Templar Edification

Doré brings us now to one of the most overlooked and misunderstood holy days upon the Church calendar: the Ascension! Here he illustrates Mark 16:19— So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat  down at the right hand of God. Luke tells us that 40 days after the Resurrection—40 ever signifying a time of new life and new birth in the stories of the Bible—the Risen Christ returned to Heaven, to the right hand of the Father, by being obscured in a cloud. For Romans this would surely have brought to mind King Romulus, supposedly taken to Olympus in a storm at the end of his mortal life. Jews would make the connection to the Shekinah, or cloud of divine presence, which descended upon both Tabernacle and Temple; as well as to the Son of Man prophesied by Daniel, coming on a cloud. In fact, this was not the simple return of God the Son to His previous abode, a heavenly hero welcomed home in triumph, but the culmination of His mission and last stag...

Our exploration of the woodcuts used to illustrate the classic Grande Bible de Tours, etched by renowned French artist Gustave Doré, takes us now from Crucifixion to Resurrection with: Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his  glory?"; Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the  things about himself in all the scriptures. -Luke 24:26-27 Cleopas and his companion are fleeing from Jerusalem. And in all honesty, it seems about the most sensible thing that they could do. We don’t know terribly much about Cleopas. Like most of Christianity’s first generation, he is remembered for whom He followed, loved, and preached—Jesus Christ—than for any incidental biographical details. Tradition holds him to have been a brother of St Joseph, and so uncle to the Christ. But who knows? As for his companion, well, they aren’t even named, but I find it reasonable to imagine her his wife. The two of them skedattle, and...

Our meditations upon the woodcuts of Gustave Doré, by which he illustrated the Grande Bible de Tours, reach the climax of Our Lord’s Passion with Luke 23:44-45— It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the  afternoon, for the sun stopped shining. And the curtain of the Temple was torn in two. By the standards of its day, the Jerusalem Temple was weird. The very idea that there ought to be but one Temple for an entire nation, for a dozen feuding federated Tribes, baffled most observers in the ancient world. Great cities could have scores of temples, of every deity and design, each housing a cultic image, a statue of the given god in glory. Some of these were wonders of the world: Zeus at Olympia, Artemis at Ephesus. Yet the Temple of the Hebrew God stood empty—empty!—just a big blank space with some cherubs set around it, and simple sacred box of acacia and gold (this latter being lost before the time of Christ). Here there would be one Temple, one...

 Our exploration of the woodcuts used to illustrate the classic Grande Bible de Tours, etched by renowned French artist Gustave Doré, continues the drama of Calvary with  Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” And they cast lots to divide his clothing. And the people stood by watching, but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!” -Luke 23:34-35 Father, forgive them, they know not what they do. That verse still stuns me. I need to stop and put my Bible down to breathe. The Romans had made death into an art. Who else could come up with something like the poena cullei—sewing someone inside of a sack with wild beasts, then tossing them together into the Tiber so that the animals in panic would tear apart the man? Who else could have imagined, let alone planned and executed, the symphony of death played out within the Colosseum? No matter how bad you may think...

In our fourth woodcut from La Grande Bible de Tours, Gustave Doré illustrates John 19:18-19— There they crucified him, and with him two others—one on each side and Jesus in the  middle. Pilate had a notice prepared and fastened to the cross. It read: Jesus of  Nazareth, the King of the Jews. Pilate doesn’t care if you’re a god. But the common folk must have no king but Caesar. Jesus is arrested for blasphemy, yet the Romans have no dog within this fight. They care little for matters of Jewish Law. Religion, for them, is a complicated thing, yet so long as people pay their taxes and allow the trade to flow, Rome will let them worship as they like. This proves doubly true for Judea, as the Romans respect little so much as antiquity, and the Torah certainly boasts an impressive pedigree. Where others must offer their pinch of incense to Caesar, Judeans shall be allowed to sacrifice for the Emperor rather than to the Emperor. It’s a handy little loophole. But if there’s one thing ...

The third in our series of biblical woodcuts by Gustave Doré illustrates Matthew 27: 33-34— And when they came to a place called Golgotha (which means Place of a Skull), they  offered him wine to drink, mixed with gall; but when he tasted it, he would not drink it. Jerusalem in Jesus’ day had spilled beyond its borders, with settlements cropping up outside the fortified city wall. Golgotha—Calvary, in Latin, both names referring to “skull”—began as a limestone quarry on the west edge of the city. The Romans used a high outcropping or hill here as a site of public execution, with crucified victims on full display for those entering, leaving, or simply passing along the road. We don’t know how Golgotha earned its name. Legends abound. Some say that criminals were beheaded there, or that the hill looked rather like a skull, or even that it had been the burial site of Adam once upon a time. The Romans certainly didn’t care. They bored post-holes in the top to hold their crosses, crucif...