Behold the Man: Jesus Christ in Art
Jesus of Nazareth is undoubtedly the most important person in the history of Western civilization. His impact on history is unparalleled.
Jesus, a Jewish carpenter from Galilee who became a travelling preacher, spread his message in ancient Israel for only a few years before he was captured, convicted, and crucified for sedition, dying on a cross like a common criminal.
His followers believe that he defeated death, was resurrected, rose up to heaven, and is sitting next to the right hand of God, from where he will return to come and judge all people, the living and the dead, to decide who goes to heaven or hell.
If you are interested in this story, you can read all about it in the New Testament of the Christian Bible.
His followers spread his message throughout the Mediterranean. Eventually it became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Over time it became the dominant religion in Europe, and Europeans took it with them to the New World and other places that they colonized, imposing it on the people that they subjugated. Today Jesus has a global audience.
From the early Middle Ages until today, the Christian church has exercised enormous political, economic, social, and cultural power, more than any other institution in the history of the West. Although it is now fading in the West, Christians in Africa and Asia are picking up the torch. There are still more than two billion Christians in the world, about a third of the world population, making it the largest religion on the planet. Millions of people devote their lives to Jesus, try to follow his teachings, although that is sometimes hard to do, and they try to emulate his example. Millions of people believe that the sacrifice that Jesus made, Jesus who is the Son of God, who became a man to die on the cross for our sins, affects their lives in the present and also their wellbeing for all eternity, for all the time to come.
Even many people who do not believe in Jesus are affected by his teachings in some way. The Western legal system is still infused with Christian ethics, and his name, whether you utter it to ask for help or to cuss, his life, and his teachings, fill our culture to this very day, despite the best efforts of those who oppose Christianity. A whole country, El Salvador, which means “The Saviour,” is named after Jesus.
Some of the most impressive buildings in many cities and towns are still the church or cathedral. How we indicate time, in terms of years, is taken from the date of his birth, B.C. — Before Christ, or A.D. — Anno Domini, the year of our Lord. Modern scholars and writers often use C.E., which stands for Common Era, but it is still dated from the birth of Christ, or the original and generally accepted date of the birth of Christ. Some sources say it is a few years off. Either way, it shows how important Christ is in our culture, and rightly so.
Even nonbelievers acknowledge that Jesus as one of the greatest moral teachers of all times, along with such sages as Confucius, the Buddha, and Mohammad. The message and the ethics that these sages taught are, however, very different.
Muslims recognize Jesus as a prophet and as one of the most important messengers of Allah, their god. They believe, however, that a final prophet, Mohammad, had to clarify the revelation from Allah. The Qur’an, which is the Muslim holy text, refer to Jesus as the “son of Mary” rather than the “son of God” that Christians use. Even so, the Qur’an preserves the tradition that Jesus was a great miracle worker. To Christians, the miracles that Jesus performed are proof that he is divine. Not so for the Mohammedans. In Surah 5:110 (surah being a chapter in the Qur’an) it tells how Jesus made birds out of clay and breathed life into them, which is similar to a tale told among Christians in the apocryphal Arabic Infancy Gospel, another interesting read you should perhaps check out.
According to surah 4:157–158, Jesus was not actually crucified and he did not die. It says:
“They did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, but it was made to appear so”
According to the Muslims, Allah raised Jesus up to himself without allowing Jesus to suffer anything, because according to them, Allah never abandons his prophets to such a fate.
Their respect for Jesus did not prevent the Crusades or the centuries of enmity between Christianity and Islam.
The Jews see Jesus as neither the messiah or as the son of God. They do not think he is divine at all, but just a first-century Jewish man whose teachings sound much like the teachings of other rabbis of that time. Some Jews see Jesus as one of many failed messiahs in Jewish history. They believe Jesus failed to bring in the messianic age because there is still so much suffering in the world.
The Talmud, a collection of sacred Rabbinic teaching, which to Jews is second only in importance to the Jewish Bible, which is the Christian Old Testament, makes several scurrilous claims about Jesus.
Those Rabbis claimed that Jesus’s mother, Mary, who is revered as a saint and called the “Queen of Heaven” by Catholic Christians, had an adulterous affair with a Roman soldier. They say that Jesus fled to Egypt and learned how to do magic there. Those rabbis also claim that Jesus was a rabbinic student who went astray or a rabbi who led his students astray. They also assert that Jesus was tried fairly for blasphemy and idolatry, and that no one came to his defense. Clearly they did not think much of the man.
This set Jews and Christians at each other’s throats for centuries to come.
The Mormons, although named The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, see Jesus very differently from mainstream Christianity in several ways. They see the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as three separate “personages” or three distinct beings, unlike the orthodox Christian view that was decided on at the Council of Nicaea that they are all one. Mormons believe that the Heavenly Father and the Son have glorified physical bodies, while the Holy Ghost, being a ghost, does not. They believe the Heavenly Father is married to a Heavenly Mother, and they literally have sex, just like we do here on earth, all heaving, hot, and sweaty, to create all human spirits. Mormons also believe that the Heavenly Father impregnated Mary literally to beget Jesus.
Jesus, for them, is God’s son as a spirit child, the first spirit guide, and that he does not share the same eternal nature of God the Father.
Some 19th-century Mormon leaders taught that Jesus was married, like all good Mormons, and some said that he had multiple wives, including Mary Magdalene and Martha, just like some Mormons liked to do. This teaching has gone in and out of favor over time.
All this, of course, is blasphemy to conventional Christian ears.
Mormons believe that all people are just like Jesus. They believe we are first born in heaven from a union between the Heavenly Father and the Heavenly Mother, that we exist in heaven before we are born here on earth, that we are sent here to practice obedience, and that we get the chance to exult our spirits and become gods ourselves by performing the Temple rites and the atoning acts as modeled by Jesus. Mormons don’t drink coffee or alcohol, so I guess I am doomed — especially because of the prohibition on java. I can’t do that. I just can’t. I won’t. No.
They see Jesus is the Elder Brother in the family of believers, a “Father” in terms of his obedience, but he’s not the Father. They do not see him as a unique divine-human intermediary but a supreme example for us of what any and all of us can be. That sounds pretty close to Gnosticism to me.
The Gnostics were a variety of cults who believed that all earthly matter is evil, that the world is controlled by an evil archon, a Greek word that means “ruler,” the God of the Christian Old Testament, and that we can only be saved through esoteric knowledge or gnosis. The search for gnōsis was widespread among Christians as well. ‘Gnosticism seems to have been born in paganism, adopted by Judaism, and to have infected the Christian church from the very beginning.’Early church fathers such as Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Ephiphanius called it the heresy of heresies.
Simon Magus seems to have been an early prominent Gnostic. Irenaeus described him as the original arch-heretic and instrument of the devil. According to Johann Weyer, a Dutch physician who wrote the first important and thorough treatise on people who were persecuted for witchcraft, ‘From Simon, as though from a seed pod, there sprouted forth in long succession the monstrous Ophites, the shameless Gnostics . . ., the impious Valentinians, Cardonians, Marcionists, Montanists, and many other heretics’. But Simon himself, in Weyer’s thinking, was heir to an even older genealogy of pagan idolatry that had its origin in Noah’s son Ham and his son Misraim, believed to be identical to Zoroaster, thought to be the inventor of magic. Zoroaster was also known as Zarathustra. He was a religious reformer and the founder of Zoroastrianism, arguably the first documented monotheistic religion in the world, in Persia, more than four thousand years ago.
Gnostics taught that we have inside us sparks of the divine light that had become imprisoned in the world of matter and that we must escape from it, in order to find our way back to our divine source. It is the idea that we are essentially all one and part of god. According to basic gnostic mythology, those human beings who carried the spark in themselves were rebelling against the demiurge, an ignorant or evil deity, the God of the Christians and Jews, who had created this, what they see as a lower world of darkness and ignorance as a prison for the soul, and therefore sought to prevent human beings from waking up to their true divine identity.
According to Christians, this is a heretical view and the early Church Fathers dealt with it decisively. However, these ideas survived in esoteric circles and secret societies, and it is, now that Christianity seems to be in decline, coming to the fore once again, but that is just an aside.
According to Mormons, Jesus continues to redeem Mormons in the spirit world. Mormons also believe that Jesus is going to restore his kingdom on the American continent, of course. That is good to know. America, f*ck yeah!
Hinduism, predating Christianity by several centuries, is one of the oldest of the major world religious traditions. When Hindus encountered Christian missionaries in India, they argued that Jesus must be one of many incarnations or avatars of god, particularly Vishnu, their god of preservation, who, according to their beliefs, regularly revisits earth in one form or another to save humanity. The Hindus also believe that Jesus had spent time in India where he received his teaching from Hindu teachers.
Buddhist see Jesus more like a bodhisattva, a person who is seeking awakening, a person on his way to achieving enlightenment and becoming a Buddha. Bodhisattvas train endlessly in methods of meditation and they seek wisdom and make any sacrifices necessary to promote others people’s spiritual progress. Jesus’s behavior looks like that to many Buddhists. They are reluctant to see Jesus as a Buddha himself, one who is capable of perfect compassion and wisdom, because they are reluctant to grant a major figure in another religion the ultimate status of their highest authority figures.
Christians of all kinds, Orthodox Christians, Catholics, and Protestants, worship Jesus as God. Through the centuries, Jesus has been depicted in a wide array of ways in a variety of art forms. This is an exploration and a celebration of this highest of art forms, glorifying God.
Unfortunately we have no surviving portraits of Jesus of Nazareth today. Either no one thought to draw or paint his face or body during his life or in the decades after his death or those drawings and paintings did not survive. As his followers spread his faith, his followers wanted to see and touch him.
Since the gospels, the books in the Bible that deal with his ministry and time on earth, does not describe how he looked, early Christian artists had to use their imaginations. Christian writers thought that Jesus must have been ugly because in the book of Isaiah 53: 2–3, which they thought prophesied the coming of their suffering messiah, it says:
“2 For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.
3 He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”
(The King James Bible Version)
However, Christian artists usually depicted Jesus more favorably, so let us look at what some of them did and behold, Jesus the man, our Lord and Savior, the Cosmic King of the World.
Early Wall Art
Some of the earliest images of Jesus weren’t portraits, but symbols that were scratched into or painted on walls in places like Rome and Carthage in North Africa. These are images of things such as anchors, doves, palm or olive branches, and fish that were associated with Jesus and his ministry and the belief in his victory over death. They provided early, simple graphics that gave Christians an idea of who Jesus was.
Christograms were symbols used to designate Christ’s name. Some of the most popular was:
The Staurogram is a Latin cross with a looped top. According to Lactantius, a Christian teacher of rhetoric and tutor for the Roman Emperor Constantine’s son Crispus, this was the sign that Constantine fought under.
Some believe that Constantine saw the Chi-Rho symbol in the sky and he heard a voice that said: “In this symbol you will conquer.” Other sources say he saw a cross. Either way, he let his soldiers paint the Chi-Rho symbols on their shields and then he led them into a battle where they won a great victory. This inspired him to legalize Christianity, make it the official religion of the Roman Empire, and, according to some accounts, convert to Christianity himself.
The Chi-Rho is named for the first two Greek letters of the name “Christ.” According to Eusebius of Caesarea, also known as Eusebius Pamphilus, a Greek or Palestinian historian of Christianity, who became the bishop of Caesarea Maritima in the Roman province of Syria, this is the sign that Constantine put on his flag.
Some Christians used the symbol “X,” shortening his title to its first letter.
Others used the acronym of Jesus’s name in Greek. Eastern Christians lengthened the abbreviation of the name “Christ” by combining the first and last letters each of “Jesus” and “Christ.” Sometimes they drew a line over each pair to make the acronym clear.
Still others used the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, the alpha and the omega, to symbolize how Christ is the origin and the goal of creation.
In the Book of Revelation, the last book in the Bible, Jesus is actually called “the Alpha and the Omega.”
Some Christians used the first three letters of Jesus’s name in Greek. However, The second letter is an eta, which is a Greek letter with a long “a” sound, but it is written with an “H” in Latin. The use of the “H” in the three letters led to some backronyms, which means that people gave new meanings for old acronyms. Some of these backronyms include Constantine’s In Hoc Signo referring to the message “In this sign (you will conquer)”, Iesus Hominum Salvator which means “Jesus, Savior of men,”, and the Jesuits Catholic religious order, which used HIS to refer to Iesum Habemus Socium, which means “We have Jesus for our companion”.
In addition to these symbols and simple graphics, Christians also painted more elaborate images called frescoes in wet plaster in the Roman catacombs, underground chambers outside of Rome where Christians began to bury their dead. They did not want to burn their dead, because they believed that their bodies will be resurrected when Jesus returns.
Initially Christians were seen as outsiders in the Roman Empire. The early Christians were sometimes persecuted because they refused to worship other gods, including the Roman Emperor who considered himself a god, so they often came together in the catacombs to worship Christ and to hide from the Pagans.
These secret meetings made the other Romans, who heard about the rituals and ceremonies that the Christians practiced, very suspicious. Their Pagan enemies spread many rumors about them. Holy Communion especially caused the Pagans a great deal of problems and confusion. In this rite, still practiced in Christian churches today, bread and wine (or grape juice) represents or changes into Christ’s body and blood. The parishioners then eat and drink the substance to remember Christ’s sacrifice by dying on the cross for their sins.
The Romans heard that the Christians ate flesh and drank blood. While doing this, they would say, Hoc est corpus meum which means “This is my body.” The other Romans did not understand the symbolism of the rite and they thought the Christians were performing witchcraft. Cannibalism was too much for the non-Christians in Rome, and they called them odium humani generis, “hatred of the human race.” Through the ages, people shortened Hoc est corpus to hocus-pocus. That’s why we associate this expression with the phrase magicians say when they perform magic tricks today.
Forty such catacombs have been discovered. Many of them preserve frescoes that include the image of Jesus.
An early graffito, a drawing or writing scratched into a wall, in a guard room in the imperial palace on the Palatine Hill in Rome from around 200 AD shows a man worshipping a crucified figure with a donkey head. The inscription says:
“Alexamenos worships his god.”
This was probably made by a pagan soldier to mock the Christians. However, Christians themselves used the donkey as a symbol of their humble God. Jesus was born in a stable and he entered Jerusalem on a donkey.
In some images they show a donkey alone with the words:
“Our Lord, Jesus Christ, son of God.”
Early Christians also referred to the story of the pagan prophet Balaam who rides on a donkey. The donkey recognizes an angel standing in the road in front of him and stops dead in his tracks. Balaam, angry that the donkey won’t budge, beats the poor beast. After Balaam beats the donkey for a third time, the donkey turns to him and speaks, asking him why he is beating him. Finally Balaam sees the angel too. This prompts Balaam to bless Israel.
In the same way, the Christians, who were often humbled and mocked by the pagans for worshipping a crucified criminal as their God, felt vindicated for recognizing Jesus as the messiah sent by God. Like Balaam’s donkey they recognized the divine messenger. The donkey was thus a symbol of them and of Christ as well as a symbol of their hope that one day the pagans will see things as they do, just like Balaam did.
Christian often depicted the wise men or Magi, pagans who traveled all the way to Judea from the east, probably from Babylon, to pay homage to the new born “King of the Jews,” little Jesus in the manger. For Christians, this symbolizes the power of the Christian faith over pagan belief.
Early on, Christians also depicted Christ healing the sick, showing Jesus touching the sick with his hand or a wand. These pictures often surrounded stone caskets that were carved for the wealthy, wealthy patrons who clearly hoped that since Jesus healed others, he will raise them to live eternally.
Some Christians showed Jesus as an androgynous figure, as a person showing both male and female characteristics. Jesus is often shown as a clean shaven youth, but he was also painted with wide hips, long hair, and breasts. Some of these images also show him with male genitalia, so it is clear they did not want to show him as a woman, but rather as a hermaphrodite. These images might have been created by the Gnostics, since they use androgyny in their symbols, and they believe that there are no differences between males and females.
This might also come from a first-century belief that in Christ “there is neither male nor female.”
In the Bible in Galatians 3:28, it says:
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
I think this refers to the idea that we are all equal, we are all one in Christ, but I can see how someone might put a different spin on it.
Because, according to his followers, Christ restored people to what humans were originally meant to be, some might take that to mean we are supposed to be androgynous.
In the Bible in Genesis 1:26–27, it says:
“26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”
Again, I can see how some people might interpret that to mean that God made Adam into an androgynous being.
These effeminate portraits of Jesus are similar to, but also different from the pictures of other gods that were popular at that time.
For example, the Greek god Apollo was also shown with breasts, long hair, and a boyish form to impress on the viewer how fruitful and fertile he is.
A young Jesus is depicted holding a lamb, taking the place of the buff, naked Greek demi-god Hercules, who is shown in a similar picture holding the skin of the Nemean lion. The great labors of Hercules are made to seem pretty small if a little shepherd boy can outdo him.
Luckily not all the images of Jesus are effeminate. He’s also pictured with dark hair and a beard, a broad forehead, and a halo of light around his face, similar to the manly features of Jupiter, the king of the Roman gods. Jesus is also shown sitting on a high-backed throne similar to Jupiter, implying that Jesus has taken over Jupiter’s role.
The Christian artists thus took inspiration from Pagan art, the most prevalent art of that time, to portray Christ and the Christian story.
In 371, the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as the official state religion and their soldiers spread Christianity wherever they went. Roman emperors began to patronize Christianity and they started to portray themselves alongside Christ. Artists began to show Jesus as a cosmic king who legitimizes the rule of the emperors.
One popular example of the cosmic king image was Christ the Pantocrator, which means “ruler of all”, found in paintings, mosaics, sculpture, and illuminated manuscripts of the Bible.
At the same time, other Christian artists undermined this imperial imagery by painting Jesus in a philosopher’s toga with a scroll in his hand rather than in military uniform with a weapon in his hand. They showed Jesus entering Jerusalem riding sidesaddle on a donkey rather than astride a horse like an emperor. They depicted him as clean shaven with long hair even though the emperors usually wore a beard and short hair.
These artists did this perhaps to keep theses rulers humble, reminding that they are not God after all, and that they, too, will be judged by Jesus, Jesus who is a king with very different values than their own.
In the mid-100s AD, Christians began to make icon art similar to that of the pagan Egyptians and Romans. An Egyptian and Roman icon was a portrait of a god painted on a panel of wood that was set up in temples or in shrines at home. The Christian icons depicted a divine or saintly figure or a biblical scene. They were painted in the same manner as the pagan art and they were then hung in homes and later in churches.
There was some controversy over it, but we will just admire their beauty here.
Despite the debates and luckily for those of us who love art, the Christian icons have survived, especially in Eastern Orthodox Christianity, as one of the most important types of devotional art.
In the late fourth century, and into the Middle Ages, impressions of Jesus’ face or body appeared. People thought that Jesus made these images himself. Some people called these impressions “true images” and they believed they were more important than other icons because they supposedly came directly from God.
Examples of these include:
The Mandylion of Edessa, a cloth that was supposedly sent by Jesus himself to King Abgar of Edessa, a city in southeastern Turkey, in the old Roman province of Mesopotamia.
This cloth could perform miracles. Apparently it healed King Abgar himself, so it was widely revered in both the East and the West. Unfortunately the image has since been lost.
The Veronica, was originally believed to be a self-portrait that Jesus gave to the woman he cured of a hemorrhage mentioned in Mark 5:25–34. The woman’s name, Berenike, which is Veronica in Latin, was transferred to the image. The name may also come from vera icon, which means “true image”. The portrait appeard in Rome in the 12th century, and pilgrims came from far to see it. Over time the story changed, alleging that a woman named Veronica wiped Jesus’s bloodied face with a cloth as he carried his cross to Golgotha, and later she found his face imprinted on it. The changing story and the fact that the relic appeared so long after Jesus’s crucifixion, leads some historians to believe that it is not a true image of Christ.
Probably the most famous of these images is the Shroud of Turin. According to legend it is the burial cloth of Jesus and it bears his image as a crucified man.
The cloth first appeared in 1357. Since it appeared so late, like the Veronica, as well as the results of scientific testing which indicates that it was made long after the time of Christ, many historians don’t think it is authentic.
The way that Christ is depicted in art often reflects the ideals of the artist and their patrons. Over time, as the values of society changed, so did the depictions of Christ.
During medieval times artists liked to show the humanity of Jesus by depicting baby Jesus with his mother Mary.
Francis of Assisi, the famous Italian monk who preached to the birds, popularized the Christmas crèche, which is the manger scene in which animals and shepherds join the holy family at Jesus’s birth which you can see all over Italy during Christmas time.
It was not always popular to depict Jesus dying on the cross. Since many early Christians were persecuted, they preferred to focus on Jesus’s power and triumph rather than his lowest moment.
During the 1200s AD, The Cistercian monk Bernard of Clairvaux and the friar Francis of Assisi started to emphasize the humanity of Jesus and his suffering. Artist started to show how Jesus was scourged, mocked, and crowned with the crown of thorns.
An example is a painting dating from 1490–1500 by Hieronymus Bosch, called The Crowning with Thorns.
They also depicted the Ecce Homo scene, which means “behold the man” in Latin, when Pontius Pilate presents the scourged Jesus to the crowd.
A good example of this is a painting that dates from 1525–1530 by Correggio, called Christ presented to the People (Ecce Homo).
They depicted the way of the cross, which was Jesus’s walk to the place of crucifixion.
A good example is a painting dating from 1505 by Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, called The Procession to Calvary.
Others painted the crucifixion. The earliest crucifixion we have is in an illuminated manuscript, from the Syriac Rabbula Gospels, dating from 586 AD:
Pietro Perugino depicted the Crucifixion like this in 1482:
Albrecht Altdorfer, portrayed a more bloody Jesus in this painting dating from around 1514–1516:
An interesting change in perspective happened when the French painter James Tissot painted the scene from Jesus’ perspective in Crucifixion, seen from the Cross, a painting dating from between 1886–1894.
Others depicted the crucifixion on large crosses like the Gero Cross, which dates from the 10th century and hangs in the Cologne Cathedral in Germany:
Other examples include these beautiful works of art, both inside:
And outside:
The crucifixion was also depicted in stained glass windows in many churches and cathedrals. Like this:
This:
And, this:
These are just a few examples of many, many great works of art.
Some showed the deposition of Jesus’s body from the cross.
An example is The Descent from the Cross by Paul Rubens, dating from 1612–1614:
The Pietà, the scene when Jesus’s dead body is placed in his mother Mary’s arms, is most famously depicted by Michelangelo’s sculpture which stands in St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City (1498–1499).
Mary’s sorrow is beautifully depicted in the Mater Dolorosa, which means mother of sorrows, a masterpiece of Spanish art.
Some images show a group of Jesus’ followers lamenting over his death.
Andrea Mantegna portrays Jesus’s human flesh from the angle of his lowly feet in The Lamentation over the Dead Christ, c. 1490:
Other images show his entombment.
Like Dirc van Delf, The Entombment in an illuminated manuscript, dating between 1405–1410:
Some artists preferred to focus on God’s love for us.
Many images emphasize the beauty of the body of Jesus and try to evoke feelings of love rather than pity.
For example, in this painting by Titian called Noli me Tangere, dating from 1510–1515:
In this image Jesus delicately avoids Mary Magdalene’s attempt to touch him.
In another image, Giovanni Bellini’s The Blood of the Redeemer, dating from 1460–1465, Jesus offers his body and blood to nourish the believers:
These images are not meant to be erotic or cannibalistic, but they are meant to depict Jesus as only object of love that can truly satisfy the human spirit.
The North African Bishop Augustine wrote in his autobiographical book The Confessions:
“You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”
During The Enlightenment people started to prioritize reason and science, which led to the quest to understand the historical Jesus. In the 17th and 18th centuries, some artists portrayed Jesus as a philosopher.
One of the favorite scenes from his life includes showing the child Jesus teaching the teachers in the Jerusalem Temple.
They also showed the Sermon on the Mount:
In the 19th century, romantic artists reacted to this emphasis on reason by trying to capture the mystery of Jesus’s divinity. These paintings often portray Jesus at moments of doubt, struggle, or personal reflection, like when he was tempted by Satan in the wilderness or his agony in the garden.
There are earlier versions of Jesus’s temptation like this beautiful mosaic in St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice dating from the 12th century:
This is Christ in the Wilderness by Ivan Kramskoy, dating from 1872:
You can almost see Jesus’ inner struggle.
Another beautiful example, dating from 1890, is Heinrich Hofmann’s Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane:
More recent Art
When the persecution of Jews in Europe culminated in the Holocaust, leading to the death of millions of Jews, it prompted Marc Chagall, a Russian Jewish painter, to create White Crucifixion in 1938.
I could not find a picture to post here, but you can view it here:
Although the power of Christian imagery was weakened during the Enlightenment and its aftermath, it was still used to stir up strong sentiment in times of national crisis.
For example, Warner Sallman’s World War II propaganda poster, The Christmas Story. Again, I could not find a picture to post here, but you can view his work, including the propaganda posters here:
Even Joseph Stalin, the Communist Russian dictator, relied on religion to try to rally the Russians together during World War Two to fight against the German Nazis of Adolf Hitler.
Look at this beautiful inside of a Russian church:
Even the Nazis aligned their cause with Christ, wearing “Gott mit uns” on their belts, which means “God with us,” and using the cross in their propaganda posters, all while they killed Jews in the concentration camps.
There is an anti-American propaganda poster from occupied France called Assassins, showing a terrified European girl threatened by a leering, larger-than-life U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, while she aligns with the cross and looks to the heavens for salvation from American evil.
The horrors that many people experienced during the First- and Second World Wars, caused many artists to despair both of God and humans. This is beautifully depicted by Holman Hunt in The Light of the World:
This is similar to Siegfried Reinhardt’s Light, which you can view here:
These art works show that Christ is still present, but that the world is filled with darkness and people are preoccupied with other things.
Salvador Dalí painted Christ of Saint John of the Cross, as a response to the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, when the United States of America dropped an atomic bomb on the city, devastating it and killing most of its inhabitants.
Here is another picture of the mushroom cloud a few minutes after the bomb exploded on Hiroshima:
People around the globe have also remade the image of Christ into one they prefer, changing his race and face to look like those who paint him.
Examples of this include the American artist DeVon Cunningham’s Black Christ, which is in the apse dome of St. Cecilia Catholic Church in inner-city Detroit, where it is surrounded by figures from all races and religions.
Unfortunately I could not find a good photo of it, but you can see some images of it here:
Janet McKenzie depicts an androgynous African Jesus with Native American and Eastern symbols in Jesus of the People.
You can view it here:
Monika Liu Ho-Peh created a Chinese Christ in The Stilling of the Tempest.
You can see it here:
Australian aboriginal Miriam Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann created abstract Stations of the Cross. You can see some of it here:
You can also find some of these images at other sites online.
In Nicaragua there are images of Christ raising the murdered peasants of Solentiname.
You can view some art work from Nicaragua here:
Unfortunately I could not find better sources.
In 2002 A Medical artist named Richard Neave reconstructed the facial features of a first-century Palestinian skull for a BBC and CNN television special and turned the computer images over to a painter, Donato Giancola. By combining forensic anthropology, computer imaging, and old fashioned painting, the team created the 1st Century Semitic Man which is an image of a typical man in Jesus’s world. This is not Jesus per se, but this image is a big contrast to the fair-skinned, slender-nosed, long-haired Jesus typically depicted of Western art.
You can see the image of a first century Semitic man here:
It contrasts strongly with this image of Jesus:
Jesus has thus been portrayed in a myriad of ways.
Some artists have chosen to profane Jesus, like the artist who created Piss Christ, a crucifix suspended in the artist’s urine.
However much some people try to besmirch Jesus, an Art Deco statue of him, Christ the Redeemer, still towers over is Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, the world’s largest Catholic Christian country, and his shadow stretches over the whole world.
Christ the Redeemer from another angle:
And from close-up:
Jesus has of course been cast in other molds as well:
And this:
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Artificial Intelligence has also generated some beautiful images of Jesus:
This:
And this:
Some AI images even portray Jesus as a wrathful God:
If you look around, you will find signs of Jesus almost everywhere:
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Catholics revere Jesus’ sacred heart as a symbol of “God’s boundless and passionate love for mankind.”
Like this:
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The most important place Jesus should be, however, is in your heart, changing you from the inside out, so that we, you, me, and everybody else who try to follow him, can change the world in his image. Who is Jesus for you?
You can contemplate that as you enjoy the images that follow, images that are beautiful and that are worth seeing, but that I could not find another place for.
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And this, which is one of my favorites:
What is your favorite depiction of Jesus?
Of course, there are many more images worth your time. As everyone knows, Christianity, the religion that has underpinned and been the source of its strength, is declining in the West. Clearly Christians have a treasure trove of art pieces to draw inspiration from in the effort to try and revive Christianity. We cannot allow this great faith to fall into decline, because with it, will go the foundation of Western civilization, leaving us prey to those who envy and hate us.
I wanted to include a section on depictions of Jesus in theater and film, but this blog post is already way too long, so I will do that in another post.
Hopefully this helps to glorify God.
May Jesus bless you.
If you like what you just read, please follow me on Medium and share this with your friends. If you did not, I thank you for reading this far and I hope you will like my next post.
Thank you.
Bibliography
Ehrman, B.D. (2000). Historical Jesus. The Teaching Company. Chantilly.
Murphy, C.M. (2008). The Historical Jesus for Dummies. Wiley Publishing, Inc. Indianapolis