|
The Early Church and Images
The early Christians had no pictures of Christ. They were Jews, and Jews allowed themselves no images, particularly if they were in any way involved in religion. Use of an image of any kind in worship was forbidden by the second commandment "You shall not make a carved image for yourself nor the likeness of anything in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them: for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous god" (Ex. 20:4-5, The New English Bible).
Just before Israel entered the promised land, God instructed: "You will soon be crossing the Jordan to enter Canaan. You must . . . destroy all their carved figures and their images of cast metal, and lay their hill-shrines in ruins" (Num. 33:51-52). And that is what, in the main, the Israelites did.
They needed no pictures, no paintings, to remind them of the true, invisible God. But most Jews by the first century A.D. went even beyond that and allowed no images for any purposes.
The milieu in which they lived strengthened first-century Jews as well as Christians in their abhorrence of images. Says the Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., "Iconoclast": "There can be no doubt that the early Christians were unanimous in condemning heathen image-worship and the various customs, some immoral, with which it was associated. A form of iconolatry especially deprecated in the New Testament was the then prevalent adoration of the images of the reigning emperors (see Rev. xv.2). It is also tolerably certain that, if for no other reason besides the Judaism, obscurity, and poverty of the early converts to Christianity, the works of art seen in their meeting-houses cannot at first have been numerous."
Such, basically, was the Christian view for 300 years. And any art containing images that crept in must he attributed solely to the conversion of Gentiles to the Christian ranks.
"It was a common accusation brought against Jews and Christians that they had `no altars, no temples, no known images'. . . that "they set up no image or form of any god'… and this charge was never denied; on the contrary Origen gloried in it . . ." (ibid).
Eusebius, even in the fourth century, "in reply to a request of Constantia, sister of Constantine, for a picture of Christ, wrote that it was unlawful to possess images pretending to represent the Savior either in his divine or in his human nature, and added that to avoid the reproach of idolatry he had actually taken away from a lady friend the pictures of Paul and of Christ which she had" (ibid).
Wrote Eusebius to Constantia: "And since you have written about some supposed likeness or other of Christ, what and what kind of likeness of Christ is there? . . . Such images are forbidden by the second commandment. They are not to be found in churches, and are forbidden among Christians alone."
This was the original teaching of the Catholic Church. But Christianity was soon well on the way toward corruption of its original doctrines.
Continuing in the Britannica: "Similarly Epiphanius [fifth century] in a letter to John, bishop of Jerusalem, tells how in a church at Anabiatha near Bethel he had found a curtain painted with the image `of Christ or of some other saint,' which he had torn down and ordered to be used for the burial of a pauper."
By the end of the sixth century the early Christian battle against images and icons was lost.
|
In Search of a Past
"I am convinced that this is the shroud that covered Jesus Christ after His crucifixion." So declared Dr. Max Frei of the University of Zurich after painstakingly testing for pollen grains in the linen of the shroud and analyzing them.
"My analysis of pollen grains has been confirmed under the electron microscope beyond any reasonable doubt. . . . I isolated from the shroud more than a dozen pollen grains from plants growing in Jerusalem and surrounding deserts. They grow only in the Near East," he said.
"The pollen most found on the shroud is identical to the most common pollen in the sediment of Lake Tiberias, in Israel" (National Enquirer, Nov. 29, 1977).
But even if we accept that the pollen proves the shroud once resided in Palestine, it would not necessarily connect it with Christ, for Dr. Frei also found in its fibers pollen from the area of southeastern Turkey! This finding would, perhaps, support Ian Wilson's theory that the shroud itself is none other than the famous Mandylion (meaning "napkin" or "handkerchief' in Arabic) which had been brought to Constantinople from Edessa in eastern Turkey. From there he postulates the Knights Templars took the shroud to the Holy Land before bringing it to France.
The Byzantine Connection
Fifty years before the shroud enters history in the possession of Geoffrey deCharnay and the Lirey church, there was another Geoffrey deCharnay. This other Geoffrey is not provably related, but shroudists suspect that he was. This man was a famous knight of the Templar organization, which King Philip the Fair of France charged with secret "idol" worship of a disembodied head — the image on the shroud, says Wilson and Geoffrey was martyred, all the while denying there was any idol.
The Templars had sacked Constantinople (Byzantium) in 1204, which, as capital of the Byzantine Empire and center of its religion, had become glutted with relics and icons innumerable. Among the relics, according to extant records, was something called a burial cloth of Christ, which apparently bore a full length image, and also the famous Edessa image, the Mandylion, which had been taken by force from the Moslem rulers of its city in A.D. 944. These both disappeared in the looting — possibly taken to the Templars' Palestine headquarters.
Ian Wilson speculates that both cloths were one and the same. He explains the double listing as possibly referring to copies of the original. A flourishing industry existed in Byzantium of making cloth and other images of "Christ." Many of these were, like the Mandylion itself, regarded as miraculously produced.
The problem for Wilson's theory is that the Edessa image is specifically described as a face only, appearing on a towel, a veronica napkin, while on the Turin shroud is undeniably a double full length figure. Wilson suggests the reason was that the shroud had always been kept folded in such a way that only the face was showing.
In any event, the image on the shroud has a long, sad face and long hair. A writer for the London Tablet was moved to observe: "The first thought likely to occur is: But how very strongly the figure resembles the Christ of any number of old masters [painters of the fifth century on]"' (quoted from Wilcox, p. 26).
What the Earlier Paintings Looked Like
There is more to that statement than meets the eye.
The oldest pictures of Christ are paintings on the walls of the catacombs of Rome. Most date from the second and third centuries. It was against the teachings of the church to have such pictures (see box: The Early Church and Images). Nevertheless, those who sketched them only about 100 years after the apostles — were undoubtedly acquainted with individuals who were familiar with the general appearance of Christ that came by word of mouth from His own generation.
" . . . There is a painting of the Resurrection of Lazarus in which Christ is shown — youthful and beardless, with short hair and large eyes. . . . Although it is now only barely recognizable, this picture is of great interest since it is the oldest representation of Jesus that is preserved anywhere" (Roderic Dunkerley, Beyond the Gospels, p. 57).
In all of these early portrayals, "He is almost invariably boyish. . . . His hair is short" (Frederic William Farrar, The Life of Christ as Represented in Art, 1894, p. 43). Short hair was the predominant style among men in the Hellenized areas of the eastern Mediterranean (including Palestine) in Christ's time.