Note 44 — VI THE SELF-OFFERING OF THE MESSIAH. THE SUPPER

In agreement with this view is the fact that the earliest representations of Christ in connection with the cross had for their subject not the suffering and crucified, but the miraculous Saviour triumphing over sickness and death. He appeared as a youthful God with the Book of the Law, the Gospel, in his hand, the lamb at his feet, the cross upon his head or in his right hand, just as the heathen Gods, a Jupiter, or some crowned ruler, used to be depicted with a cross-shaped sceptre. Or Jesus’ head was placed before the cross, and this in the orb of the sun—and exactly at the point of intersection of the arms of the cross, thus at the place where one otherwise finds the lamb. Even the Church, probably with a right feeling of the identity of Agnus and Agni, and in order to remove the connection of ideas therein contained, in the year 692, by the Quinisext Synod (in Trullo), forbade the pictures of the lamb and required the representation to be of the Saviour’s human shape. In spite of this even then they did not represent “the Crucified” in the present-day sense of the word, but portrayed Christ in the form of one standing before the cross praying with outstretched arms. Or he was shown risen from the grave, or standing upon the Gospels at the foot of the cross, out of this arising later the support for the feet in the pictures of him crucified. Here he was represented with open eyes, with his head encircled by the sun’s orb. In all of these different representations accordingly the cross only brought again before the eyes in symbolical form what was at the same time expressed by the figure of Christ standing at the cross, just as at the feasts of Osiris or Attis the God was doubly represented, both in his true shape (as image or puppet) and in the symbolical form of the Jatu or pine-tree trunk. This mode of depicting Christ lasted a long while, even though as early as the fifth or sixth century mention is made of crucifixion, and in arbitrary interpretation of Psa. xxii. 17 he was depicted with the marks of the nails. For, as has been said, “crux” betokens both the gibbet and the mystical sign, and the marks of the nails served to symbolise the Saviour’s triumph over pain and death. An ivory plate in the British Museum in London, mentioned and copied by Kraus,44 is considered the oldest representation of a crucifixion in our present sense. It is said to be of fifth-century origin. This assignment of date is, however, just as uncertain as the other, according to which the miniature from the Syrian Gospel manuscript of the monk Rabula of the monastery of Zagba in Mesopotamia, which also has the crucifixion for subject and is to be found in the Bibliotheca Laurenziana at Florence, is assigned to the year 586. In any case, as a general rule until the eleventh century it was not the dead but the living Christ who was depicted before or on the cross. Consequently an illustration in the Bibliotheca Laurenziana of about the date 1060 is considered as the first certain example of a dead crucified Christ.45