it almost looks as if Christ is displaying palms already pierced! I don’t think that’s meant to be the case; I think the tiny penstroke on each palm is meant to outline the thenar eminence, i.e., the fleshy mound at the base of the thumb. Unfortunately, Le Lieve hasn’t used this device for the only other figure whose palms are prominently visible: white-bearded Andrew, brother of Simon Peter, third from the left. (Andrew’s jazz hands do match Leonardo’s composition. Leonardo does emphasize the thenar eminence at least on Andrew’s right palm, but not on Christ’s left palm.)

4. Critical scholarship does not come into this calculus.

(Do I really have to explain this?)

Okay, fine.

The prima facie joke is that Jesus is referring to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The joke works best if we chuckle and move on without thinking about it.

Once we start thinking, if we have even a little New Testament knowledge, it may occur to us that, of the traditional four Evangelists, only Matthew and John were among the Twelve, and thus definitely present at the Last Supper. Mark is sometimes thought to have been the young man in the Garden of Gethesemane who ran off naked (Mark 14:51–52), and so he might have been present at the Last Supper; still, he was not one of the Twelve, and is conspicuously not seated at the Lord’s table in Leonardo’s composition, or in most other depictions. As for Luke, he is generally considered a Gentile and thus a much later convert to the Way of Jesus; we have no reason to think that Luke and Jesus so much as met during Jesus’ earthly life.

At this point, some well-meaning souls may be tempted to try to smooth over this speed bump by pointing out that the Gospels aren’t the only books in the New Testament ascribed to members of the Twelve! What about the letters of Peter and James? Wait—the letter of James is traditionally ascribed to James the brother of Jesus, not to either of the two apostles named James. Well then, what about Jude? No, no, no. In the first place, short letters like Jude and even James (less than, respectively, 500 and 2,000 words in Greek) are obviously not “book deal” material; the clear reference is to the four Gospels. In the second place, the joke is long since dead.

Another potential caveat—which absolutely should not at all figure in our thinking about this strip—is that the consensus view among critical scholars is that the four Gospels were written anonymously, and that the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were appended later. Thus, for most critical scholars, none of the four Gospels was written by anyone present at the Last Supper. For what it’s worth, I tend to find critical consensus views plausible and often persuasive (for example, I believe Markan priority is the most persuasive view), though in this case I’m more open to the traditional authorships of the Gospels (with the caveat that the identity of “John” is a bit muddled).

As regards the strip, though, this whole line of thought is a dead end. This strip is set in a comic-strip version of Leonardo’s painting; historical criticism is beside the point. Otherwise we would have to begin by criticizing the architecture and the whole dining arrangements, beginning with the fact that Jesus and the disciples are not reclining at table, etc.!