Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art

It often seems like people consider the Bible these days to be something completely divorced from "life". We hear about the BIble vs Science. The Bible vs. History. The Bible vs. Art. But the fact of the matter is that the Bible has been central to the development of Western culture, and has been central to the development of historical study, the scientific method, and most of all the development of different art forms. Consider this article the next time someone speaks of the Bible as though it were separable from the other good things in our culture.

Commented Timothy Potts, director of the Kimbell Art Museum: “The origins of Christianity have been a very active area of research in recent years from a variety of perspectives—historical, theological, and artistic. But there has never been an exhibition that brings this new evidence together, allowing visitors to see in the works of art themselves how and why a distinctively Christian visual artistic culture emerged. In "Picturing the Bible" we see how the early Christians drew upon pagan and Old Testament motifs to express their new faith; we witness the interplay between the earliest artistic representations of biblical themes and the doctrinal debates among early Church Fathers over the correct interpretation of scripture; and in the process come face to face with many of the finest and most treasured images that have survived from the tumultuous centuries when Christianity emerged from persecution to become the state religion of the Roman Empire. Assembling so many of the most important masterpieces of early Christian art has been a major challenge—especially the fragile early Bibles, ivories, and gold glass—and presents a spectacle of early Christian life that is unlikely to be repeated in our lifetime.”