The Last Bite
Acrylic on canvas
200cm x 150cm (+ 2 cm tray frame in black)
The Last Bite is an anachronistic take on the story of the Last Supper which refers to the final meal that Yeshua (Jesus Christ) shared with his disciples before his crucifixion, as described in the New Testament of the Bible. During the meal, Jesus shared bread and wine with his disciples, instructing them to consume them as his body and blood, establishing the ritual of the Eucharist or Holy Communion. Jesus used this occasion to foreshadow his imminent sacrifice and the establishment of the New Covenant between God and humanity through his death and resurrection. He identified the bread as his body, which would be broken, and the wine as his blood, which would be shed for the forgiveness of sins. However, the hosts were well known followers of a radical Jewish sect. This challenges traditional beliefs about an event that has evolved into a central Christian ritual, the Holy Communion.
The four Gospels of the New Testament provide little detail on the Last Supper, saying only that it took place in a guest room inside walled Jerusalem around the time of the Jewish Passover holiday, which commemorates the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. According to Christian tradition, Yeshua gathered his disciples for a farewell meal in the city on a Thursday evening, then walked to the Mount of Olives. There, in the Garden of Gethsemane, he was arrested by the authorities who were tipped off by Judas. The crucifixion took place Friday morning, just hours later.
The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke say the Last Supper, a meal marking the Jewish Passover celebration, coincided with the start of Passover. But John says the meal was held ahead of the holiday. As for the Last Supper, scholars say, the actual meal looked quite different from the famous Leonardo da Vinci painting in which Yeshua is sitting on a chair at the center of a large rectangular table with disciples on either side. Yeshua and the disciples were probably lounging around small round tables, as was customary at the time. Scholars argue that the Last Supper room wasn’t even on Mount Zion but rather in a poorer quarter of the city, closer to the Temple. In any case, each table in my painting represents a different belief system, i.e., an ideology or set of principles that help us to interpret our everyday reality.
Who was Yeshua? He was a psychologist and healer, a rock-star with a sparse groupie following, a Marxist orator, rebel, and freedom fighter, and finally an apocalypticist. Quite a curriculum vitae, right? Let’s take a tour of the various tables, shall we? It all started with a Jewish family, in a Jewish village on Jewish soil. The annunciation story is only found in Luke (the Gospel of Luke), and it is the account where an Angel comes to Mary and tells her that she's going to bear a special child. Yes, the Holy Spirit will impregnate her so that the one born of her will be the Son of God. Naturally you would assume, that Mary knew full well about Yeshua and of course accepted him as the Son of God as would her husband then Joseph and anyone else who was in this Jewish family. How did Joseph feel about it? Adultery? Swiftly moving on, one does not know anything about Yeshua’s life until he reappears on the world stage at age 30. He made Capernaum his base of operation. It was a slow start on all fronts, rejection after rejection amassed.
In Mark and the Gospel of Thomas one remembers a parable that indicates that the reason the kingdom of God has such a small inauspicious beginning is because Jesus Proclamation is falling on deaf ears. From John (Gospel of John), we learn, that most of the people Jesus is preaching to are not accepting his message. This stands counter to what we might imagine when we think about Jesus going through the Galilean countryside with thousands and thousands of people following him and only a few people are only kind of the outskirts of the crowd kind of grumbling about things. It looks like it wasn't that way at all it looks like that on the contrary most of the people hearing Jesus are rejecting him and he's responding to this rejection by proclaiming coming judgment against those who don't accept his message. It is quite clear that Jesus was not widely accepted by those who were construed to be the religious leaders of the Jews in Palestine at the end of his life. It was the rejection by the aristocracy among the Jews that ran the Temple in Jerusalem namely the Sadducees and the chief priests that ultimately led to Jesus’ execution by the Romans. Oh well, time to take a tour of the tables, shall we?
Table 1 - Modern belief systems. Capitalism is seen as a modern form of religion and symbolized by Andrew Carnegie, basking in his own glory. Capitalism needs Celebrity Idols, new Messiahs that spurns the capitalist spectacle of appearances, here represented by Jay Z. On the antipodes we have Marxism with its seditionist and rebellious qualities represented by Che Guevara. Two beautiful commodities, maybe escorts or trophy wives, that represent the modern slave like take on society, where no one can any longer be recognised by others, everyone becomes incapable of recognizing his or her own reality. McDonalds and Coke, as bottles of Champagne are quintessential symbols of Capitalism and are in no need of explanation. The repression practice and the anti-dialectical false consciousness that result from repression are imposed at everyday life subjected to the capitalist media-techno spectacle that systematically destroys the faculty of encounter and replaces it with social hallucination. Imprisoned in a flattened universe bounded by the screen of capitalist spectacle that has enthralled him, the spectator knows only the fictitious speakers who subjects him to a one-way monologue about their commodities and the politics of commodities. Like Capitalism, Marxism developed into an autonomous power through its possession of total power, changing its ideology from partial truth to totalitarian falsehood, where history can no longer exist. In Stalinism we saw its continuous rewriting of the past, and in the process the destruction the working-class movement, leaving only its repressive function of controlling all thought and prohibiting any competition whatsoever. In that sense, Stalinism represented a form of state capitalism rather than genuine socialism or communism, right? Stalinism concentrated power in the hands of a bureaucratic elite, which controlled the means of production and suppressed workers' self-management and autonomy. Does that ring a bell? One must condemn his widespread use of censorship, propaganda, and state violence to maintain control over the population. These repressive measures as contradictory to the emancipatory goals of Marxism, which aimed to create a society based on freedom, equality, and the self-realization of individuals. Stalin’s cult of personality can be seen as a mechanism for consolidating power and stifling dissent, further contributing to the authoritarian nature of these regimes. Whether we live under the umbrella of Capitalism or State Marxism, we simply remain spectators, living in an illusory bubble called passivity. What the two trophy-ladies are experiencing is a dramatization of an illusory escape from a universal form of learned autism. Individuals who passively accept their subjection to an alien capitalist everyday reality are thus driven towards a madness that reacts to this fate by resorting to illusory magical techniques. In a nutshell, a modern belief system that creates a superficial, mediated reality that disconnected individuals from authentic experiences and relationships. So, is capitalism inherently exploitative and dehumanising at each stratum of society? The jury is out, right? The essence of this pseudo-response to an unanswerable communication is the acceptance and consumption of commodities, from champagne to expensive dresses and jewellery. Yes, a life atomised by money and greed. Atomised to a life of impoverishment, enslavement, and negation of real life.
Table 2 – Abrahamic belief system. A Pharisee, a Sadducee and a high priest are arguing about the potential arrest of Yeshua. Jewish law prohibited deliberations and rulings in a capital case being made at night. Nevertheless, if there were a guilty verdict, it had to wait until the decision could be reaffirmed the following day—which precluded cases being adjudicated on the eve of a Sabbath or feast day (Mishnah Sanhedrin, IV.1). Historically speaking, none of the parties would have known Yeshua, because he wasn’t known enough. It is worth noting that during Pilate's rule, tensions between the Jewish population and the Roman authorities were high. Maybe, Pontius Pilate prefect of Judea in the reign of Tiberius saw Yeshua simply as a seditionist, or a local terrorist of a Jewish radical sect, who’s mission it was to free the land of Palestine from the Roman yolk. The rabbinic belief system is monotheistic, orthodox, and proto totalitarian, its objective is to safeguard the interpretation and application of Jewish law, known as Halakha, as well as the study of Jewish texts. During Pilate’s reign Abrahamic religions were viewed with varying degrees of acceptance and suspicion by the Roman authorities and its pagan polytheistic society. Now to top it all, one of their own, was predicting absurd events in the future, which were not in accordance with the Tanakh. Yes, it was only when Yeshua left the familiar rural environment of his childhood and took his apocalyptic message of the coming judgement of God to the capital city of Jerusalem that he aroused the opposition of those who were powerful enough to silence him once he offended them by proclaiming that they too would face God's coming wrath his own days became numbered. A life atomised, by mitsvahs and religious manipulation. Atomised by an ideological system, that impoverishes, enslaves, and negates real life. An Ethiopian lady holding a parasol seems not to be interested in the men’s conversation. Just as well.
Table 3 – A star is born. Celebrity Ideology. Yeshua is blessing the challah. To his right we see an androgynous John worshipping Yeshua. This pairing of Yeshua and John the Evangelist was one of the few Biblical “role models” of male same-sex intimacy that was sanctioned by the authorities. Heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual: Jesus could have been any of these. There can be no certainty which. The homosexual option simply seems the most likely. The intimate relationship with the beloved disciple points in that direction. It would be so interpreted in any person today. Although there is no rabbinic tradition of celibacy, Jesus could well have chosen to refrain from sexual activity, whether he was gay or not. Many Christians will wish to assume it, but I see no theological need to. Whether Jesus was gay or straight in no way affects who he was and what he means to the world today. Spiritually it is immaterial. Behind him Judas Iscariot is leaving the scene. Ultimately, the crucifixion of Yeshua is understood as part of God's redemptive plan, where Yeshua willingly accepted the suffering and sacrifice for the salvation of humanity, as described in Christian theology. The involvement of Judas in the events leading to Yeshuas' crucifixion is seen as a fulfilment of prophecy and a tragic aspect of the narrative rather than a necessary condition for the crucifixion itself. Another Ethiopian woman is joining the party, while an Arab lady seems to be more interested in herself, than in anything else. One would expect an incredible amount of religious magnetism arising from this table. But it is not the case, right? Society has become what ideology already was. The repression practice and the anti-dialectical false consciousness that result from repression are imposed at everyday life subjected to the roman totalitarian spectacle that systematically destroyed the faculty of encounter and replace it with social hallucination. In a society where no one can any longer be recognised by others, everyone becomes incapable of recognizing his or her own reality. Yeshua’s abnormal need for representation compensated for his agonizing feeling of being at the margin of existence. Yeshua (Jesus) brought a message of axiomatic dialectic to people, that God would soon intervene in the affairs of the world, to relieve their suffering and to reward their faithfulness. He would remove the Romans and all other evil forces from power and bring the poor and oppressed and outcasts God's kingdom. There would be no more pain, injustice, poverty disease or death. Moreover, his followers had already begun to form a tightly knit community organised around the principles of love as taught by God himself in the Jewish Scriptures. Yeshua himself himself was thought to have done great miracles, right? Yes, miracles that showed that in fact the kingdom of God had already begun to appear. All this makes it even more striking that the early traditions of Jesus suggest that he was by and large rejected by nearly everyone he encountered. This may seem odd to anyone today who simply assumes that Jesus had thousands of avid followers and only a few powerful enemies, but traditions of Yeshua’s rejection involved most of those with whom he came into contact, his own family his towns people, people living in surrounding towns and villages, the Jewish religious leaders, the aristocracy in Jerusalem and of course the Roman overlords. In my painting, at least, I give Yeshua the benefit of doubt, and filled the upper half of the canvas with naked groupies, Groupies, that idolised him, adored him out of proportion to the rhythm of Jay Z.
Table 4 – Christian belief system. To Yeshuas’ left we find James and Thomas hypnotically attached to him. Jesus serene composure, with his head and eyes lowered, contrasts with the agitation of the Apostles. Their varying postures rise, fall, extend, and intertwine is angry, while the disbelieving Thomas, sitting next to James, points upward and seems to ask, “Is this God’s plan?” His gesture anticipates his later reunion with the resurrected Christ, a moment that was often represented in art with Thomas using his fingers to touch Christ’s wounds from the crucifixion to quell his doubts. In-between the two Apostles we see an Italian soldier in his WWI uniform representing a modern-day roman legionary. With his back turned at us, we see Simon the Zealot, (the Jewish nationalistic party before ad 70; they were freedom fighters known for violent uprisings. One Zealot sect, called the Sicarii, were known for being assassins who would try to cut off Roman rule in Israel) they were supposedly preaching the Gospel in Egypt. Simon is also one of the most obscure apostles, hence I didn’t show his face.
Most of the apostles were illiterate and could not in fact write. So who wrote the New Testament, then? Most of the texts were composed by people with extensive schooling, that is, undoubtedly, members of the upper class elite. Many, if not most, of the Scriptures were written by people falsely claiming to be the Apostles or other leaders of the early Christian church. That means a lot of books of the Bible could actually be forgeries. The book of Mark, like the rest of the Gospels, was written anonymously. Why, then, do we believe they were products of the men that bear their names? I don’t subscribe to the school of thought that blind faith can solve any mystery, albeit I subscribe to the psychological soothing effect that religious stories can provide.
Shouldn’t we think about what is scientifically feasible, what archaeology and history research reveals, and base my judgments from there? Virgins do not give birth, right? Men are not raised from the dead, right? Illiterate peasants do not write well-argued religious tracts, right? Controversies, accusations, and disbelief are chiselling at the vacillating foundations of Yeshua’s story. Most of the apostles were illiterate and could not in fact write. They could not have left an authoritative writing if their souls depended on it. Christians in the early centuries of the church were in constant conflict and felt under attack from all sides. Christians were at odds with Jews, who considered their views to be an aberrant and upstart perversion of the ancestral traditions of Israel. They were at odds with pagan peoples and governments, who considered them a secretive and unauthorized religion that posed a danger to the state. And they were virulently at odds with each other, as different Christian teachers and groups argued that they and they alone had a corner on the truth and other Christian teachers and groups flat-out misunderstood the truths that Christ had proclaimed during his time on earth. Oh well, and Christianity hasn’t even started yet.
Table 5 – Myth as a component of a spiritual belief system. Myth and ideology are structurally different, but functionally similar. Ideology is a deductive, quasi-logical inventional system, and myth an analogical, narrative inventional system.
A pregnant Mary Magdalen, carrying Yeshua’s child. The three fates. Clotho spun the “thread” of human fate, Lachesis dispensed it, and Atropos cut the thread (thus determining the individual’s moment of death). Clotho and Lachesis are in mid conversation with Mary about her pregnancy, while Atropos is thinking about everybody’s exit.
Plato explored the philosophical implications of mythology in his works. In "The Republic," he uses the allegory of the cave to convey his metaphysical and epistemological views. The allegory depicts individuals trapped in a cave, perceiving only shadows on the wall, which Plato argues represents the illusory nature of sensory perception. This mythological narrative serves as a metaphor for his theory of Forms and the nature of reality.
Friedrich Nietzsche engaged extensively with mythology and its role in human culture. He considered mythology as an expression of the fundamental human drives and explored the concept of the "eternal recurrence" in his work "Thus Spoke Zarathustra." This mythological idea suggests that all events in the universe recur infinitely, which Nietzsche used as a philosophical thought experiment to explore the human relationship with time, meaning, and the affirmation of life.
Carl Jung delved into mythology in his psychological theories. He proposed the concept of the "collective unconscious," which he believed contained archetypes—universal, symbolic patterns found in myths and dreams that represent fundamental aspects of human experience. Jung saw mythology as a window into the deeper layers of the human psyche, and he used mythological motifs to explore individuation, the process of integrating one's conscious and unconscious aspects.
Jean-Paul Sartre did not directly focus on mythology in his writings. However, he explored themes related to human freedom, responsibility, and the creation of meaning, which can be seen as relevant to mythological inquiries. Sartre's concept of "bad faith" involves individuals denying their freedom and adopting false beliefs or roles, which can be seen as a departure from authentic existence. While not explicitly drawing from mythology, Sartre's works examine human existence and the ways in which individuals construct their own meaning in a world without inherent purpose.
Sigmund Freud interpreted mythology through the lens of psychoanalytic theory. He argued that mythological narratives and symbols reflected repressed desires, fears, and conflicts within the human psyche. Freud saw myths as expressions of universal human experiences, particularly those related to the Oedipus complex and the unconscious mind. For example, Freud explored the Greek myth of Oedipus in his work "The Interpretation of Dreams," drawing parallels between the myth and his theory of psychosexual development.
Mircea Eliade extensively studied and wrote about mythology and its connection to religious experiences. He argued that myths contain sacred narratives that express fundamental truths and archetypal patterns of human existence. In his influential work "The Sacred and the Profane," Eliade examined the role of mythology in religious rituals and the creation of sacred spaces. He explored the concept of "eternal return," the idea that mythical time is a sacred and timeless realm, contrasting with profane, linear time. Isn’t it interesting how deep-rooted mythology is in our DNA?
Are we just not all products of a mythological evolutionary process? If so, the last bite could well be getting another renaissance, right?
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