The Last Supper and “Kneževa večera,” Parallels and Their Resonances in Traditional Christian and Serbian Folk Culture

Abstract

The New Testament episode of the Last Supper has powerful images of the suffering Jesus; of Judas, the evil disciple who betrayed him; and of Peter, the good but fainthearted disciple, who—torn between his loyalty to Jesus and his self-preservation instinct—denied his master three times in the course of a few hours, only to re-emerge as one of Christ’s most faithful apostles. This episode does not only reflect the relation of the early Church to the Jews but was also used for centuries to construct and reconstruct the relations between the two religious communities. Symptomatically, the name of the disciple who plays a diabolical role in the scene, Judas, is an eminently Hebrew (Jewish) name. Even more interestingly, it ‘happens’ to be identical with the ethnonym of the Judeans, the descendants of the biblical tribe of Judah, the inhabitants of New Testament Judaea, the later Jews. The anti-Semitic potential of the New Testament’s Last Supper was often used in traditional Christian society for creation and nourishment of anti-Jewish sentiments; or, even worse, as a pretext for anti-Jewish actions on the part of the elites (legislation, mass expulsion, etc.) or the common masses (riots, pogroms, etc.).