Of Cherubim and Gospel Symbols - The BAS Library
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Home > Magazines > BAR > July/August 1995

Of Cherubim and Gospel Symbols

By Robin M. Jensen

The lion, eagle, ox and man of Ezekiel’s vision re-emerge in early Christian art as the standard symbols of the authors of the four New Testament Gospels. In his famous vision, the prophet Ezekiel describes four cherubim, each with four faces—of a human being, a lion, an ox and an eagle; each with four wings with human hands underneath; and each with eyes all around (Ezekiel 1:5–10). In western Christian iconography, however, Ezekiel’s composite creatures are usually conflated with the apocalyptic vision of four living creatures surrounding the divine throne in the Apocalypse of John, or Revelation (4:6). Unlike […]

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Footnotes

1.

Art historians debate whether the manuscript was actually created by monks from the Kells monastery or, perhaps, by monks living on the remote island of Iona, off the coast of Scotland, who brought the manuscript with them to Kells when they fled the island during the ninth-century Viking invasions.

2.

Developed in 320 by Eusebius of Caesarea, canon tables list in columns the citations for parallel texts from the Gospels. The tables became a standard accompaniment to the Latin Vulgate, Jerome’s translation of the Bible. Medieval artists often set these tables in ornamented architectural frames and occasionally added images of the evangelists.

Endnotes

1.

See Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.11.8.

2.

See Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel 1.1 (Latin text, Patrologia latina 25.21); and Augustine, The Harmony of the Gospels 4.10 (Latin text, Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum 43.406–407). Augustine and Jerome differ in their identifications of Matthew and Mark; Augustine assigned the human/angel creature to Mark and the lion to Matthew.