Worshippers have been using images for different purposes since way before the start of Christianity. The Babylonians had rituals of initiation for the creation of their idols while the second commandment prohibited the Jews of the Old Testament from making an image of any God, including their own. The second commandment had a deep impact on Jewish (and later Muslim) worship but did not have a lasting impact on Christian worship. All three religions claim to follow the God of the Old Testament, so what changed in Christian history and theology that made image making ok?
To answer that question, I want to look at the early history of the Christian movement, specifically the leadership of the church, the relationship between church and state, the iconoclastic periods and the theological motivations of artists up until the time of the crusades. I will look at these specifics through images of Jesus found in time periods from the start of Christianity until the time of the crusades. Looking at specific artwork will allow me to address the history and culture of the time, the theology behind the images, and issues that the church was dealing with at that particular time.
Once the tradition of images and icons becomes established as ok in most Christian traditions, we see interesting movements and adaptations of the image of Jesus come about. We see things like a search for what Jesus actually looked like take place in modernity, we see black Jesus and Gay Jesus and touchdown Jesus, but why do these images emerge, what is different about them and what do say about the images of Jesus they seek to modify?
To answer these questions, I will look at some of these paintings and images of Jesus to see what the theology is behind them. I also plan on exploring the reaction of the audiences and the culture that some of these images were created in. The creation of an image goes beyond the idea of the artists: It involves the people that commission it and the audience’s reaction to it as well. It takes on a meaning of it’s own and comes alive. “The idea that images have a kind of social or psychological power of their own is, in fact, the reigning cliché of contemporary visual culture.”[i] At what points in Christian history and theology does this happen to images of Jesus? With that, what type of power do these images have over their audience?
This project seeks to answer all of these questions by analyzing sample images of Jesus and asking the above questions about all of them one at a time.
[i] W.J.T. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 32.
Images of Jesus 