Hello! I went to mass for the first time last night, and the church was BEAUTIFUL. But I have a question re: some of the art.
St Luke was depicted as an ox, St Mark was a lion, St John was a bird (a griffin or eagel maybe?), and then St Matthew was a man. Every one of them had angel wings.
Can someone tell me about why they are depicted this way, and when/ where the practice of these animal depictions originated?
Ty! Happy Holidays!
Not all saints, just the four evangelists are symbolized by the four "living creatures" of the Bible. Wikipedia explains:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetramorph
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_creatures_(Bible) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Evangelists ("Symbols" section)
They're the four evangelists, symbolized by the eagle, the ox, the man and the lion. These four animals are mentionned in some christian texts, the apocalypse, for example, but I don't know when these texts were written.
Associating these four main characters with simple symbols has three purposes I can think of :
You can worship them secretly, kinda like how the christ is symbolized by a fish at the begining.
You can associate them with symbolic moral stories
People (who may or may not read) can identify them easily on paintings and sculptures.
“The beef”
Lol, Saint Luke’s been demoted to meat! 🤣
English is not my first language, I knew deep down I messed up 🐮 I'll edit.
Well, ox are humble, so I doubt he took offense. 😀
They were written 20 housand and 26 years ago
You know how sometimes, an oral tradition is written decades/centuries after, or when the first writings were lost and the earliest copy we know are from middle age/late roman empire, or when a text or a legend re-use older elements, or when more recent texts are added to a traditional corpus? I'm too lazy to double-check the sources and dates of christian mythology right now, but I'm sure OP will love to learn about them themself.
I know. I was being cheeky. That's the issue with the Bible its so hard to really translate ancient written language. Especially when accounts were written way after the events. Funny though how many events and places in the Bible are proving to be true in some context. Like the flood. Troy etc.
The oldest known Gospel manuscript is P52, containing a fragment of John, and is dated to 100-150 AD, which itself only 10-60 years after the conventional date for the Gospel text itself. This is practically instantaneous by the standards of the paleography of the ancient world— our knowledge of almost everyone else from that time comes from copies of sources made centuries after the fact.
I don't know how they got matched up by Christians to the guys who wrote the Gospels, but these are the Holy Creatures that hold up the Chariot in Ezekiel's vision. So these animals come from Judaism, but they were applied to these representatives of the Gospels.
Btw, they are also part of The Chariot card in the Tarot.
I'll give you the Orthodox answer:
These four depictions are linked to the four beings found in Ezekiel 1 and Revelation 4. They have the face of an animal and six wings like angels, surrounding the throne of God. They're meant as a sort of typological prophecy, but also linked to certain theological concepts:
Gospel of Matthew - focuses on Christ's human genealogy from David (man)
Gospel of Mark - includes the prophecy of roaring in the wilderness (lion)
Gospel of Luke - focuses on Christ's sacrifice/temple (ox)
Gospel of John - focuses on Christ as the eternal logos (high Christology/eagle)
Animal iconography (small i) is common in Christian culture. Ie. Jesus is depicted as a lamb with seven horns and seven eyes. The Holy Spirit is depicted as a dove. Believers are fish. But the tetramorph depictions are generally not to be found in icons that are venerated. Here's a brief article on it: The Tetramorph in Christian Art | A Reader's Guide to Orthodox Icons
https://preview.redd.it/5jpc1fmj4j9g1.png?width=1383&format=png&auto=webp&s=3fe83c193cdc5b7ba45eb1ec4ad258b896ad0ad6
(picture because it's kinda cool)
It's a very, and I mean VERY ancient tradition, which, like many others, was adopted by Christianity.
The four directions (constellations of Leo, Ox...) were impersonated by "Watchers"/"Guardians" in Persia, who borrowed this idea from Babylonians.
In Egypt the Four sons of Horus were associated with cardinal directions, associated with being "guardians" as well, and that's 2000BC, Christianity is as far from that period of Egyptian history as we are from the birth of Christ.
So you can trace where it came from to Christianity, but as for where it originated, and what it actually meant originally... The four cardinal directions "guardians" is one of the oldest motifs, of the same age possibly as pleiades and earth diver.
Go back and see what Roman’s did to Christians before Constantine. A Roman might walk in on Christians during worship and see a bunch of pagan items and ignore it, but an obvious saint, Jesus or anything that identified them as Christians would get them a much different fate. Each animal aligns with traits of the saint and if you dig deeper you will find that they also did stories that prefigured Christ. Like Jonah and the whale to tell their stories. …but I’ve been drinking bourbon all day and could very well be off.
Welp, Happy Holidays to you too, my down voting brethren. I ain’t wrong though. So, yeahhhhhhhhhh
It's not like Christians had to worship in the Catacombs or anything...
....everyone needs to read 'Cat's Cradle'....;)
Read this book every year, with the occasional skip year.
Do you have any evidence that this is the actual origin of those four symbols?
You mean other than the symbols being expansive and well documented for centuries with numerous scholars writing about it? Nope. Nothing. 😑
That doesn't mean they were developed as secret, anti-persecution devices. Do you have any evidence for that?
Why don’t we back up a bit. Before I write a thesis based on readily available material, why don’t you tell me what you know about Ancient Rome and how Christians were treated by Romans until Constantine.
I am aware of the persecution of early christians in the Roman empire, mostly because they refused to participate in official state religions, including the worship of the emperor as a deity. Rome was usually happy, even keen to incorporate foreign religions, as long as they also allowed for official state religions such as the rights associatted with Jupiter Optimus Maximus which were presided over by the Pontifex Maximus, the heighest ranked priest in Rome, who in reality was often the emperor.
Christians not only refused to participate but ion some cases were openly hostile, staging protests and other forms of civil disobedience at these events.
That said, the level of active peersecution waxed and waned over the roughly 300 years before Constantine the Great, with intervening periods of relative calm, so it wasn't a constant thing in reality but there were some significant episodes, starting with Nero. How much of this involved christians being fed to lions in the Colosseum, like we see in Hollywood and books about the martyr saints is an open question, though considering it was an appropriate punishment for insurectionists, it surely did happen sometimes.
I am not disputing that any of this happened, I am also not disputing that as a result the early christians were forced to worship in secret and employed covert symbols such as the fish to help keep their activities secret. I just haven't heard that this is the origin of the symbols for the four evangalists. It doesn't seem implausible though, so was wondering if there was some actual evidence.
So like syncretism in voodoo
Don’t know why anyone downvoted this.
who the fuck knows, nor do i care
possibly, yes, and the other West Indian and Brazilian slave cultures that adapted and incorporated Catholic iconography as a way of maintaining African religious practices and beliefs, not only Voudon, but also Santeria, Palo, and Candomble.