Apollo – God of the Sun
The first Christians weren’t looking for a God who made them feel guilty. That would never have caught on. They were looking for a God who would save them, and fill them with hope. So as their model for the first Jesus, Christian artists selected the youngest and handsomest of the pagan gods. They chose Apollo, the god of the sun. Blonde, and not bearded, youthful and curly-haired. Apollo was a God who made you feel good.
So the first Jesuses were curly-haired and pretty, because they borrowed that look from Apollo. And it went further than that. When a mysterious Christian statue was dug up out of the ground it was thought to represent a woman, an unknown goddess, a muse.
Only later was realised that this, too, was an early Jesus. In that wonderful museum in Cleveland, the one with the Jonah Marbles, there is a carving of Apollo performing a miracle with Nike, the goddess of victory. Apollo is the robed figure on the left. And look how shapely he is. How easily we might mistake him, too, for a woman.
Pagan gods could be male and female. They could amalgamate the sexes, represent both genders at once. Just like this Jesus here. Extraordinary as it sounds, the first Jesuses were sometimes made to look feminine on purpose.
They were given suggestions of breasts, beautiful faces, soft bodies and long hair. “There is neither male nor female”, wrote St Paul to the Galicians. “You are all one in Jesus.”
Pagan Goddesses
The pagans have lots of goddesses to worship Venus, Isis, Diana. But Christianity had none. Christianity believed in one true God and he was masculine. There was an entire feminine side missing. So the feminisation of Jesus was a deliberate artistic attempt to cater for both sexes.
It produced some of the Dark Ages’ most unexpected imagery. In Ravenna, in the magnificent Aryan baptistery, there is an un-bearded Jesus being baptised in the River Jordan. He is so soft and feminine. A podgy and delicate Christ with childbearing hips.
Before this girlish Jesus could become fully masculine, grow a beard and turn into a man, Christianity needed to find a feminine presence of it’s own.
The borrowing of Christ’s face from Apollo shouldn’t really surprise us. The early Christians borrowed from the pagans because that’s what art does. It uses what’s already there. It is important to remember, too, that for most of these early centuries of Christianity, Christians and pagans lived together in reasonable harmony. Those terrible periods of persecution, when the Romans murdered the Christians in terrible ways, those were rare, the exception, not the rule.
Later, when the Roman Empire became officially Christian, under the Emperor Constantine, aggressive Christian writers, looking back on these times, did what the victor always does in a war. They rewrote history from their point of view. Dramatised it, exaggerated it.
In most of the Roman Empire, particularly at the borders, like here, in Roman Syria, pagans lived next door to Christians, Christians lived next door to Jews, and all of them muddled along together.
Mithras
The earliest known Christian church has been found in the Syrian border town of Dura-Europos. It was next to the earliest known synagogue. And around the corner was the temple of the bull-God Mithras. All these different religions swapped each other’s converts, borrowed each other’s gods, and influenced each other’s art.
Take the Halo, that miraculous circle of light which you see around the heads of holy figures in Christian art. At first, there were no halos, Jesus was the magician with the wand, and that was enough to differentiate him. But as Christian art grew busier, and more and more characters popped up in it, Jesus needed to look more obviously divine. So Christian artists did what the pagans did, they gave him a halo, borrowed once again from Apollo.
Long before Jesus acquired his miraculous nimbus of light, Apollo already had one. As circle of symbolic sunshine emanating from his head to signify his solar divinity.
Isis – The Earth Mother
Another crucial borrowing from pagans was the image of the Angel. If you look at a typical Roman sarcophagus from the early Christian era, you will usually see a pair of winged figures carrying a portrait of the deceased upwards in glory. They look exactly like angels, but they are not. They’re Roman figures of victory. Nikes, pagan transporters of the soul.
But the most significant of these pagan borrowings was a female figure adapted from Egyptian art. She became very popular in Christianity. Indeed, she was central to it. But that is not how she began. The Egyptian earth mother, Isis, was one of the most revered of all pagan gods. She was the goddess of fertility, the mother goddess, from whom all life originally sprang.
When you wanted babies, you prayed to Isis. When you wanted your crops to grow, you prayed to Isis. Whoever you were, slave, servant, outcast, you prayed to Isis, because Isis would protect you.
To emphasise her caring nature, Isis was often shown with a baby on her knee whom she breastfeeds regally. He is Horus, son of Isis. Horus was the God of the sky, the Egyptian Apollo, and his birthday fell at the winter solstice, sometime around December 25.
External Links
Apollo, God of the Sun – Wikipedia Page
Isis, Earth Mother – Wikipedia Page
