SUNESIS MINISTRIES

 

 

Written by Stuart Pattico

 

© 2008 Stuart Pattico.  All rights reserved.  No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission from the author.

 

In many church buildings it is common to see paintings / depictions of Jesus Christ, Mary, ‘saints’, and angels etc.  This is very common especially in Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy.  It is also common to see paintings of Christ in many Christian households.  In this article, we will briefly look at 1) if it is Biblically acceptable to have or create images of Jesus Christ. 2) What did Jesus look like anyway? 3) How having images of Christ became an acceptable practice.

 

The Jews in the Old Testament were not adverse to religious art.  In fact, artwork played a very important part in Tabernacle and Temple worship.  The design of the Ark of the Covenant featured two carefully crafted cherubim on the Mercy Seat.   The Temple that Solomon built also had two cherubim within the Holy of Holies.  Each Cherub was 20 feet 10 inches high.  Each wing on the cherub was 10 feet 5 inches, making a full wing spread of 20 feet 10 inches.  However, within the Temple and Tabernacle, there was no image of God.  The reason for this is made very plain in Deuteronomy 4:15-16:

 

15 “Take careful heed to yourselves, for you saw no form when the LORD spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire, lest you act corruptly and make for yourselves a carved image in the form of any figure… (Deuteronomy 4:15-16, NKJV)

 

When God came to Horeb, He purposefully did not show the Israelites what He looked like.  This is so that they would not be able to make a depiction of Him.  It is clear from the Bible that God does not approve of depictions being made of Him.

 

The first Christians also were not adverse to art.  However they had no images of Jesus Christ.  This is because in the biblical Christian faith, Jesus is God, having the same nature as God the Father.  This is made clear in many scriptures, including those given below:

 

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…  And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:1,14 NKJV)

 

28 And Thomas answered and said to Him [Jesus], “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28, NKJV)

 

God was manifested in the flesh (1 Timothy 3:16, NKJV)

 

Therefore, to make a depiction of Jesus is to make a depiction of God, which is forbidden in the Bible.

 

I would like to suggest that another reason to avoid depictions of Christ is because they are at best the work of man’s imagination.  They are by no means accurate portrayals of what Jesus really looked like.  You will observe that the majority of these images show Jesus having the appearance of a white European.  However, Jesus was a Jew, and in those days, the Jews looked very similar to Egyptians.  In the Bible, Exodus 2:17-19 and Acts 21:37-39 show us that both Moses and the apostle Paul were mistaken for Egyptians:

 

17 Then the shepherds came and drove them away; but Moses stood up and helped them, and watered their flock.
18 When they came to Reuel their father, he said, “How is it that you have come so soon today?”
19 And they said, “An Egyptian delivered us from the hand of the shepherds, and he also drew enough water for us and watered the flock.” (Exodus 2:17-19, NKJV)

 

37 Then as Paul was about to be led into the barracks, he said to the commander, “May I speak to you?”
He replied, “Can you speak Greek? 38 Are you not the Egyptian who some time ago stirred up a rebellion and led the four thousand assassins out into the wilderness?”
39 But Paul said, “I am a Jew from Tarsus, in Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city; and I implore you, permit me to speak to the people.” (Acts 21:37-39, NKJV)

 

Seeing as the Jews and Egyptians were of similar appearance, this indicates that Jesus’ skin was darker than these paintings suggest.  In the artwork of early Ethiopian Christianity, which pre-dates European Christianity, paintings of Jesus depict Him as having a much darker appearance.   It is important to know that the Jesus we worship is a Jewish Jesus.  Jesus didn’t only temporarily become a Jew when He came to earth.  Jesus still is a Jew.  In Heaven, Jesus is still known as ‘the Lion of the tribe of Judah’ (Revelation 5:5).  It is sad that historically, Western ‘Christianity’ has been one of the main propagators of anti-Semitism.  It is therefore no surprise that their art work seems to remove the Jewish identity of our Saviour.  This white image of Jesus is embedded in the minds of Christians not only in Europe, but throughout the world.  I recently saw an Asian Christian television program.  The background image for this program was a picture of a white European Jesus.  Christianity is sadly considered by many to be a ‘white man’s religion’, whereas the biblical truth is that “salvation is of the Jews” (John 4:22).   God has used a Jewish Messiah to make salvation available to all nations (Luke 24:47). Despite the fact that Jesus is a Jew; it is crucial to know that whether the artist portrays Christ as a European, an Ethiopian, or even a Jew, the end result will still just be the work of man’s imagination.  The apostle Paul warned against those he described as “intruding into those things which he has not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind” (Colossians 2:18, NKJV).

 

Despite the volume of Biblical data contrary to creating images of God, having images of Jesus Christ has some how become accepted by many churches and households.  We will now briefly look at some church history to discover how this has happened.[1]

 

From 100 – 400 AD Christian leaders rebuked various people for tying to introduce images of Christ and saints into their worship.  The 36^th canon of the synod of Elvira prohibited images as a hindrance to true worship.  Pictures were forbidden in churches.  However, the adoration and use of images was very popular in the East.  The theory that images represented the invisible persons became prominent in certain circles.  Therefore, reverence began to be paid to the images.  Eventually, images were sanctioned in churches by the Lateran synod in 769 AD.  Tarasius, an advocate of images was made patriarch of the East in 784 AD; and in 787 the synod of Nicea ascribed reverence to images and the worship of God through them.  The same decision was reached in the West at the synod of Frankfurt in 794 AD.  Images were again sanctioned at Paris in 825 AD.  After 850 AD, there were many stories of miracles performed through images and so the practice of image worship in churches began to grow.  In 1188 it was declared that to deny the images was to deny God Himself.  In 1265, Thomas Aquinas, an Italian Catholic priest, declared that an image of Christ claims the same veneration as Christ Himself.  The 25^th session of the Council of Trent (1551 -52) also justified the worship of images.

 

So it is that the use of images in conjunction with worship has been accepted by many as authorised by God.  However, the fact remains that the Bible is against the use of all images/paintings/depictions of God.