First Glance

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When Andy Warhol died in 1987, the public knew him mainly as the “Pope of Pop.” He was that white-haired, avant-garde artist who hung out with rock stars—an irreverent iconoclast who tested the boundaries of art by painting the icons of popular culture, like Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s Soup cans. But Warhol had another side, private and seldom shared, that he revealed in many of his later works. In the two years before his death, Warhol, a life-long Catholic, produced more than a hundred prints and paintings on religious themes, many of them based on Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper. In “Jesus as Pop Icon: The Unknown Religious Art of Andy Warhol,” Jane Daggett Dillenberger suggests that Warhol’s beautiful, challenging Last Supper paintings reflect his struggle to reconcile his intense religious devotion with the profane but powerful images of American popular culture.

An art historian with a particular interest in Judeo-Christian art, Dillenberger is professor emerita at the Graduate Theological Union, in Berkeley, California. Besides her numerous publications, including Image and Spirit in Sacred and Secular Art (Crossroad, 1990), she has curated two traveling exhibitions on the history of American religious art. Her article, “Images of God in Western Art,” appeared in BR, Summer 1985.

Call it the Case of the Elusive Esther. Scholars have long puzzled over why every book of the Hebrew Bible is represented among the Dead Sea Scrolls, save one: the Book of Esther. Recently, however, scholars of the scrolls were electrified to learn that what may be a portion of Esther had been identified among the fragments from Cave Four at Qumran. Is it time to contact the Missing Persons Bureau and tell them to call off the search? Sidnie White Crawford provides us with a close reading of the newly identified fragments to answer the question, “Has Every Book of the Bible Been Found Among the Dead Sea Scrolls?”

Crawford is associate professor of religious studies at Albright College, in Reading, Pennsylvania. She contributed “A Critical Edition of Seven Deuteronomy Manuscripts from Cave IV, Qumran” in an upcoming volume of Discoveries in the Judean Desert (Oxford Univ. Press) and wrote numerous entries in the Anchor Bible Dictionary.

“Truly,” says Jesus in Mark 9:1, “there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God has come with power.” For most of this century, New Testament scholars have generally understood Jesus as an eschatological prophet who believed that the world was about to be transformed. Recently, some scholars have challenged that view, claiming that Jesus’ apocalyptic sayings were added later to serve the interests of the early Church. These scholars emphasize Jesus’ moral-ethical teachings and religious reforms; they say Jesus taught his followers how to live, not how to prepare for the millennium. In “The Eschatological Jesus: Did He Believe the End Was Near?,” Dale Allison points out that not all of Jesus’ statements about the end of things are demonstrably later. Numerous apocalyptic writings survive from Jesus’ time, and Jesus’ precursor, John the Baptist, preached that the end was near—suggesting that Jesus, too, believed that God’s kingdom was imminent.

Allison has taught at the University of Glasgow, in Scotland, and at Friends University, in Wichita, Kansas. His writings on the Gospels and related literature include The End of the Ages Has Come (Fortress, 1985) and a three-volume commentary, co-authored with W.D. Davies, on the Gospel of Matthew for the International Critical Commentary series.

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A Note on Style

B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era), used by some of our authors and often used in scholarly literature, are the alternative designations corresponding to B.C. and A.D.

When Andy Warhol died in 1987, the public knew him mainly as the “Pope of Pop.” He was that white-haired, avant-garde artist who hung out with rock stars—an irreverent iconoclast who tested the boundaries of art by painting the icons of popular culture, like Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s Soup cans. But Warhol had another side, private and seldom shared, that he revealed in many of his later works. In the two years before his death, Warhol, a life-long Catholic, produced more than a hundred prints and paintings on religious themes, many of them based on Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last […]