Jots & Tittles

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On Exhibit: Armenian Gospel Book

The story of Pilate’s wife is seldom retold and almost never depicted in art. She is mentioned in passing only once in the New Testament, in Matthew 27:19: “While [Pilate] was sitting on the judgment seat, his wife sent word to him, ‘Have nothing to do with that innocent man, for today I have suffered a great deal because of a dream about him.’”

But the Gladzor Gospels, a brilliantly illuminated manuscript named for the Armenian monastery where it was completed, devotes a full page to the episode. Mrs. Pilate does not appear, but her emissary is shown, passing her message to Pilate as an irate crowd looks on.

Thanks to an ongoing conservation project in which all the leaves of the Gladzor Gospels have been removed from their binding, more than 60 folios—many presenting uniquely Armenian interpretations of biblical scenes—from the manuscript are now on view at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

The exhibition celebrates the 1,700th anniversary of the Armenian church, which was the earliest Christian church. (Armenia accepted Christianity as its official religion in 301 A.D.) The Four Gospels were translated from Greek into Armenian in the fifth century, with no significant textual variants. The creation of a specifically Armenian reading of the biblical texts was left to illuminators and commentators who interpreted the biblical scenes in terms of contemporary Armenian life.

Shown on the cover of this issue, the Last Supper in the Gladzor Gospels is depicted as the first Eucharist—a common interpretation of the scene in both western and eastern art (compare, for example, the 15th-century painting accompanying “Was Jesus’ Last Supper a Seder?” in this issue). In the Armenian illumination, however, the flat, round eucharistic wafers appear not only in front of each diner but also inside two wine chalices in the foreground. This alludes to the very ancient Armenian tradition of dropping the Eucharistic bread into wine and then offering it to worshipers by spoon. The image intimates that the disciples themselves preferred this system to the Roman Catholic procedure, in which bread and wine are offered separately.

The Gladzor Gospels, owned by the UCLA library, will remain on view at the Getty Museum through December 2, 2001. An accompanying catalogue by Thomas Mathews and Alice Taylor includes color reproductions of all the images from the exhibit. For more information about the exhibit and catalogue, contact the Getty Museum (Web site: www.getty.edu or phone: 310–440-7305).

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The Bible in the News

Cecil B. De Mille once said, “Give me a page of the Bible, and I’ll give you a picture.” The De Mille spirit still lives, at least on TV. If media critics are to be believed, that spirit is anything but holy.

From “In the Beginning” (NBC, fall 2000), we get the following headlines: “‘In the Beginning’ Should Never Have Begun” and “Bible’s ‘Beginning’ Never Gets Going.” “Mary, Mother of Jesus” (NBC, fall 1999) is described as “this week’s ultimate woman-in-jeopardy made-for-TV movie” and “giggle-inducing in its inability to believably portray either the human or the divine.”

But it was NBC’s “Noah’s Ark” (summer 1999) that inspired the best in the critics. Headlines included: “The Flood, the Ark—and Sodom and Gomorrah Too,” “NBC Rewrites the Bible for Sweeps,” “Bon Voyage, Biblical Style,” “Just Say ‘Noah,’” “Sea of Sodden Ideas Swamps Poor ‘Noah,’” “‘Noah’s Ark’ Sinks,” “The Wackiest Ship in the Bible,” “Oh Noah! Since When Did Pirates Board the Ark?” and “A Man, an Ark, and a Whole Lot of Critters.” A voice crying in the wilderness (the wilderness of critical approval, that is) did manage this: “‘Noah’ Taking the High Ground: Revisionism Yields a Deluge of Delights.”

Most of the critics—and I looked at more than four dozen reviews—found little to praise: The dialogue was more appropriate to the Catskills than to Canaan, the actors looked more at home in England than Egypt with accents more congenial to the Thames than the Tigris. The rewriting of the biblical narrative allowed Noah to visit Sodom, Lot to lead a pirate attack against the ark, and Sarah to go from barren wife to mother of a full-grown son in six minutes flat.

None of this is, perhaps, unexpected, given the viewer advisory statement that preceded “In the Beginning”: “This film reflects the spirit and historical significance of the stories of the Bible, although some dramatic license has been taken,” and the disclaimer for “Noah’s Ark”: “For dramatic effect, we have taken poetic license with some of the events of the mighty epic of Noah and the flood.” I for one would favor revoking both licenses, dramatic and poetic. In their place, I would demand another document: a Ph.D. or Th.D. in biblical studies. After all, at least some scholars combine a sense of humor with a sense of responsibility.

On Exhibit: Armenian Gospel Book