Images of Jesus’s Crucifixion did not appear in churches until the tenth century.

[JDPriestly]

Here are excerpts from the article:

. . . .
Tragically, in Christianity’s second millennium the Crucifixion expelled paradise from earth. After searching in vain for images of Jesus’s dead body in the ancient churches of the Mediterranean, we found the corpse of Jesus in northern Europe, in a side chapel of the enormous Gothic cathedral in Cologne, Germany. There, among the mottled light and shadows, hangs the Gero Cross, the earliest surviving crucifix, sculpted from oak in Saxony around 965.
. . . .

A thousand years after Jesus, the brutal logic of empire twisted the celebration of his life into a perpetual reenactment of his death. The Gero Cross was carved by descendents of the Saxons, baptized against their will by the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne during a three-decade campaign of terror. Charlemagne’s armies slaughtered all who resisted, destroyed shrines representing the Saxons’ tree of life, and deported 10,000 Saxons from their land. Pressed by violence into Christian obedience, the Saxons produced art that bore the marks of their baptism in blood.

Charlemagne also im­posed a Roman Eucharistic rite on Europe, replacing an earlier rite that celebrated the creation of human beings in the image of God with one that spoke of Christ as “pure victim, a holy victim, an unspotted victim.” In 830, the Carolingian theologian Paschasius Radbertus laid out an unprecedented interpretation: the consecrated elements were the material, historical body of Christ, and the bread and cup made the crucified blood and flesh of the Lord present. Theologians in Saxony countered with the traditional doctrine: the glorified, resurrected body—not the crucified body—was present in the ritual. Archbishop Hincmar (806–882) further elaborated Paschasius’s ideas, suggesting that the Mass was a reenactment of Christ’s execution.

. . . .

The ninth century’s new focus on the crucified Christ coincided with a shift in the Christian prohibition against the shedding of human blood. For centuries, the church had taught that participation in warfare was evil, that killing broke the fifth commandment, and that soldiers were to perform penance to cleanse their souls from the stain of blood. At the dawn of the Holy Roman Empire, Christianity began to lose its grip on the sinfulness of killing. A new age began—one in which the execution of Jesus would become a sacrifice to be repeated, first on the Eucharistic altar and then in the ravages of a full-blown holy war.

http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/107992.shtml

[Lifetimedem]

1. That is very interesting

Thank you for that article.

I always wondered when the use of that icon started .

[Poll_Blind]

2. Interesting stuff. Thanks! n/t

PB

[ftownesc119]

3. Kinda harsh...

[tbyg52]

14. Hi, ftownesc119!

Welcome to DU! :hi:

In what way is it "kinda harsh"?

[Tangerine LaBamba]

4. The late great comedian Bill Hicks

used to muse about how it might be for Jesus to return to earth and find people wearing replicas of his method of death on chains around their necks.

He compared it to Jackie Kennedy seeing people wearing small, gold rifles on chains.

[FirstLight]

5. This would take some more investigation,

but I just got up and the cofee hasn't kicked in yet. bookmarking for later...

on first read,m though it is fascinating to think that the crucifixion was not the focu of the early church - which would also bring into thinking how the early christianity really did blend well with more "pagan" beliefs...honoring the creator, honoring the bread as the gift of the field, the wine as the gift from the vine..honoring life and mother earth, etc...

doid the shift to worshipping sacrifice & death precede the crusades? was it just spin to justify he catholic church sending thousands to war with the 'infidels'? HMM...HISTORY SEEMS TO REPEAT ITSELF IN HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS ALOT (oops, hit the caps lock key)

so let me propose that the way "back" to healing the Earth and its tribes may rest in returning to honoring of creation in all its wondrous diversity...that we can honor the grain and the wine, as we honor eachother for our differences, yet the obvious ikeness is that we are All earth's children?

[nichomachus]

7. Fascinating

Also fascinating: The Laughing Jesus by Timothy Freke. Recommended.

[roguevalley]

9. that is a great book. so is the politics of Jesus, my favorite which

is Jesus the Heretic by Douglas Lockhart and Tom Harpur's pagan christ. Freake has another couple of books, one of Jesus and the goddess and anything by spong is great.

[On the Road]

21. Was That a Reference to "The Politics of Jesus"

by John Howard Yoder? Now that is a favorite of mine. Yoder's method is deceptively simple -- go through the gospel of Luke chapter by chapter and pick out any saying which has political, social, or economic implications. The results are striking.

[knitter4democracy]

26. Or maybe the authors could look East.

The Eastern Orthodox Church never had the crusades (in fact, they were victims of one of them when the Pope sent his army to Constantinople and sacked it, stealing many icons and books and other important artifacts) and has always had a different, more mystical, version of the faith.

[FirstLight]

6. BTW KICK & rec

I think we should focus more on paradise of this planet and it's beauty, and our stewardship of it - other than destruction of it for profit.
If we can bring that more into our collective consciousness, we can be better prepared for the changes coming on this earth. I would rather be "for" mother earth, than 'against' her in the years to come! just in case anyone is watching or keeping score, like God... heh

[formercia]

8. Roman Empire reinvents itself as the Holy Roman Empire

Gods become Saints, volunteering to be martyred in the Colosseum becomes bad. Same shit, different name. Roman Legions become legions of Crusaders.

[roguevalley]

10. I can't remember the book but I remember reading about how the

Pope is a HUGE heresy because there was nothing about making Rome the first among equals in the beginning. It was more a political thing than theological. too bad.

[nichomachus]

11. Pretty much all of Christian belief

is political rather than theological. The original Christianity was just a reiteration of the pagan myths that have been around for centuries. "Jesus" was the latest mythical figure who was born of a virgin, performed miracles, died and resurrected -- one of many.

However, the Romans decided to use this new religion to solidify the empire. They invented a new form of Christianity -- destroyed (or tried to) most of the previous books (and people) and forged a new set of scriptures around the third and fourth century to back up their political beliefs.

Freke covers it quite nicely in the book I mentioned above. He also explains how the Koran came to be -- which is even more interesting.

[formercia]

18. Roman 'Christianity' was a sect among many.

They just happened to have a big Army and Navy to impose their values on others.

Prisoner of the Vatican is a good book that explains how Italy freed herself from papal rule. Until the late 19th Century, the Pope was quite the Dictator.

The boys would like to bring back the old days again.

[knitter4democracy]

27. Well, that's what our patriarchs think.

That was what was behind the Great Schism in 1054 that split the Church into East and West.

[uberllama42]

13. YOU'RE WRONG

There is no WAY that the same syncretic process that occurred between Catholic saints and African tribal deities during the colonial period could have happened with Greco-Roman deities centuries earlier. NO. FUCKING. WAY.

:sarcasm:

[kestrel91316]

12. The seeming obsession with/worship of death, not life, is one thing

about Christianity that has always turned me off........

I'm more into what Christ himself taught, which was definitely about life and how you live it.

[Warpy]

15. The core teachings are inconvenient to most people

which is why the religion veered toward the myth replacing the teaching, especially that part of the myth dedicated to the ideal of virginity in women (sterility) and the adoption of the symbol of death, the cross.

Redistribution of wealth to the poor served Empire ill.

I've always wished for Christian believers to read their New Testaments and realize what has been robbed from them by centuries of clerics and replaced by myth and intolerance for outsiders.

[kestrel91316]

16. The only bible we ever had in my home when I was growing up was the

King James version, red letter edition. And I thought the whole thing was BS, except for the red letter parts, which made a lot of sense to me and didn't appear to fit with the noisy public face of Christianity.

[jody]

33. I agree re red-letter portions. Read that and one discovers the irreconcilable differences between

what Jesus said and what all versions of Christianity preach.

IMO the foundation for religions is quite simple as portrayed below.

[struggle4progress]

17. Fascinating piece. Thanks for posting

[Lydia Leftcoast]

19. And yet, one of the charges against the early Christians was cannibalism,

since outsiders overheard the Words of Institution and took them literally."This is my body, given for you... This is my blood, given and shed for you."

However, the Words of Institution also contain "This do in remembrance of me," i.e. this is supposed to be a memorial rite. They are also very old, first attested in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians 11:23-26.

Now it may be that the Carolingians changed the emphasis of the Eucharist from memorial to sacrifice, but the actual ritual is one of the oldest in Christianity.

[HamdenRice]

20. Completely astonishing!

I never would have guessed that crucifixion was such a late addition into the European Christian tradition! Nor that it was a reaction to the brutal forced baptism of the Saxons by Charlemagne:

"the Saxons produced art that bore the marks of their baptism in blood."


Thanks for posting.

[On the Road]

22. Wow --That is Quite an Article

Thanks for posting. I did not about those depictions of an earthly paradise, and I've read a lot (or thought so) about early Roman and per-Roman Christianity. It is particularly striking because of the empahsis on martyrdon -- before Constantine, pagans sometimes thought of Christianity as kind of a death cult.

The part about Charlemagne and theologians of that era is also new to me. Seems reminiscent of Erich Fromm's "Anatomy of Human Destructiveness," particularly in the personality type obsessed with death.

[muriel_volestrangler]

23. Can anyone with good knowledge of Orthodox church history comment?

Because the split with Rome was fairly advanced by that time, and it became complete not that long after. Is there a noticeable absence of, or many fewer, crucifixions in Eastern Christianity?

[knitter4democracy]

28. As far as I know, we've had that icon for a long, long time.

Every Orthodox church has an icon of Jesus in the tomb and Jesus crucified on the cross. They're used in Easter rites. The icon of Christ buried is put inside the epitaphion, a wooden structure meant to represent the tomb, and then carried around the church in a procession while we all sing funeral hymns on Holy Friday. The icon of the crucified Christ is in two parts, and they take Him off the cross on Easter Sunday and keep Him off until Pentecost, if I remember right.

Martyred saints hold a cross in their hand in their icons, and that's been a tradition for over a thousand years. After someone's been baptized and chrismated, they're given a cross necklace to wear, and I've seen old cross necklaces in Russia in museums from when they converted in 988, so it was an established ritual by then, since Greek missionaries were the ones who came up to Russia and taught them the faith and started churches and translated everything. We've also been making the sign of the cross on ourselves, from what I was told, since the very early days.

[potone]

34. It is important to distinguish between crosses and crucifixes.

You are right about the icons in the Orthodox Church, but the symbol of the cross is an early Christian tradition that, I believe, predates the depiction of Christ on the cross, which is a crucifix. Except for the use of the icon of Christ's crucifixion, icons of saints show them holding crosses, not crucifixes, and Orthodox Christians wear crosses, not crucifixes. This is because the emphasis in Orthodoxy is on the resurrection, not on Christ's suffering and death, as is the case in Catholicism.

[knitter4democracy]

35. But really look at our crosses.

We have the top bar, which refers to the placard put on the cross, naming Christ as Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. Then the crossbar. Below that is the foot bar, which is tilted with the right side going up (referring to the robber on his right who begged for mercy and whom Jesus said was going to heaven). All of those refer to the actual crucifixion.

Then there are the crucifixes in the front of every church and the icon of Christ in the tomb which is usually framed and kept out during the year and used on Holy Friday during Holy Week. I've never been in an Orthodox church, either here in the States under whatever jurisdiction or in Russia, that didn't have a crucifix icon at the front of the church somewhere.

[pingzing58]

24. Here is some information on the cross and the crucifix. By the way:

The earliest example of the crucifix, a carved representation of Christ attached to the cross is from the late sixth century.2
(2. Philip Schaff, "The Cross and the Crucifix," History of the Christian Church, vol. 2, § 77.)
<http://www.jesuswalk.com/christian-symbols/cross.htm>

It has nothing to do with the commandment "thou shalt not kill" and the shedding of blood. In the early church soldiers had to renounce their jobs because they had to worship the emperor as a god to be good roman soldiers.

[knitter4democracy]

25. Did the author forget about the Eastern Orthodox?

Everything I read was entirely Western. The cross has been in Eastern Orthodox icons from the beginning, though the controversy with the iconoclasts destroyed most of the earliest ones.

On edit: Sure, they went to Hagia Sophia, but that's a mosque now and has been definitely messed with. What about talking with Orthodox iconographers on Mt. Athos or from St. Catherine's monastery in Egypt? What about reading the early Church Fathers and Mothers and seeing what is actually said?

Visiting churches is all fine and dandy, but considering how old they are, how can they be sure that they've been kept in the same original condition for over a thousand years? How can they be sure that their thesis is right just by visiting a few sites?

[Viva_Daddy]

29. I find this very doubtfull

The cross is very ancient. Indeed, so is the whole story of the "death" of the "son (sun) of God". Crucifixion as a form of capitol punishment goes back at least as far as the Babylonians. While not all the "sons of god" were crucified (in fact most died in a great variety of ways), the "Great Story" itself is very ancient...long before the supposed time of Jesus Christ.

[HamdenRice]

32. Does this make any sense in Greek or Latin?

You seem to be suggesting that older forms of Judeo Christian religion conflated "son" with "sun."

But does that play on words work in languages other than English? In Spanish, which is presumably closer to Latin, son his "hijo" and sun is "sol" and they don't sound alike at all.

[Viva_Daddy]

36. Some language research can be useful, but not conclusive

I was merely pointing out that the basic 'story' of the 'son of God' was an allegorical representation of the course of the SUN through the Zodiac. This was true in virtually all the Mystery Religions (although some used special constellations rather than the sun) of which Christianity was only one of many until it successfully used the power of the Roman Empire to persecute the other Mystery Religions out of existence (or underground).

[Lydia Leftcoast]

37. No, the pun of "son" and "sun" works only in Germanic languages

and really well only in English

The first word in each case is "son," while the second one is "sun."

German: Sohn, Sonne
Norwegian: sønn, sol
Dutch: zoon, zon
Russian: syn, solntse

Latin: filius, sol

Ancient Greek: pais, helios

Hebrew: ben, shemesh



If you think that linguistic evidence supports the notion of "the Son of God" comes from "Sun" worship, then you've seen that Star Trek episode too many times. :-)

[Viva_Daddy]

38. It's not a pun

I used both "son" and "sun" in English. I wasn't talking about "linguistic evidence" or any such thing. If you look at the things said about "the son of God" you'll see that almost all of them are allegorical statements about the sun. That's all I was saying. I was not making a "linguistic argument"; I was making a mythological statement. The same thing can be said for virtually all the Mystery Religions of the Greco-Roman period.

[rug]

30. Don't confuse art with theology.

The Passion was central to Christianity from the beginning.

[and-justice-for-all]

31. This is correct..MARKETING has been around for a long time