Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Toto · 05-20-2003, 10:16 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Evangelion
All you've got here is a single synagogue outside Israel in a Hellenic-influenced community. The exception proves the rule.

The exception does not prove the rule in that sense, it tests the rule. Get your English proverbs straight.

Dura-Europa is unusual only in that it was well preserved. It shows that whatever rules some rabbis were making up, they were not being enforced 2 centuries after Jesus presumably lived, in the Jewish Diaspora. Are you trying to claim that Christians of that era would have adopted a strict Jewish rule that Jews themselved did not follow?

Evangelion · 05-20-2003, 09:12 PM

Quote:

The exception does not prove the rule in that sense, it tests the rule. Get your English proverbs straight.

This has nothing to do with "English proverbs" and everything to do with facts. Again: this exception proves the rule. The article cited by joedad even supports this by pointing out that the use of such images was contrary to the 2nd Commandment. It was contrary to the normative practice.

Quote:

Dura-Europa is unusual only in that it was well preserved.

No, it is also unusual in that it provides us with an example of a blatant breach of Jewish law in a Jewish synagogue.

Quote:

It shows that whatever rules some rabbis were making up, they were not being enforced 2 centuries after Jesus presumably lived, in the Jewish Diaspora.

Well, duh!

Of course a Hellenic Jewish community in Syria is going to start pushing the envelope. I already anticipated this when I wrote:

Bottom line: the depiction of Christ by his followers was largely defined by the prevailing ethos of their respective eras.

Quote:

Are you trying to claim that Christians of that era would have adopted a strict Jewish rule that Jews themselved did not follow?

No, I am making no such claim. Please read this thread carefully.

I have pointed out that the earliest Christians were Jews, and that this is the primary reason why they did not employ images of people and animals in their religious art. But later (when Christianity spread to Rome) we have examples of Christian art which does incorporate images of humans. And why? Because we are now dealing with (a) 3rd Century Christianity, and (b) a non-Jewish population.

Hence the citation from Finaldi:

And in fact there is no Christian art really, until about the 3rd century, and then again, not in Israel, not in Palestine, but in the Pagan west, in Rome.

So again:

Bottom line: the depiction of Christ by his followers was largely defined by the prevailing ethos of their respective eras.

Toto · 05-21-2003, 12:54 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Evangelion
Bottom line: the depiction of Christ by his followers was largely defined by the prevailing ethos of their respective eras.

This is certainly true. How else to explain the blue-eyed Anglo Jesus with flowing light brown hair so beloved in modern America. But I don't think it helps your case.

Toto · 11-18-2003, 05:28 PM

I know this is an old thread, but it is not very involved and I have just come across a source on a disputed point, whether the early Christians refused to have pictures of Jesus because there was a Jewish-derived prohibition against graven images:

Veneration of Images (Catholic Encycopedia)

Quote:

The catacombs are the cradle of all Christian art. Since their discovery in the sixteenth century -- on 31 May, 1578, an accident revealed part of the catacomb in the Via Salaria -- and the investigation of their contents that has gone on steadily ever since, we are able to reconstruct an exact idea of the paintings that adorned them. That the first Christians had any sort of prejudice against images, pictures, or statues is a myth (defended amongst others by Erasmus) that has been abundantly dispelled by all students of Christian archaeology. The idea that they must have feared the danger of idolatry among their new converts is disproved in the simplest way by the pictures even statues, that remain from the first centuries. Even the Jewish Christians had no reason to be prejudiced against pictures, as we have seen; still less had the Gentile communities any such feeling. They accepted the art of their time and used it, as well as a poor and persecuted community could, to express their religious ideas. Roman pagan cemeteries and Jewish catacombs already showed the way; Christians followed these examples with natural modifications. From the second half of the first century to the time of Constantine they buried their dead and celebrated their rites in these underground chambers. The old pagan sarcophagi had been carved with figures of gods, garlands of flowers, and symbolic ornament; pagan cemeteries, rooms, and temples had been painted with scenes from mythology. The Christian sarcophagi were ornamented with indifferent or symbolic designs -- palms, peacocks, vines, with the chi-rho monogram (long before Constantine), with bas-reliefs of Christ as the Good Shepherd, or seated between figures of saints, and sometimes, as in the famous one of Julius Bassus with elaborate scenes from the New Testament. And the catacombs were covered with paintings. There are other decorations such as garlands, ribands, stars landscapes, vines-no doubt in many cases having a symbolic meaning.

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