medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
To complement Jim Bugslag's thoughtful (as usual) comment, I found a discussion of _The Clash of Gods_ on our own list by... Jim Bugslag. Here it is:
Date: Sat, 4 Dec 1999 12:09:45 +0000
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Sender: medieval-religion
From: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Images of Jesus the Christ
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> I am perplexed as to why most images of Christ show him to have long
> hair, when I Corinthians 11:14 (KJV) states:
>
> I Corinthians 11:14
> Doth not even nature [phusis] itself teach you, that, if a man have
> long hair [komao], it is a shame [atimia] unto him?
>
> More generally, I'm interested to know where I can learn about the
> origins of historical and modern images of Christ.
Dear Michael,
The earliest images of Christ do, indeed, depict him as young and
beardless, e.g. the 3rd-century catacomb paintings, and such images
continued to appear until the 6th-century, eg. the apse mosaic in S.
Vitale in Ravenna. But from the 4th-century onwards, the competing
image of Christ as older, with long dark hair and beard, began to
appear as well, and this image evenually replaced the earlier
non-bearded type of image completely. The bearded type was
evenually formalized in the Byzantine east as the image of Christ
Pantocrator (ruler of all), and in fact, one theory has it that the
long-haired and bearded image of Christ represents a tranference from
a non-Christian image tradition, depicting the father of the gods,
Zeus or Jupiter, who was, indeed, depicted in such a manner. My own,
completely unsubstantiated (yet) opinion is that these two manners of
representing Christ also had something to do with the increasing
doctrinal importance of Christological and Trinitarian questions (for
which, see this list`s Threatened Series by Bill East). For more on
the subject of images, you might look at André Grabar, Christian
Iconography: A Study of its Origins (Princeton, 1968), still a
valuable work, and Thomas F. Mathews, The Clash of Gods: A
Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art (Princeton, 1993), an
interesting but overstated re-evaluation of imperial influence on
early Christian imagery (see the excellent review by Peter Brown in
Art Bulletin, vol. 77 (1995), 499-502).
Cheers,
Jim Bugslag
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