medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Jim,
I am well aware that the crucifixion was used as an argument against Christians, by Celsus and others, as well as the ass-head graffito. The issue was whether Christians were thereby ashamed of it and I don't see any indication of that whatsoever. Both Johannine and Pauline writings as well as Peter's sermon in Acts 2 etc. are shot through with the in-your-face reply that the cross is the glory, as paradoxical as that may seem to those who do not believe. It would be hard to find a more consistent and central position in the NT. Of course, without the resurrection, the Cross would be a source of shame, more than that, it would totally dis-credit Christianity--that's Paul's point in 1 Cor 15 etc. But without the Cross, the Resurrection would not mean the same thing either. NT writings do not pit the one against the other, nor can I find any patristic or medieval literary accounts that do--for those who really believe in this Christian stuff, pitting the one against the other makes no sense whatsoever. In the face of this literary evidence (which could be extended ad nauseum from patristic sources) any effort to offer a motivation for the fact that no corpus is found on crosses until late and then the corpus is not realistically portrayed as a dying man needs to be cautious. Since it does make good sense to pit the one against the other if one is a modern, Enlightenment type non-believer in a historical Resurrection (even if still calling oneself a Christian) and since the emphasis on the Resurrection pitted against the Crucifixion is a modern thing (claiming to discover this prioirty in Greek theology, which I do not think is really supported by the evidence), a motivation equally plausible with the "Christians were ashamed of the Crucifixion" or "Christians were defensive about it because their opponents threw it in their face" is the one I offered--iconic versus realistic art trends.
My subtext was that we need to be critically aware of the presuppositions that go into our sweeping generalizations. I am very much aware of mine--I approach these issues as a traditional Catholic believer. I just ask that those who do not (deracinated Catholics included) recognize the role their presuppositions play. If we all do that, then I think the playing field is level and we can really begin to have scholarly interchange.
Dennis Martin
>>> [log in to unmask] 10/24/02 12:53PM >>>
medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
> The issue may be less one of a
> theology of resurrection versus theology of gory crucifixion than
> less realistic, more iconographic (early) and more realistic,
> naturalistic (high and later Middle Ages> >
Dear Dennis,
There are a few pagan Roman writings from the early Christian
centuries that express both wonderment and genuine disgust that
Christians "degraded" themselves by setting up a mere executed
criminal as their god. And a bit of 2nd-century graffiti on the
Palatine Hill in Rome depicts a crucified donkey with the inscription
"Alexamenos worships his god" - although interpretations of this
differ, one possible one is that, once again, a non-Christian Roman
is parodying what they see in Christian worship. This alone -- not
to mention the fact that crucifixion was intended as a particularly
humiliating form of execution reserved for the lowest class of
criminals -- might have disinclined Christians to represent the
Crucifixion, but there was certainly no such reticence to represent
his Resurrection, the earliest example of which is probably a wall
painting in the baptistry at Dura Europos from the early 3rd century.
A possible interpretation of this is that anyone can die, but it
takes someone rather special to raise themself from the dead.
Cheers,
Jim Bugslag
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