Resurrecting Easter: Hunting for the Original Resurrection Image

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All of the main events in Jesus’s life are directly described in the New Testament— except for the Resurrection. This central event happens off-screen and is not directly witnessed. As a result, early Christians created two very different depictions of this moment. Join the Crossans as they hunt for the earliest images of Jesus’s resurrection—and attempt to resurrect the original Easter vision.

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Footnotes

1. John Byron, Biblical Views: “Who Sinned First—Adam or Cain?” BAR, 43:04.

Endnotes

1.
Full details, see our book: John Dominic Crossan and Sarah Sexton Crossan, Resurrecting Easter: How the West Lost and the East Kept the Original Easter Vision (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2018). We work jointly, Sarah on photography, technology, and depiction and Dominic on history, theology, and description.

2.
See Jaś Elsner, “The Christian Museum in Southern France: Antiquity, Display, and Liturgy from the Counter-Reformation to the Aftermath of Vatican II,” Oxford Art Journal 32 (2009), pp. 181–295. For a full iconography, see Hubert Schrade, Ikonographie der Christlicher Kunst: Die Sinngehalte und Gestalungsformen. Die Auferstehung Christi, vol. 1 (Berlin & Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1932). Despite its name, this only examines the Individual Resurrection Tradition of the West.

3.
In 1916, the brilliant German Jesuit archaeologist Joseph Wilpert (1857–1944) depicted those frescoes in colored reproductions as they were after a decade and a half of degradation from outside urban air. Despite recent preservation and restoration, during which the complex was closed to the public (until March 2016), Wilpert’s older images are the best we can ever have of what once was there.

4.
Richard C. Miller, “Mark’s Empty Tomb and Other Translation Fables in Classical Antiquity,” Journal of Biblical Literature 129 (2010), pp. 759–776; see also Richard C. Miller, Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity (New York: Routledge, 2015).

5.
André Grabar, L’empereur dans l’art byzantine: Recherches sur l’art official de l’empire d’orient, Publications de la Facuté des Lettres de l’Universitee de Strasbourg, Fascicule 75 (Paris: Librairie Les Belles Lettres, 1936); André Grabar, Christian Iconography: A Study of Its Origins, The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1961, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Bollingen Series 35.10 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968), p. 126.

6.
See Paula Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity (New York: Knopf, Random House, 1999), pp. 243, 253.