Quotes from Robin M. Jensen

Such elaborations of the story necessarily added extensively to the Gospel narratives and their realism would have stimulated strong responses in an audience, prompting them to weep, even cry out in outrage. The tendency to confuse the drama with reality often aroused anti-Jewish prejudice when they presented the crucifixion as a perfidious plot of Jews against Christ.

A famous instance of this kind of abuse comes from Basel in 1529, when a mob carried a crucifix from the church, through the streets, and into the marketplace, tossing it onto a bonfire while a particularly zealous citizen exclaimed, "If you are God, help yourself; if you are man, then bleed!

In eerily similar fashion, Hernán Cortés and his conquering Spanish army fled from Cuba and landed on the east coast of Mexico on Good Friday, 1519. Perhaps because of that auspicious date, Cortés named his first colonial settlement the City of the True Cross (Veracruz).

Aztec religion practiced human sacrifice, understanding it to be both a form of oblation to the gods and a means of deification for the victims. The crucifixion therefore made a certain kind of sense by analogy and the cross was thus incorporated into this sacrificial narrative. Nahua (Aztec) converts could comprehend a crucified god, self-offered to a yet-higher deity.

Marc Chagall's White Crucifixion (1938) was painted shortly after Kristallnacht—the horrifying, widespread Nazi raid on German Jews. The painting shows a world swallowed up by violence, including the figure of Christ on the cross with a Jewish prayer shawl draped around his loins.

Showing Christ as African, Asian, or Central American underlines the universality of his humanity. The depiction of the Holy Spirit as a hummingbird rather than a dove on the Mexican cruz de ánimas (Fig. 9.2) is a modest but striking instance of using meaningful visual language for a particular culture.

The colobium begins to disappear by the ninth or early tenth century, however; and from this time, Jesus is more commonly shown, like the thieves, wearing a knotted perizoma, which some medieval interpreters understood to be Mary's veil, given to him in order to cover his nudity.

Under the direction of the patriarch Niketas (741–775), iconoclasts removed figurative portraits (probably saints' busts) from the council hall of the church of Hagia Sophia and replaced them with plain crosses.31 Already, by 743, Constantine V had rebuilt the earthquake-damaged church of Hagia Eirene and ordered its apse decorated with a simple, unadorned cross. Somewhat surprisingly, this cross has remained its sole decoration to this day.

Plain crosses replaced images of Christ and the saints in other parts of the empire, as in the apse of the Church of the Koimesis of the Virgin at Nicaea, where a cross supplanted a mosaic image of the Virgin.32 After the reaffirmation of the orthodoxy of icons in the ninth century, iconophiles removed the cross and reinstalled an image of the Theotokos holding the Christ child.

The iconophiles, however, would not concede this distinction between cross and crucifix and argued that the representative depiction of the crucifix was necessary to affirm the true humanity of Christ. For this reason, they regarded the removal of crucifixes as both heretical and sacrilegious. Illuminations in the ninth-century Chludov Psalter went so far as to equate the whitewashing of an icon of Christ with the act of crucifixion itself.

The eighth-century icon now at St. Catherine's Monastery in Sinai was one of the earliest to show Christ upon the cross with his eyes closed.

The apse of Rome's Basilica of Santa Pudenziana contains the oldest surviving example of a golden, gemmed cross in mosaic. This church, known up to the sixth century as the Titulus Pudentis, was reconstructed at the end of the fourth century. Its apse mosaic—the earliest extant in any Roman church—was installed during the papacy of Innocent I (402–417).

Owing to our first-formed parent's injury, the maker grieved; when he bit the baleful apple and thereby collapsed in death, he himself the wood then marked out that wood's damage to repair. —Venantius Fortunatus

Similar in some respects to the Ravenna sarcophagi are stone crosses found in Armenia and Georgia. Although the earliest date from the ninth century, such crosses continue to be made into the modern period. These memorial steles, called khachkars, typically display crosses enclosed within interlacing designs of vines, fruit, and flowers. The cross's arms generally flare and are tipped with buds. Only a few of the later examples show a corpus on the cross.

The third section tells the rest of the story also from the cross's perspective, vividly elaborating its feelings as it is pierced with nails, spat upon, then cast aside. The poem concludes when the original narrator awakens. The cross charges him to hold it in awe, share the vision with others, and to follow the path to righteousness.

Now you may hear, beloved hero, how I had to abide the deeds of bullies, sorrowful cares. The time has now come that people on this plain far and wide and all this wondrous creation worship me, pray to this sign. On me God's Son suffered a time; thus glorious I now tower under the heavens, and I may heal all and some of those in awe of me.

What makes this particularly remarkable is the link between the object and the text. The poem speaks in the first-person voice of the cross and, in this case, the actual stone cross voices its own story (albeit in carved runes).

Distinctive crusader crosses also distinguished national contingents. According to Jonathan Riley-Smith, at the planning meeting for the Third Crusade (1189–1192), the French decided to wear red crosses, the English white, and the Flemish green.

Cranach was one of Martin Luther's close allies and, in the mid-sixteenth century, he produced altarpieces for Lutheran churches in Wittenburg, Weimar, Schneeburg, Kemberg, Regensburg, and Dessau. Unlike other reformers, Luther never forbade images, especially of the crucifixion, and many of Cranach's paintings and altarpieces functioned as didactic exercises, almost schematic diagrams of Lutheran soteriology.