Such a scape-goat cult/meme is just as strong now in 2008 as it has ever been in any time in HIS-story.

http://www.jesusneverexisted.com

But you will of course say that we are not part of what is described on this website. And I say bollocks because everything that you presume to “know” about Jesus, including the contents of the Bible, is informed or conditioned by the church as a very worldly institution.

Plus every aspect of your presumed body-mind personality is the result of the conditioning that you received (and still receive) from/by the “culture” at large in which you have grown up. Its “values”, its “knowledge”, its modes of pereception etc etc are ALL indelibly imprinted into the cells of your body and the patterning of your brain and nervous system.

Which version of “jesus” do you want as President?
The “jesus” as promoted by the Dominionists who want to create a theocratic (fascist) state!
Who would “jesus” bomb?
Some christians quite rightly say no one.
But on the other hand many christians are more than happy to bomb any and every one into submission to the West.

I think I like this piece of art because of the story behind it. I mean, Jesus being rejected by the Church because it wasn’t good-looking, it wasn’t appealing to look at, it wasn’t a Jesus we like to see… So, am i being a pro-iconist because i have an icon that represents a metaphor of a larger problem in the Church then (and certainly even worse today!)?

Other thoughts, the drawing of the Jesus “fish” (much like the same drawing we have on our bumper stickers) was used as a cross-cultural sign of peace. when people met each other on journey’s (and didn’t speak the same language) one would draw the top arch of the fish in the sand, and when the other person drew the completed arch on the bottom – they knew each other as brothers/sisters in the Kingdom.
Also – martyrs in antiquity were given the icon of a palm branch near or on their tombs to designate their martyrdom as one who followed the cross.

Lastly, I like trees. I painted a huge mural of one on my wall. I like the image of one large tree with a half-eaten apple on one branch and the crucifixion of the flesh of Christ on another. Life in the garden was taken away by the fruit on a tree, life was redeemed and given by the man that hung on a tree. Somehow, when I look at trees, something happens inside me – and this ‘feeling’ is directed by the remembrance of what I see in and through the Tree.

I need to look into this more because i feel also myself teetering on a fine line between admiration and necessitation

Chris, this point about iconography and the legalization was originally Jason’s point: “But when Christianity was legalized in the 4th century priests encouraged artists to create paintings …” But then he comes back and tells me that icons are part of the religious landscape before Constantine. I’ll defer to Jason on this stuff. I don’t know much about ancient iconography.

I also like your stuff about Ezekiel drawing pictures in the dirt. I just want someone to help me understand how folks get around the commandment against making images of God or creatures. I’m sure someone is seeing something that I don’t see. (Maybe you can draw me a picture in the dirt of how it all works out).

Jason, I’ll admit that I don’t know too much about this stuff. So I’m open to changing my mind. In fact, I don’t think I have an ‘opinion’ or conviction about icons. I just need some help in connecting the dots.

On Anabaptist iconoclasm… I’ve only done limited reading. This book is awesome: Peter Matheson, The Imaginative World of the Reformation (2001), and it’s not very long. He turns the tables on accusations of iconoclasm during the Reformation. He argues that the destruction of images served the creation of new images: “such iconoclasm may be eclipsed by what we can call the iconopoiac energies of the Reformation, its creativity in producing new allegories and metaphors for the divine and the human” (6). So, towards the end of the 15th century and on into the 16th, there are a bunch of Catholics who hear the good news that they are no longer “slaves to the law.” They hear that there is “no lord but the Lord.” So they reject all the ways in which feudal lords and priests use the church to subjugate them. Peasant Catholics start trying to take back the church from the powers that enslave them. So they get rid of images and structures that tell them that all people are “brothers and sisters,” not masters and serfs. Matheson: “Perhaps what happened in the Reformation was that one imaginative architecture was replaced by another. The divine becomes more intimate, Christ as saviour rather than ominous judge; the human more earthy” (7). A popular new image among the commoners was the “bundschuh,” the peasant boot. Anabaptists are these kind of peasant Catholics.

The anticlerical movement of late medieval Catholicism shows how images are ambiguous. While they may have been used to tell the gospel to the illiterate, they were also used as a way to centralize power. The public buildings (and private estates) that possessed images were the places that controlled God’s relationship to the people. But this problem isn’t unique to icons. The same thing happens with Scripture and Eucharist—removed from the people, something only the priests could handle, not fit for the filthy bodies of the peasants. It’s no mistake that peasant Catholics turned to mystical traditions. One of them was called “the gospel of all creatures”—Christ suffers in all of creation. And when you an animal suffer, or when you yourself suffer, then you can see Christ. Those who suffer through slavish labor intimately feel God’s presence, just as Mary’s labor birthed Christ. Basically, medieval Catholics found Christ’s presence in toil and hardship and dirt and suffering. Images became another way for the authorities to control God’s power. So the people torched the images. That’s what I mean by saying that icons are ambiguous—it depends on who has them and how they are used.

Jason, say a bit more about what you think are “incidental” aspect of Jesus. I have no idea how to think through such decisions. Jesus’ penis is not incidental to the story if you take his circumcision seriously. Isn’t that essential to the story? It’s interesting that iconography of Jesus on the cross always covers his penis. Some argue that it’s because culturally accommodated Christians wanted to distance themselves from the Jewishness of Jesus—and to display his penis would be to have his circumcision staring you in the face.

Even if more “accurate looking” icons (and i do use the term accurate lightly because I do agree with predominate white looking Jesus’ out there) came into play largely after Constantine, I wonder if they were started not just to make pretty pictures but to actually convey Jesus? Meaning, since I am sure not everyone was reading the gospels (the printing press didn’t come out till 16th century – just before Luther began writing – also considering that the gospels weren’t even written until between 50-90 CE) other means were used to preach the good news. So even if martyrdom did cease because of Constantine, the good news still needed to go on. So maybe those icons were needed not to depict a snapshot of Jesus but to tell people about Jesus. Just as much as, lets say, a Christian blog may tell people about the good news of Jesus…

I’m wondering if you know why anabaptists were originally iconoclasts since they were around before colonialism and the advent of modern racism? Just curious.

The root of the dilemma for me is “can we make an image of God?” And you’re right, if we say yes, it’s dangerous because that image can constrain and shape God into our image and be used as a weapon. But that means the incarnation was also dangerous for those same reasons, and, as you alluded to, the historical figure of Jesus has been used as a weapon against Jewish people (strangely enough, by ridding him of his Jewishness).

But if God is willing to take the risk of being imaged as a human and limited by place and culture, then I think we can also (with trepidation) take that risk. Yes, we can see Jesus in the poor, but we can also hear of Jesus in the gospels and see him when those gospels are “written” as images. As John of Damascus writes in his first treatise: “We proclaim Him also by our senses on all sides, and we sanctify the noblest sense, which is that of sight. The image is a memorial, just what words are to a listening ear. What a book is to the literate, that an image is to the illiterate. The image speaks to the sight as words to the ear; it brings us understanding.”

Finally, you make the good point that depicting Jesus as he appears in various cultures would be “ripping him out of his body.” However, the goal of an icon is not to be a photograph. It’s not as though we would have the perfect icon if only they had digital cameras back then or that we would be better off if we used the face reconstructed by archaeology and science. I think we can, and should, depict Jesus as different cultures see him because the incarnation did not mean that every aspect of the body of Jesus of Nazareth “had to be”—there were some which were incidental. The color of his skin was incidental, his Jewsishness was not. His maleness was incidental, his compassion was not. And so on. An icon that portrays Jesus can only be identified as Jesus if it is recognizable by the community of his followers. And his followers, in part, look to what we know of Jesus from the Gospels and the creeds. So, for example, the icon above, from Sinai, images Jesus, not because he takes the form of a 6th century Byzantine man, but because of the symbolism that teaches and points to Jesus: the two fingers pointed in blessing, the three fingers curled back as a symbol of the Trinity, the asymetry of his face that holds together both mercy and justice, the gospel that he holds that tells us where his story his written, etc.

You worry that icons could be an abstraction and a distraction. I agree, they could be, but they don’t have to be. To me they are concrete manifestations of the Jesus we hear about in the gospels and looking at them doesn’t distract any more than reading the gospels does. Rather, in seeing Jesus I better hear and know Jesus which compels me outward.

I think this is the heart of the matter. It’s about our desire to see Jesus. And this is ultimately why I wonder if icons are distractions. It’s funny to me that you think pictures are more real than people. An icon is more of an abstraction than real flesh. And if it’s truly the real flesh of Jesus you want, then go visit prisoners and feed the hungry. Jesus already told you where you can find him—in real flesh and blood, not pretty pictures (Matt 25). Looking at a picture is much easier than dedicating your life to visiting prisoners. That’s my worry: icons are an abstraction and a distraction from the living Jesus scandalously present in the “least of these.”