Hasn't anyone just tried reading the gospels?

Or is it just more fun doing this instead?

New ‘Last Supper’ theory crashes Web sites
Amateur scholar claims Leonardo painting reveals mysterious figures

Of course he does.

MILAN, Italy - A new theory that Leonardo’s “Last Supper” might hide within it a depiction of Christ blessing the bread and wine has triggered so much interest that Web sites connected to the picture have crashed.

News flash! At the Last Supper, Jesus blessed bread and wine! What else has the Church been hiding?

Now Slavisa Pesci, an information technologist and amateur scholar, says superimposing the “Last Supper” with its mirror-image throws up another picture containing a figure who looks like a Templar knight and another holding a small baby.

Now, I know that Leonardo was a ridiculously bright fellow who, among other things, actually wrote in mirror-image script in his notebooks... but aren't we reaching here?

“I came across it by accident, from some of the details you can infer that we are not talking about chance but about a precise calculation,” Pesci told journalists when he unveiled the theory earlier this week.

Yeah, darndest thing. I just happened to be screwing around with the skew and rotate functions in Photoshop and whaddya know, all this esoterica came tumbling out.

Or, of course, you could read the Bible and find the straight story in black-and-white. The only bit of real information here, that Christ blessed the bread and wine, was already known; da Vinci's fresco didn't suddenly end 14 centuries of doubt on that point. What is with people needing to find all sorts of secret messages that overturn or contradict the plain statements that are already there? "This must not be what He really meant; let's take a painting, someone's old diaries, mix it with a bunch of crap someone made up to make his family look important, and say that the Church covered all of it up in favor of the actual Bible."

Mastering the original material is hard enough without this crockpottery.