Bible Review

Most recently Michael Coogan, “Literacy and the Formation of Biblical Literature,” Realia Dei: Essays in Archaeology and Biblical Interpretation in Honor of Edward F. Campbell, Jr., at His Retirement, ed. by Prescott H. Williams, Jr., et al. (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999), pp. 47–61.

See “Frank Moore Cross—An Interview, Part 3: How the Alphabet Democratized Civilization,” BR 08:06. The origins of the alphabet were also discussed by P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., et al. in a presentation on the Wadi el-Hol inscription at the 1999 Society of Biblical Literature meeting in Boston.

One rather fantastic theory suggests that the Mandylion later turned up in Turin as the shroud. See Ian Wilson, The Shroud of Turin (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978); and the critique of such a theory in Averil Cameron, “The Sceptic and the Shroud,” in Continuity and Change in Sixth-Century Byzantium (London: Variorum Reprints, 1981).

See Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 218–224.

The earliest version of the legend that mentions a miraculous image is contained in the apocryphal doctrine of Addai (c. 400); George Howard, The Teaching of Addai (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1991), pp. 9–11.

Eusebius, History of the Church 1.13. Eusebius includes a version of the letter from Abgar to Jesus.

Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 1.25.6.

Such an explanation might also account for the differences seen in the presentation of Jesus at his baptism in the Orthodox and Arian baptisteries. The designers of the Arian mosaics may deliberately have changed Jesus from an older figure to a younger (unbearded) one since he had not at that point “entered into his glory.”

Certain younger pagan gods like Hercules and Dionysus were also depicted as both youthful and mature, bearded and unbearded, perhaps to suggest their own adaptability and multivalence, or even their ambiguous sexuality. Thus we may have here another kind of parallel between Christian iconography and that of the Greco-Roman religions.

Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 10.5 (Andrew A. Stephenson, trans., The Works of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, vol. 1 [Washington, DC: Catholic Univ. of America Press, 1969], p. 198). See also (for comparison), Origen, Against Celsus 2.64 or the Acts of John 87–89 for other examples of Jesus’ variant and changing appearance.