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figure 3
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Christian meetings were weekly assemblies,
first held on the Sabbath as in Jewish tradition but very soon
moved to Sunday. Worshipers gathered to study, hear sermons, and
pray, and, for those faithful who had been baptized, to celebrate
the Eucharist. From apostolic times, the rite of Communion reenacted
Christ’s
offering of bread and wine at the Last Supper, the priest invoking
God’s
presence and urging remembrance by the participants. The Eucharist
and evolving church liturgy were already densely symbolic and
transformative; they redefined the participants as disciples of
Christ thereby also re-creating the Christian community. By the
second century, the death and resurrection of Christ was celebrated
as a separate feast, the precursor to Easter. By the fourth century,
an annual cycle of liturgical events encapsulated Christian history
through the life of Christ, culminating with Easter, with Christ’s
resurrection and the hope of salvation. It was not unusual, throughout
late antiquity and the Middle Ages, to find visualizations of the
festal cycle in church decorations, imagery that explores this
dense symbolism.
We are looking at a reconstruction
drawing of door panels, and a couple of the panels themselves,
from the Church of the Virgin, al-Moallaqa (the Hanging Church)
in Cairo, Egypt. [figure
3] The door is medieval in date (ca.
1300), from a period when Egypt was under Islamic Mamluke rule
(1250–1517). So the door is much later
than the Roman period but indicative of the enduring legacy
of the first formative centuries. The panels, now in the
collection of the British Museum, were displayed here at the
Metropolitan Museum in the exhibition Byzantium:
Faith and Power, that was organized and curated by Dr. Helen
Evans.
Ten panels altogether were arranged in pairs to form a door
to a baptismal chapel in the church. Six of the panels
represent episodes from the life of Christ in complex compositions
corresponding to eight liturgical feasts. I don’t have
time to discuss these compositions in depth, but I will “read” a
few of these visualizations of festal imagery.
In this first panel, we see three angels watching
over the baptism of Christ in the River Jordan by John the Baptist,
and the descent of the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, when
God’s voice
was heard proclaiming Christ as his son. The scene below represents
the Annunciation by the Archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary that
she would bear the Son of God. The events are not shown in sequential
order as a simple narrative. The scenes are paired out of sequence
to emphasize that in both events the Word of God announced, identified,
Christ as the Son of God. The second panel, for Palm Sunday, represents
Christ’s
Entry into Jerusalem: Christ, astride the ass, hovers above assemblies
of Jerusalem’s
inhabitants.
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