Customer Reviews

The Image of Christ

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I have noticed that Christian Art books have been growing in popularity. Many of these are cheap opportunities to jump on a commercial bandwagon in an attempt to make a quick buck. This book is the REAL THING. It is outstanding. The pictures are large and sharp. The articles are informative and written well. This book values its subject and covers a wide spectrum of Christ centered art. I found this book both thoughtful and moving.

This book is equivalently the catalog of an art exhibit at the National Gallery London from February to May, 2000 on how Christ has been portrayed in art from a fourth century Good Shepherd statue to Stanley Spencer's 1926 Resurrection, Cookham. The magnificently illustrated 79 items in the show are supplemented with photographs of 52 additional pieces of art that develop the theology out of which each set of images arose. It is a thing of beauty and pleasure, useful for prayer and theology, and the sort of thing needed in today. Too many postmodern art students have lost contact with the Christian symbols of the western world and are unaware of the depths of their own cultural heritage. This book will be very informative for them and even for the already theologically educated.

The focus of this book is the Collection in Trafalgar Square but is not exclusive to it. It contains works of art that either picture a representation of Christ or allude to Him. I found my reading to be a delightful and awe-inspiring theological journey. Each chapter deals with a different aspect of how Christ is perceived. Several authors have compiled brief descriptions of the works that explain their significance and meaning. The book traces it course through predominately Catholic art. This may have been done mostly out of necesity because the plethera of art from the 13th to 20th centuries is largely by Catholics. However, it would have been nice to see some more Protestant imagery to complete the respesentation of Christ in art.

The Image of Christ provides an overview of the heritage of Christian art, from paintings and prints to sculptures from the early Christian era to modern times, examining the purposes for each and exploring their meaning to viewers. Depictions of Christ via symbol and image are examined in a treatise recommended for art libraries and religious holdings alike.

This is a lovely book, and worth every penny; but the buyer should know in advance that its pictures are manmade images of Christ, rather than images of himself that Christ has revealed to man. There's a difference.

Humans speak today of "finding God" for the simple and obvious reason that God can be difficult to spot. The Virgin Mary appears often enough, but coyly. On one recent tour of North America, she manifested herself, not just on Diana Duyser's $28,000 toasted cheese sandwich (old news), but as a simulacrum on the glass facade of office buildings from Florida to Massachusetts to California, and in the bark of a black locust tree in Connecticut, and as rust stains on a giant oil tank in Ohio, and even as skillet burns on a tortilla shell in New Mexico - causing subsequent traffic jams as the faithful flocked to see her. (I'm not blaming Mary, that's just her way, she's shy. Besides, the traffic jams would be far worse if she showed herself in the all-together.)

If it's Jesus you want to see, don't worry, he'll be back, he promised, and it won't be on a tortilla shell. Caveat: when you see him, you may not recognise him. Don't be fooled by the pictures in this lovely book, called _Images of Christ_. Don't be fooled by posters in your local Bible bookstore of a handsome, longhaired, dewy-eyed European male. Don't be fooled by James Caviezel, who played Jesus in Mel Gibson's S&M extravaganza. Jesus Christ looks no more like those fellows than the real Moses at age 120 looked like Charlton Heston.

(Okay: bad comparison: Moses at age 120 actually did resemble Charlton Heston, but Jesus Christ does not look anything like James Caviezel.)

So what does Jesus look like, you ask? Well, Belial or Beelzebub could give you an accurate description - the Son of God goes way back with all three of us - but you won't get a straight answer from my pals. Belial will just grunt, or shrug his shoulders and say, "Who cares?" Beelzebub, always the smart aleck, will say that "Jesus of Nazareth and his stepfather, Joseph of Nazareth, are dead ringers"; or that "Jesus looks just like that fellow who showed up on the Shroud of Turin"; or that "Jesus and shortstop Zoilo ('Zorro') Versalles are long-lost Twins."

If you say, "No, I mean, what does Jesus look like right now, in Heaven, as the Son of God?" Beelzebub will ask you first to tell him what the holy Ghost looks like; and when you say, "I imagine him in the form of a white dove," he'll say, "Fine, fine. Now imagine a second one: Jesus looks just like him, without the feathers - like a holy Ghost, plucked!" He will then chuckle, and drain down the rest of his beer.

Since returning to Heaven in 31 CE, Jesus has shown his true face to mortal men only three times. The first revelation was to Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus in 36 CE. The second was to Saint John in 65 CE, when he was writing the book of Revelation. The third manifestation came in April 1995, to born-again Christians around the world, or at least to those who had Internet access: The Hubble Space Telescope relayed a picture, authenticated by NASA, of the so-called Eagle Nebula, 7000 light years from Earth. In that photograph from space, amongst a swirling cloud of gas some six trillion miles long, Jesus revealed his countenance to Christian believers; and the discovery came as a terrible shock. Here is the plain, unvarnished truth, based on the Hubble photograph: Jesus looks very much like a 30-year-old Osama Bin-Laden (i.e., before that incident in 1997, when Osama got punched in the nose by a recoil from his own rifle butt). Slight difference in dress, granted - but if Osama had gotten his nose restored, his face would again have been virtually indistinguishable from that of Jesus of Nazareth. Even their whispery voices would be hard to tell apart, were it not that Jesus spoke Aramaic and Hebrew while Bin-Laden spoke Arabic and English.

I'm not suggesting that Jesus and Osama are on the same side. Osama was a resentnik who would forgive only those who share his creed, and he took vengeance on everyone else with a relentless ferocity out of all proportion to anything his victims ever did wrong. Does that sound like Jesus?

Okay, yes, maybe it does, but Jesus and Osama are different in other ways, such as their birth dates and fingerprints and shoe size. What's weird is just the striking physical resemblance. In fact, in April 1995 when various Arabic news media reported on NASA's photographs of the Eagle Nebula, thousands of Muslims saw the face of Jesus Christ - but mistook it for a photograph of Osama Bin-Laden.

--L

"You know how much I go to church."

"'How little' you mean. Still, you must know that, as craftsmanship, paintings and sculpture of the Crucifixion are usually atrocious-and the painted, realistic ones often used in churches are the worst of all...the blood looks like catsup and that ex-carpenter is usually portrayed as if he were a pansy...which He certainly was not if there is any truth in the four Gospels at all. He was a hearty man, probably muscular and of rugged health. Buy despite the almost uniformly poor portrayal in representations of the Crucifixion, a poor one is about as effective as a good one for most people. They don't see the defects; what they see is a symbol which inspires their deepest emotions; it recalls to them the Agony and Sacrifice of God."

Robert A. Hienlein-"Stranger in a Strange Land"