Dinner For Thirteen.

Dinner for thirteen is never a good idea. For a start, it’s an odd number so you’re always going to have someone playing gooseberry. You’re also very likely going to need an extra chair and if you’ve got an extending dining table then you’re going to have to extend it all the way as far as it will go (if you’ve already done that then you’ll also need to find a small table that you can stick on the end, though we all know that these tables are never quite the same height and will always have at least one wobbly leg, but then who cares because it’s only there to accommodate the gooseberry?). The problems continue. You can’t just cook six ready meals for two because there won’t be enough to go around and you’ll probably need to buy a new set of crockery and cutlery so no-one ends up having to eat with their hands. You’ll need to pop to TK Maxx for another pair of wine glasses, but they won’t match properly with all the others and that’ll give the gooseberry even more reasons to feel like one. There are doubtless plenty of other reasons not to organise a dinner party for thirteen and I simply haven’t got time to go into all of them, but the deeper point I think I’m trying to get at is that we never, ever seem to learn from history. Silly buggers.

Fortunately, this dinner party was organised by Jesus and to avoid anyone being a gooseberry he only invited heterosexual men, because if anyone is going to frown on a homosexual couple turning up at a dinner party it must surely be Jesus, or at least Jesus as we thought of him back then. Once he’d sent out all the invites and hired the room the scriptures don’t make it very clear who was first to turn up. It’s possible that one turned up early and just sat waiting on his ass for a familiar face to turn up, and then they figured they could go in together. What we do know is that the invitations said supper, but then supper means different things to different people. To me supper is a small bowl of soup, some cheese and a few crackers, perhaps eaten an hour before bed to keep the tummy tunes at bay. To others, supper is the main meal of the day and the central event of the evening, so by making it vague means that many of the guests might potentially have turned up already stuffed from a late lunch or top-level hangry because they haven’t even sniffed a biscuit since brunch. We also don’t know if Jesus had dubbed it “The Last Supper” at this stage but we should assume he hadn’t, if only to not make it sound quite so pretentious, or indeed, portentous.

Anyway, just for arguments sake let’s just agree it was Simon. Or Peter. Which is confusing, because Simon was Peter and Peter was Simon. We don’t know whether Simon and Peter called themselves the same name to throw people off the scent, as a simple party trick, or even as an act of schizophrenic narcissism, but what we do know is that they had two first names, which means it would have taken twice as long to write out their name card for the place setting, if there were place settings, which seems unlikely. Simon Peter thought of himself as quite the big shot amongst the disciples, what with his two names and everything, so he would have wanted to turn up early to spray his scent, as it were, and set the tone for the evening. Due to his slightly elevated status he wouldn’t have been expected to bring a main dish, but it’s possible he would would have bought a selection of crisps, nuts and nibbles. We have to bear in mind that this was two thousand years ago so allergies hadn’t been invented yet, but just for the sake of it Simon Peter may have been asked to write out a few little cards for each bowl containing nuts that said “this bowl contains nuts” and some labels for the other bowls that said “this bowl may contain products that were made in a factory where nut products are also made”. He may have also popped a box of antihistamines into his satchel, because you can never be too careful.

Andrew was famously punctual and so he would certainly have been there quite early. He was also quite tight fisted and would have seen an early arrival as an opportunity to hoover up some of the free nuts and nibbles that Simon Peter had laid on. He may have bought a couple of bottles of wine with him too, but they would have been cheap and tasted like sweet vinegar and piss, his hope being that embarrassment could have been avoided if Jesus had offered to turn them into a superior cru, single vineyard, vintage wine with a lingering nose and exceptional depth, at which point Andrew would have slipped them back into his carrier bag to finish off when he got home. It’s likely that Andrew would have bought at least two other apostles with him in an effort to look popular, and the most obvious culprits would surely have been John and Philip because they also sound like good, honest, white Anglo Saxon types (if Anglo Saxons even existed at this point) and we must assume they wanted to stick together in a Holy Land that was fast becoming a demographic melting pot. I’ve trawled through hundreds of ancient, sacred documents, stained with teabags, and can still find no firm evidence of what John and Philip brought to the party so let’s make an educated guess and say a potato salad and a tiramisu respectively, the latter wrapped in foil and placed in a cool box to avoid the cream and mascarpone turning in the heat; they weren’t daft, these apostles.

Next came James, son of Zebedee and James, son of Alphaeus. They had known each other since nursery and had bonded over the fact that their fathers both had silly names and yet had chosen to call their sons something as simple as James. Not that there’s anything wrong with the name James, in fact I know and like several people called James, but I don’t like James Taylor because he makes music that’s as wet as an otter pocket. Where was I, oh yes, James and James would have come together and because they acted almost as if twins they would have worked together on a dish, possibly some sort of centrepiece for the evening; I’m thinking a large beef Wellington or, if there was a recession on and they were feeling the pinch perhaps a vast chicken thigh and drumstick tray bake, like those ones that Jamie Oliver makes in five minutes but in the real world take the best part of a day. It’s quite likely that James, son of Zebedee and James, son of Alphaeus would have bumped into at least one other apostle on the driveway and that would very likely have been Judas Iscariot. Of course, at this point Judas was still a stand up guy and a well respected member of the group and if he was already having thoughts about betraying Jesus he would have kept those to himself – he certainly wouldn’t have wanted to play his cards too early and he must have known that if he’d announced himself as a backstabbing shitkicker in the middle of the first course it would have soured the whole rest of the evening. “Oh no, Judas, pick your moment wisely”, is what he might have said to himself as he paused to consider a vol-au-vent.

Speaking of starters, although this was a traditional Holy Land supper that you would have expected any number of so called sons of God to be hosting at the time, starters would have been very forward thinking and might have been forerunners to the sort of thing you would see at a dinner party in 1970’s Basildon: prawn cocktails served in glass goblets or melon served with Parma ham, that sort of thing. Oddly enough, even though four of the apostles were fisherman the experts think that the prawns were probably bought in bulk at a cash and carry by Bartholomew and Matthew, a right old pair of jokers, who could often be found composing filthy limericks to be read out over aperitifs or pulling another apostles robes down to the floor just as he was walking past a pretty lady on the high street. Up until their arrival the supper would have been subdued, drab even, but with Bartholomew and Matthew throwing their saucy prawns around spirits must have been lifted and, for just a brief moment, Jesus might have found a moment to let go and have a laugh, perhaps even forgetting just how serious an occasion this was meant to be. Not that it would have lasted long, because sooner or later Simon the Zealot would have arrived, and you know what zealots are like – they just can’t seem to take a day off from being zealous.

I think we’re almost all there now but we mustn’t forget Thomas and Thaddeus, or Jude to his friends and dealer. I’ve interviewed dozens of experts on the bible to put this article together and almost all of them agree that Thaddeus might have been a bit of a dark horse. It’s very likely that he would have spent the afternoon in the run up to supper frequenting a number of bars and houses of ill-repute and would have turned up more than a little worse for wear. Miraculously though, just as Thaddeus seemed to be struggling he would excuse himself to the bathroom and return refreshed, excitable, full of unlikely stories and wide eyed with wonder. We can only assume that this amazing rejuvenation was either down to another of Jesus’ miracles or down to Thaddeus doing some form of ancient medication off the toilet lid. Either way, Thaddeus was proving to be a proper loose cannon by the end of the night and Simon Peter eventually called him a taxi (or more likely a donkey) and bundled him off into the night. As for Thomas, well, he wasn’t one hundred percent he could make it until he pitched up at the last minute, only to spend the night wondering aloud if he should have bothered. Silly Thomas, he never was very good at making up his mind!

What minutiae we would have witnessed as the evening unravelled we’ll never really know, but I haven’t spent the last thirty years of my life researching every aspect of The Last Supper just to serve you plateful of made-up horseshit. There would have been drinking and gossip, banter and braggadocio and we have to assume that someone must have bought a vegetarian, vegan or gluten-free dish because how often to you get thirteen people around a table without someone being awkward? Party games would have been played, including “fuzzy duck”, “call my bluff”, “the washing of the feet” and “spot the traitor” (with hindsight they would have kicked themselves), and while there may have been an underlying sense of melancholy and uncertainty about how everything was going to pan out the apostles would have just been happy to be there, if only so they could tell their other friends that they had been invited to a supper by none other that Jesus Christ, the son of God and Messiah in waiting, the central figure in a newfangled religious craze that would soon be sweeping the world like Taylor Swift. And thank goodness Leonardo DiCaprio was there to take some preliminary sketches so he wouldn’t forget the key details when he returned to Milan fifteen hundred years later and got to work slapping that fresco out. He knew, like so many would soon learn, that not many people can pull off dinner for thirteen, but then not many people are Jesus. And I’m not talking about the Brazilian chap that plays for Arsenal, though I dare say he’s got quite an impressive dining room.

G B Burton. 16.04.2025