Christian Art

Lesson Transcript

I'm going to be talking about early Christian art, especially focusing on the first 300 years of the Church, and just presenting a bit about that. And I'll show you some examples of early Christian art. This is not one example, just so you know. So the early Christians didn't talk about art very much, and mostly they didn't seem to have very strong opinions on it. They did have some opinions on it, and one was not—they were against worshiping images. They didn't really have regulations on art; it didn't seem.

But there are a lot of themes that come out from the art that they had. Most art was—is thought to have been commissioned by individuals rather than churches. So churches mostly didn't commission art, but we'll see some examples of that towards the end here. So let's see. I'm going to quote from a scholar in this book that I studied.

Robin Jensen says, "Historians generally agree that first and second-century Christians left behind few material artifacts that historians could recognize as specifically theirs." But eventually, she says, "Adherents to this new faith evidently began to decorate their tombs, places of worship, and even small domestic objects with iconography that reflected their distinct religious identity only in the late second or early third century." So that would be like around 175 or later, we start to see examples of art

that they had.

She draws some conclusions from the dates of the art that we have. In general, Christian art proceeds from being primarily symbolic to illustrating biblical narratives, to presenting certain dogmatic developments, and finally to embracing iconic or portrait types as it proceeds from domestic and funereal settings to monumental ecclesial spaces. So basically, she's saying it starts out—you start out seeing more symbolic type art, and then as time passes, you see more Bible story pictures.

And then around the time of Constantine, it starts—and we'll see some of this art. You see art that presents dogmatic developments and finally embracing iconic or portrait types. So that would be what we know today as icons. So the symbolic images that arise earliest, I'm going to show you some examples of that. So one of the best—one of the most common examples is this right here, which is known as an orant.

This is a—the orant is a praying figure, usually a woman, and it is thought to represent the soul of somebody who's died. So you'll see this in the catacombs, especially beside where—besides where someone was interred, I guess is the term, I don't know. You'll see this image that is kind of representing their soul. And I'm not sure why they did that necessarily, but they thought that—or I guess they thought of a soul as something kind of female, and that's why they represented it as a woman. Let's see, where am I?

And typically, it's just not specifically anyone, but often they actually have—these orants are actually portraits of the deceased, I guess, especially if they're women. So in this case, I don't know if this is a portrait of someone or if it's just kind of a generic woman figure, but that was something they did. Okay, here's another example. You can see this veiled lady standing here, and I'm not sure what's happening over here. I don't think anyone's quite sure what this is.

It's thought that this might be a picture of Mary and Jesus, but no one's quite sure about that either. This is, I think, in an apse, the ceiling. It's like a domed ceiling in one end of a catacomb. All right, and let's see. They also—a lot of their art was to start with subjects that would often be found in Greek and Roman art, but they imbued the subjects with their own symbolism. So one example of that is the Good Shepherd.

So we see a lot of Good Shepherd paintings, and this is—I think because this is round, I think that means it's in the dome of some of a catacomb. I think this is in the Calyxes catacombs. So you can see there's this shepherd. He's got a lamb over his shoulder, and he's—you can't see much about his face. Typically, they're young and don't have a beard. But basically, it's not supposed to necessarily be a portrait of Jesus. It's just to represent the aspect of Jesus being the Good Shepherd.

And this is also a type of portrait that was actually fairly common among pagans as well. It's, I guess, they like seeing shepherds with sheep over their shoulders too. I don't know. I don't know why. Lynn, could you go back to the previous one? Yes, I can do that. Yes. Yeah, I wanted to point out these praying figures that they call orant, which means prayer. They reveal so much because it's showing the dress of a typical Christian woman.

You can see the head covering, also the posture of praying, lifting up the hands that you read about in Timothy. And I noticed on both—well, the one was in black and white, but I've got a color image of it. And yeah, both of them have dresses that are colors. So they were not against, as a church, that everyone had to have drab dress. It's very modest, obviously, but yeah, they allowed bright colors and things like that. Yeah, and it looks like she's looking upward.

It's a little hard to tell, but there seems to be enough detail to tell that she's looking upward while she's praying too. So yeah, thanks for bringing that up. Here's another example of a Good Shepherd. I think this is from the Priscilla Catacomb. It's a little grainy. And oh, and here's one that Grace and I actually saw when we were in the Cleveland Museum of Art about a year ago. This is a statue that wasn't as common for the early church, but apparently someone decided to portray him in a statue.

You can see how it's kind of this young beardless guy who's holding a lamb, which I assume represents the sheep that—or let's see, the parable of the man who left all his sheep, 99 sheep, and went to find the one that strayed away. And here's another one in an apse, and you can see he has a lot more sheep and some trees. I'm not sure what this is over here. Yeah, it does actually look like a wolf. And this does too. Maybe he's protecting his sheep from the wolves. I don't know.

And it's important to note that whenever they used types of images that were commonly used by the pagans as well, it wasn't that they were worshiping their gods or something. It's just that they saw that theme as something that Jesus fulfilled. So here's an example of that. I'm not sure I would do this myself, but this is a mosaic, which is made of colored stones on the ceiling of a catacomb, I believe.

And this is, they think anyway, it's always hard to tell exactly what this art is representing, but they think that this is Christ portrayed as a Greek or Roman sun god would be portrayed. You can see the sun kind of behind him and the rays of the sun. And this is, I guess, this is maybe the horses that pull the chariot of the sun around. I'm not sure. But I guess the idea was that Christ is the real bringer of light. Christ is the real God of the sun.

And again, I don't think I would do this kind of thing myself, but it didn't seem like it bothered the person who made it anyway. This is not very common. They don't have a lot that's this explicit. So then, as Robin Jensen noted, in the third century, in the 200s, scenes from the Old and New Testament stories became pretty common. And here, anyone have a guess as to what this is? This is Jonah being swallowed by a sea monster, which actually Grace and I happened to see this too in the Cleveland Museum.

It does look like a pig. You can see how, yeah, it's some kind of special kind of sea monster. I forget what the type is. I could look it up. And you can see poor Jonah's legs have not yet been swallowed. So this is one of four pictures in the story of Jonah. The next one is Jonah being spat out of the sea monster to dry land. And then here's Jonah under the vine, under the gourd vine. What was that? Yeah. Obviously, with statues that are that old, things tend to break off of them, and you just like they get lost.

And then here is Jonah praying. And again, you can see the way he prays there. And so Jonah was one of the most popular subjects of art back then because I guess Jonah, like Christ said, that no sign would be given to the people who were looking for a sign except the sign of Jonah. And Jonah was in the whale's belly or whatever it was that we saw him in for three days. And he is a great picture of—that's a great picture of the resurrection where he died figuratively and then came back to life. Let's see.

Also, another—so here's another example, and that is Noah and the ark. I should have actually asked you guys what you thought it was before I said it was because I don't think you'd have guessed. So they would portray Noah on this kind of box-like ark, and you can see the waves down here. And here is the dove bringing back an olive branch. And again, he's praying. So a lot of art of Jonah and the ark is kind of terrible, and it's just really comforting to know that art of Jonah and the ark has always been terrible.

So. Well, I think one thing that is kind of nice, it's folk art. These people were not very good artists, but their representation of things are interesting. And like I say, you can see how they prayed that the things that were very common to them, even though they didn't do a great job in drawing and that sort of thing. Yeah. And one person mentioned that their styles of art were fairly common for what people had back then, but often their art is actually not quite as well done.

And I mean, if you're not—if people are typically not very rich and didn't have all the money to hire really good artists, that would be—I'm not blaming them for having bad art. It's just they kind of did. But some of it is actually quite interesting, as we'll see. Another thing about that, I don't know a lot about it, but art often—we're used to the photographic age where we look at a photograph and we want to photograph it exactly the way it looks.

And often art is more—the purpose of it is more to communicate an idea or an impression. And so it often, actually almost usually, will sacrifice exactness because they're trying to—the positioning of things, the size of things, and things like that are just communicating an idea. So it's not supposed to be an exact visual representation. Yeah, that's a good point. And how would you represent Jonah and the ark if you had a limited amount of space?

You'd have to make the ark super small and wouldn't be able to put a lot of details in. I do notice it's sort of interesting what the word ark must have portrayed to them because the dimensions are obviously off, but he draws it as a—or she—as a chest, which is the Ark of the Covenant. We know was a chest. And so this person's obviously picturing it as a big square box, not as a ship that sometimes you see today the ark is drawn as. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's see.

And also, what's interesting is it seems like secular workshops were creating a lot of Christian art or art with Christian themes. So here is a lamp by the workshop of Florentius. We have a fair number of ceramic objects made by Florentius or his workshop. This is a drawing of a lamp. And you can see there's the Good Shepherd with his sheep over his shoulder. There's the sheep. You can guess who this is. I think we all gather that. And then, of course, here's Jonah again under the fig vine.

I'm not sure exactly what these are. Somebody thought this was Noah, and this is the dove, but I'm not sure. It doesn't really look like Noah. And these seven stars, I guess, are when Jesus shows up in Revelation, doesn't he have seven stars around him or something? I think that's what that's about. So I don't know if this was made for Christians or for non-Christians, but it's obviously Christian symbolism. I'm going to mention the—on Jonah there on the left, and maybe after Laura, if people can see it.

Let me see if I can. This is—it seems very common. The Greek word that's translated as dragon. In their minds, we have a concept in our minds. We see a dragon, something more like one of the dinosaurs. But I noticed that in their understanding of the word is a giant sea serpent or some kind of serpent. And so, yeah, the monster in their minds seems to normally be this snake-like, some kind of giant snake-like thing in the ocean.

I've seen that in a number of their representations, also in just discussions that they had. Yeah, it's very interesting how they have such a different take on it. All right. Let's see. So we're going to talk now about types of art that they had. So one very well-known quote among the scholars who are studying this is one by Clement of Alexandria. He gives this advice for Christians.

He says, "And let our seals be either a dove." So a seal would be like a ring that you'd use to stamp sealing wax whenever you send a letter. You'd put wax on the letter to close it up and then stamp your seal in the hot wax so that everybody could tell it came from you. "Let our seals be either a dove or a fish or a skip, a ship scutting before the wind or a musical lyre," which probably somebody or other used, "or a ship's anchor," which somebody else—I'm sorry about the names—got engraved as a device.

And if there be one fishing, he will remember the apostle and the children drawn out of the water. I'm not sure what the children drawn out of the water is. Do you have an idea, David? I assume he's talking about baptism and we as the children of God. Okay. I would assume it, but I don't know. Could be. And I guess if anyone's going to be baptized, just remember that if you're being pulled out of the water, that's kind of like a fisherman pulling a fish out of the water.

And he finishes, "For we are not to delineate the faces of idols who we are prohibited to cleave to them." And I think somewhere else—I couldn't find the quote—but somewhere else, I think he said not to use swords as your seal and things like that because we're people of peace. So I actually managed to find a seal after some digging, a sealing ring. Oh, that's not it. There we go. That has an anchor and two fish. So this would have been okay according to Clement of Alexandria.

If you had this, you'd be in his great good graces. Let me see if I can enlarge it. It's a little hard to see, but can people see the anchor? And then you can't obviously tell that these are fish, but the picture says that they're fish, so I trust it. And you can kind of see the way it's engraved here. So when you stamped the seal, the anchor would stand out and the fish would stand out because they'd been carved into the stone. And we'll go back to the one before because that was interesting too.

So one interesting kind of medium that they had back then that I had no idea existed is called gold glass. So basically, that was a really thin sheet of gold sandwiched between glass. So they could have a gold glass plate or this is a medallion. And they could do art on the gold leaf that was in between the plates. So this is an example. This isn't a Christian artwork that I know of, but this is an example of what it could have looked like. And this is actually fairly good portraits.

I imagine that you would be able to recognize these people if you ran into them in a time machine or in heaven if they happen to be there. So. It's interesting being non-Christian. I mean, as soon as I saw it, I thought, "That can't be Christian." You see the necklace on the woman and the earrings, no head coverings. It looks like her hair is kind of those fine braids that Paul talks against that was very expensive and time-consuming to do.

Their dress is not quite as simple as the ones that were on the ladies in the catacombs. It's very interesting seeing the difference. Yeah, very much so. Let's see. Another medium where they had their art—sorry for wiggling my mouse around. I was just trying to find it, and it wasn't over here where I expected it to be—is sarcophagi. So a sarcophagus is basically a kind of coffin that would be displayed more prominently. So it would be a marble box or concrete box or something.

And it would often have art on it and would be displayed above ground. So this one doesn't really have a lot of art on it. This one isn't a Christian one necessarily. I think I forget where it is. Oh, I think it was found in Tyre, and it might be a Christian one. I'm not sure. But this is just to give you an example of where a sarcophagus might be found. And here is a very well-known sarcophagus that contains a Gaius of the Neo Junius Bossus or contained. I don't know if it still does.

So this is actually after Constantine. And as we'll see, there are a few things that are slightly different about this than with sarcophagi before Constantine or art before Constantine. But this is one of the best preserved ones we have. So the ones before would often have a lot more complicated scenes, just all sorts of different figures all over the place, whereas this is more clearly delineated. And let's see. So this, I think, is Abraham and Isaac, and there's the ram. Yeah. Let me see what I can do.

Is that visible for people? And then I'm not sure what this is. This is Jesus with Peter and Paul on either side of him, Jesus enthroned. So you see, after Constantine, you see a lot more pictures of Jesus being enthroned. And so that's something that you don't really tend to see before. I'm not sure what this is. Supposedly, this is Pilate washing his hands, but I don't know how they know for sure. There is a, I guess, hand wash bowl there. I'm not sure what this is. This obviously is Adam and Eve.

And I think this is Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem. I'm not sure on that. Zacchaeus. Zacchaeus. Oh, that does kind of look like Zacchaeus. Right. And I was also thinking about Balaam, but it didn't quite fit that. I think it's Jesus riding into Jerusalem because I think that these guys are holding branches, and this guy might be throwing his cloak under Jesus' feet. I'm not sure. This might be Daniel and the Lions then. I have no idea. It might be something else too, and I'm not sure what this is.

So yeah, just very interesting. A lot of the art that survives is funerary art, as in that was surrounding burial of people. I guess what we'd now have in a graveyard, they had in the catacombs. Let's see. So I showed you the gold glass medallion. And as you've probably guessed, quite a bit of art is from the catacombs, either wall art or ceiling art. Just as a note, the catacombs weren't places of worship that we know of.

I mean, obviously, people probably prayed there, but they were basically—they just used them as graveyards. They wanted to make sure they buried everybody because they were Christians and eventually run out of space to bury people if you have to do it in a cemetery. So they dug tunnels and put people in walls. So here you can see some orants. This might be the apostles fishing. Can you guys see well enough? I can make it bigger. Here. Anyone know what this is now? I do think you need to make it bigger. Okay.

All right. I'll make it bigger. Yep. This is Noah and the Ark with slightly different dimensions. This, I think, is Moses striking the rock, but it's a little hard to tell. And then this is the Adoration of the Magi. So basically, when the wise men came to bring gifts to Jesus, you can see these guys bringing gifts, and there's Mary and Jesus sitting. So there were only two wise men, not three? Yeah. There were only two wise men. Just so you know, we have a picture of it. They were taking a photo. Right. Yep. Okay.

And then one interesting thing—okay. One interesting thing is we don't actually have a lot of pictures of Mary because obviously at this time period, they didn't venerate Mary. But we do have a few that we think are of Mary. That last one was obviously—and I showed one before. And here's another one that's one of the only few that have Mary on them that we think anyway. So this is a woman with a child. We think it's Mary, and we're not sure who this man is. He seems to be pointing upward.

So it could be any number of people, maybe an Old Testament prophet, or it could be an angel, could be anything. Okay. And now I'm going to show you some art that was actually in a church. So in the 1920s, archaeologists excavated this town called Doura Europos, and I forget where it is, maybe in Syria somewhere. I'm not sure. That sounds wrong, but it might be. No, you're right. Okay. And it had a baptistery and an assembly hall in it. So it's—oh, sorry.

The city had a house that had a baptistery and an assembly hall in it. So basically, a Christian house that was used for multiple things. So this is a reconstruction of what it could have looked like with the art that they were able to reconstruct from the walls. You can see here, somebody could be dipped in water here. There was a picture here, which we'll see it—pictures on the walls and stuff. I don't know if in the assembly hall there were any pictures.

As far as I know, there weren't any, but here in the baptistery, there were. So let's just go through some of the art here. So here's how it was laid out. There's a courtyard. Here was the assembly hall, baptistery. Apparently, it had a second-story vestibule. Don't you wish we had a church like this? So if you lived back then, maybe you would have had one. Okay. So this is what—so these pictures are black and white because this was excavated in the 1920s and '30s. So that's what they had back then.

You can see the baptistery right here, and here are several women in a procession. We'll see that art shortly. And here's some more art that we'll also see. Here's what the baptistery looked like from above. I mean, obviously, you wouldn't be standing above, but they're excavating it. Here it is again, and you can see this art. Anyone want to make a guess as to what this art might be? It's a good shepherd. It's hard to tell because of how in the state of repair.

So this is what it would have looked like, or a sketch of what it would have looked like. The good shepherd, some sheep, and Adam and Eve showing up here. There was maybe other art. We don't know. And I found it interesting that in that, whatever you call it, arched place, there's stars up above. I don't know if that symbolizes the great cloud of witnesses or if that's reminding us of how God promised to Abraham that his seed would be numbered like the stars. I'm not sure. Here is someone drawing water from a well.

This might be Rebecca drawing water from the well, or it might be the Samaritan woman that Jesus spoke to. This, let's see. Do we have a clear—no, we don't. This, and we have—oh, I must have skipped over the one where it was slightly clearer. This is Jesus who is healing the guy who's on his bed, and now the guy can take up his bed and walk. Actually, let me see if I can run back to—there we go. So this is in a catacomb. This isn't actually in that building, but this is Jesus being baptized by John.

I'm not sure who this is. And this is a picture, again, of the guy taking up his bed and walking. You can see, I guess it was a rope frame that he took out. Oh, there we were. So here again, you can see him taking up his bed and walking. This, no one's quite sure who these women are. They're a procession of women who might be the wise virgins or it might be the women going to the tomb. I think it's probably the wise virgins. That would be my guess because it seems like they're going to a house with a light there.

They've got their torches lit. I'm not sure on that one. And here's a reconstruction of what that would have looked like. Basically, these grayed-out areas are the areas that they kind of have to fill in from their imagination. This is Jesus and Peter walking on the water. And here's a good, better picture of Jesus raising the man. Oh, okay. This is a little farther than I wanted to go. So that's the art that they had then. The one type of art that they didn't have is the type of art that you'd pray to, like icons.

They didn't believe in praying to images as some Christians do today and as the pagans did then. Their reasoning for this, because the pagans wanted to know why, was that you can't—it's silly to vow to matter and expect that your reverence would go to God. So Clement of Alexandria said, "But images being motionless, inert, and senseless are bound, nailed, glued, or melted, filed, sawed, polished, carved.

The senseless earth is dishonored by the makers of images who change it by their art from its proper nature and induce men to worship it. And the makers of gods worship not gods and demons, but in my view, earth and art which go to make up images." That was his thought. So pagans noticed that Christians didn't have sacred images that they bowed down to, and they thought that was really weird because, I mean, who would worship without an image?

How could you possibly worship a god without an image of a god is what they wondered. And this is one reason why they accused Christians of being atheists because they're like, "If you aren't worshiping your god with an image, what if you just aren't worshiping a god at all? Or maybe you just don't respect your gods enough to show them in an image." So Origen replied to one pagan critic named Celsus, and he said that Celsus said that Christians cannot tolerate temples, altars, or images.

And Celsus explained that in this, they're like the Scythians, the nomadic tribes of Libya, the Syrians who worship no god, as in atheists, and some other of the most barbarous and impious nations of the world. So he's saying because they don't have images, they're just these really impious and barbarous people.

And Origen said, "To this, our answer is that if the groups that Celsus was talking about cannot bear the sight of temples, altars, and images, it does not follow because we cannot suffer them any more than they, that the grounds on which we object to them are the same as theirs." So he's saying we're objecting to images for different grounds.

He says, "None of the former abhor altars and images on the ground that they are afraid of degrading the worship of God and reducing it to the worship of material things wrought by the hands of men.

Christians not only avoid temples, altars, and images, but are ready to suffer death when it is necessary rather than debased by any such impiety the conception which they have of the most high God." So he's saying it's actually debasing the worship of God to be addressing your prayers to an image when God isn't material. You're reducing God to that, and you're risking worshiping matter instead of God by doing that.

Interestingly, there were one issue that they ran into in those days was that there were Christians who were making idols not to worship themselves, but Tertullian talks about these Christian idol makers.

He says, "I make," says one, "but I worship not as if there were some cause for which you dare not worship besides that for which you ought not also to make the offense done to God, namely in either case." And then he goes on to say, "Well, you aren't worshiping these gods, but you're making them so that someone else is worshiping them." And basically, you're being like a pagan priest to these pagans who are worshiping gods. And let's see.

And I think also Hippolytus in the Apostolic tradition mentioned that if someone wasn't an artist and they became a Christian, he said, "You need to stop creating idols. That's not something you can continue to do." All right. So now let's talk about some later art. One type of art that later Christians had after the time of Constantine was art that was actually on their clothing, like art on textiles.

We don't really know for sure whether they did before then or not because we don't have—because cloth degrades a lot, but it didn't seem to be—it doesn't seem to be something that happened before the fourth and fifth centuries. But there's a bishop, Asterius of Amasea, who, let's see, in the fourth century, somewhere in the 300s, this person quotes, complains about enthusiastic and presumably wealthy Christians wearing clothing with whole Christian stories on them.

And he says, "They devise for themselves their wives and children gay-colored—that would be brightly colored dresses decorated with thousands of figures. You may see the wedding of Galilee with the water jars, the paralytic carrying his bed on his shoulders, the blind man healed by means of clay, the woman with an issue of blood seizing Christ's hem, the sinful woman falling at the feet of Jesus, Lazarus coming back to life from his tomb.

In doing this, they consider themselves to be religious." I thought that was really interesting. They kind of had printed T-shirts back then. It just was a lot more expensive for them than it is for us. That was quoted by Jennifer Ball in this book here. So I had mentioned earlier on that Robin Jensen mentioned these dogmatic images that started appearing in the mid-fourth century. This is after Constantine and the first council of Nicaea. Christians then started having more portraits of Christ and the saints.

And someone says, "I forget." I think this is Norbert Zimmerman, who's also in this book. By the mid-fourth century, the biblical narrative scenes of the Old Testament characters and Jesus' miracles were joined by more dogmatically oriented and imperially influenced subjects. Some of this evolution may reflect the contemporary debates over the nature of the Trinity or the person and work of Christ, but the increasing prosperity and security of the church during the fourth century must have contributed as well.

Portraits of Christ, the apostles, and other saints also began to appear with more regularity, often as devotional images without specific narrative contexts. So what he's saying is instead of being in Bible story pictures like this kind of thing, you'd actually start seeing portraits of Jesus and the saints. They weren't typically venerated at that point, like the portraits weren't typically prayed to at that point, but it was opening the door for that kind of thing to happen.

And Christ was now often portrayed as enthroned rather than like a good shepherd or in healing miracles. And here's an example of that. This is a common motif called Christ Pantocrator. If I'm saying it right, it basically means ruler of all. And you can see how now they've actually got a portrait of Jesus with long hair and a beard. You see this nimbus around him, this kind of halo. That's something that was borrowed from pagan icons. And here's another one. This is in the Hagia Sophia mosaic.

This one here was the first one, I think, was from—oh, whoa. The first one was from the 500s, I think, or 600s. I forget which. And this is somewhere from like the 1100s or 1200s. So because Constantine was the emperor, he wanted to—and Christ was now his god—he wanted, obviously, to be portrayed as being enthroned by this god who was kind of the ruler of all, the king of all, which Christ is the ruler of all and king of all.

But it's interesting that that focus appeared when Constantine really valued it for his political purposes. And today, the Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox have pictures of the saints that they call icons. For Roman Catholics, often it's statues. And they bow to kiss these pictures, and they do that to show honor to the saints, and they pray to the pictures to ask for intercession from the saints, which they call a veneration of images. Their idea is not to worship idols, but to honor the saints.

But unfortunately, this was not something that the early Christians did. This is a practice that came into being. Scholars tend to think it's somewhere in the 500s and 600s that it came into being. And in 787, there was actually a council that declared that you had to venerate images. So here are a few examples of that. Here's an image of Mary from the 500s. Let's see. You can see how she's got a nimbus around her. She's holding Jesus, and she's got angels around her and flowers, etc.

So this is quite possibly an image that would have been prayed to from that era. And what's interesting is let's compare it with this image. This is an image of Hestia, which was a Roman—yeah, I think a Roman goddess. And this is textiles from the same era. And you can see how it's kind of—it's similar styles and obviously a similar purpose for these artworks. And let's see. Oh, and here, and obviously in our Bibles, since we use the Orthodox Study Bible, we also see icons as well.

I think there's a lot of beauty in icons, even though obviously it's not something that they aren't something we should be praying to or venerating. But I really like the—I really like the imagery, for example, of this and icon of the resurrection, Christ rising from the dead. Here's the strong man that he mentions bound beneath his feet, and he's raising the dead in the final resurrection, I guess. And I think this is some kings.

So again, there's a lot of meaning to this kind of art, but I think there's a reason why the early Christians didn't have this type of art because it became very much a temptation for undue honor to be shown to this kind of art. And sadly, that's what has occurred in some areas of Christianity. So that's all I've got. Does anyone have questions or comments on this art? I found something very interesting. I don't know if I ever made the connection before.

So when you brought out the idea that before Constantine, Christ was often represented as a shepherd, and then after he became enthroned, he's represented as a throne. And I wonder, I've often wondered why prayer—like today, we think of prayer as someone a full-body bow before a kid. Whereas in early Christians, they're standing open-handed before a shepherd. And when you see that visual thing change, I wonder if that's not why the prayer—we look at prayer differently too. He's a shepherd. He's available.

I'm not sure what the difference is, but you stand and make your—you pray before him. It was just an interesting—it popped out to me for whatever. I thought that interesting. The early Christians prayed open-handed, standing often. Yeah, I think today, I remember reading that and thinking, "Oh, that's weird." But maybe I'm the weird one. I think that's a good point that Jesus is portrayed more humbly and generously, I guess, by the early Christians. Yeah. Yeah.

Rather than kind of distant, this king overall that you have to placate. Yeah. So something that threw me for many years is I would see pictures in books from the catacombs, and maybe you would have Mary in this exalted position. And I was like, "Wow, the writings don't exalt her, but these pictures are from the catacombs." And I didn't realize, and it's important I'm mentioning this just because others may come across this. Just because the picture is in the catacombs doesn't mean that it's real early.

After persecution ended, I mean, they still kept burying in the catacombs. But more importantly, later on, yeah, they would paint icons and things in the catacombs that may be from the 6th century, 7th century, things like that. So yeah, you have to really double-check what is the year of this picture. And it's really, and I think we could just all see it becomes very obvious now once you see it. The stuff from the 200s looks so different from the stuff from the 6th and 700s. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's a good point to bring up. There's even art as late as the 1100s, I think, in some of the catacombs. And again, it just looks so different from what would have originally been painted by the people who buried people there. Any other thoughts? I think there was one from over here. I enjoyed just seeing the stories that were important and the concepts that were important to them. I've been doing some study about culture and some of that whole thing.

And that's one of the things that creates culture is values. And values come from heroes and stories. And it's just interesting to see what stories were prominent and important. And also just the concept of what salvation was about for them too. Who starved and being delivered. Healed. That's right. It wasn't about getting a consequence of sin taken away. It was more about a restoration and a deliverance. Yeah. That's a great point.

And a lot of scholars make the point that the art that they tend to have is around themes of salvation, like healings and miracles of that sort, raising Lazarus, Noah in the ark, Noah being saved, and so on, Jonah. And then as time goes on, their emphasis changes a bit. I had one thought. Go ahead. When you were showing the pictures of the early pictures of Jesus stating the shepherd, I was thinking that was the time before the state and church were united.

After the state and church were united with Constantine and afterward, then he became this king. At the same time, the church says we have to take up the sword to defend our king and to spread Christianity, a false Christianity. I was just thinking how that contrasted with the good shepherd before the time of Constantine and his thing. Yeah. I think that's a very good insight. Yeah. Any final thoughts on this? All right. Well, I enjoyed sharing this, and I hope you enjoyed hearing about it.

I will turn this over to Kevin. Would you lead us in a prayer? And then I think Bill has a song for us. Interesting.