Christian Imagery Decoded | Jesus Christ | Lazarus | Shroud of Turin

Puzzling Imagery

Waldemar Januszczak attempts to decode the hidden meaning in much of the early Christian imagery found all around Christendom.

It is not until the beginning of our period, the so-called Dark Ages, 300 years after the birth of Christ that figures and scenes begin to pop up at last in Christian imagery. Look how puzzling they were. We are in a third century Christian burial chamber, in the catacombs of Priscilla. A rich, Christian family was buried here, and look what’s on the walls. Over here, some peacocks. Over there, three chaps standing in a fire. And over here, some kind of sea dragon, with someone coming out of its mouth.

So, let’s decode all of this. The peacocks are symbols of eternity. Because peacocks replace their beautiful feathers every year, the ancients believed their flesh couldn’t rot. It was eternal.

The three young men are described in the Bible by the prophet, Daniel. Three young Israelites were set on fire by the Babylonians, but God protected them and the Babylonian fires couldn’t touch them.

The chap coming out of the sea monster is the prophet, Jonah, who you may remember was swallowed by a whale for three whole days. After three days, the whale spat him out again, and he returned to dry land, a wiser man.

Christian Imagery of Salvation

Cleveland Museum Sculpture

The thread that unites all these cryptic images is salvation. Hope. “God saved the three young men from the fire, he saved Jonah from the whale and he will save you, too.”

Jonah is also the subject of the earliest surviving masterpieces of Christian sculpture. Found today in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Jonah, swallowed by the whale, spat out by the whale and return to dry land a wiser man.

Jonah is particularly significant because the early Christians used him as a stand-in for Jesus himself. Jesus, remember, also rose from the dead after three days. The reason why Jonah is so popular in the catacombs is because he is a way of showing Jesus… without showing Jesus. Replacement, another code, a symbol.

Turin Shroud Image

We’ve been down here, what, 5 minutes, and look how many different ways we have already seen to represent Jesus without actually showing him. He is the Chi-Rho, the word sign, he’s Jonah in the whale, he’s the fish, the anchor. What we haven’t seen yet is a Jesus we can all recognise. A Jesus who actually looks like Jesus.

The truth is, no one in early Christian art had a clue what he actually looked like. The Bible doesn’t describe him, no one does. So art took an extremely long time to come up with a face for Jesus. And I think, the search for that face is the greatest artistic tussle of the Dark Ages.

Jesus Christ – Christian Imagery

Cherubic Jesus Christ

The proof that no one actually knew what Jesus Christ looked like is this controversial relic. The Shroud of Turin. It is said to be the cloth in which Jesus was wrapped at his death. This haunting likeness is the true face of Christ, preserve miraculously in his blood, or so they say.

The Shroud of Turin doesn’t get shown very often, but when it does, thousands of pilgrims flock to Turin to see it. Most of them believe they are looking at the true face of Christ. When I went to see it, there was such a powerful atmosphere in the church, so many people, so certain they were staring at the remains of Jesus.

I’m afraid they weren’t, because Jesus Christ didn’t look like that. At least, not according to the evidence left behind by the first Christian artists who described him.

According to these first Christian artists, Jesus Christ actually looked… like this. Blonde, fresh-faced, boyish, the earliest images of Jesus looked nothing like the Jesus we know today. And nothing like the Jesus Christ on the Turin Shroud. Jesus at first is a happy-go-lucky character, curly-haired and handsome. He is usually shown waving his wand about, performing remarkable miracles.

Crucified Jesus Christ

So here, he is turning water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana, and here he is curing the paralytic, who couldn’t walk until he met the baby-faced Jesus Christ. And over here, a blind man is being cured by Jesus again. And finally, with a wave of that Harry Potter wand of his, this is Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. You can always tell Lazarus in early Christian imagery, because he looks like an Egyptian mummy, all wrapped up.

What you never see in these very first examples of Christian imagery is a Jesus Christ who is suffering in pain, covered in blood like the one on the Turin Shroud. And this Jesus doesn’t turn up in art for 1,000 years or so, because the tortured Jesus is a creation of the Middle Ages, an expression of mediaeval guilt and terror.

What horrible pains the artistic mind went on to inflict on the crucified Jesus in the centuries ahead. How harshly it whipped him and scourged him and punctured him.

In the beginning, though, artists didn’t do that. The first Jesuses in art are young, handsome, curly-haired and free. So, either Jesus deliberately misled his followers about what he actually looked like for the first 1,000 years or so of Christianity, or the Turin Shroud is a mediaeval fake. I know what I think.

Further Reading

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External Links

Christian Imagery and Symbolism – Wikipedia Page

Christian Imagery Decoded | Jesus Christ | Lazarus | Shroud of Turin
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