In July 2002, Rita Brock, a Disciples of Christ minister, and Rebecca Ann Parker, former president of Starr King Theological School, set out on a Mediterranean journey to confirm a claim that had been made for many years: Christian art did not show a crucified Christ until the 10th century.
Brock and Parker found Christ as a victorious king and as a good shepherd with a live lamb on his shoulders, but they did not find any images of Jesus dying on a cross. When Jesus is shown on the cross in these early centuries, he is very much alive and looking straight out into the world.
In the sixth century St. Apollinare Nouvo Church, there are 26 panels depicting the life of Christ. The 10th panel is Simon of Cyrene carrying a cross, and the next and final panel shows the angel and the two women at the tomb. Curiously, but significantly, Christ crucified is not represented.
Cyril of Jerusalem preached that the Eucharist represented a "spiritual sacrifice of a bloodless offering." At the moment that the bread and wine were consecrated, the Holy Spirit descended to Earth and reopened the gates of a New Eden and a new humanity was restored by Christ.
Many early churches were decorated in ways that made them an earthly paradise - a heaven on Earth. St. Ambrose, the Italian bishop who baptized St. Augustine in A.D. 387, believed Paradise was not only present in churches but also in the souls of all believers at baptism.
Before the 10th century, the sacramental bread and wine represented a heavenly transfer of Christ's glorified body and blood, but after that, orthodoxy required one believe it was the crucified body and blood. The New Testament, however, is clear Jesus declared the wine and bread as his blood and body before he was executed.
The first known crucifix was made by a Saxon artist who carved a life-size dead Jesus from oak. Called the Gero Crucifix it was produced in A.D. 965 and is displayed in the cathedral in Cologne, Germany.
The ancient Saxons worshipped trees and they were converted by Charlemagne's troops at the point of the sword. As Parker and Brock state: "The cross - once a sign of life - became for them a sign of terror. Pressed by violence into Christian obedience, the Saxons produced art that bore the marks of their baptism in blood."
In a supreme and terrible irony, the humiliated Saxons identified with the crucified Jesus and they saw their own wounds - physically and spiritually - in his tortured figure.
Church authorities imprisoned and tortured Saxon theologians, who continued to believe the Eucharist contained the heavenly Christ rather than the new view of the judging crucified Christ.
Brock and Parker draw political conclusions from the replacement of Churches of Paradise with Churches of Crucifixion: "Charlamagne fused church and state in new ways, altered the long-standing Christian prohibition against the shedding of human blood, and made Christianity a colonizing tool. He aligned the Cross with military victory and laid the axe to the root of sacred trees."
Over the next hundred years pogroms against Jews increased dramatically. Significantly, the Christian leaders who did focus on the crucifixion, such as Melito of Sardis, were also those who called the Jews "Christ killers." As Brock and Parker state: "Melito's sermons show how easily a focus on the death of Jesus spilled over into the vilification of Jews."
Under the banner of a huge red cross, the Crusades sent military expeditions against "infidels" in Asia Minor, killing many innocents on the way. In the centuries to come, it would be witches and heretics who would die, and Christian violence continued in the great European empires of the 16th through 19th centuries.
Nick Gier taught religion and philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31 years. He can be reached at ngier006@gmail.com.
