Why the Ox?

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The four gospel writers have long been linked with the “four living creatures” that surround the throne of God in the Book of Revelation (4:6–8):

Around the throne, and on each side of the throne, are four living creatures, full of eyes in front and behind: the first living creature like a lion, the second living creature like an ox, the third living creature with a face like a human face, and the fourth living creature like a flying eagle. And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all around and inside.

Among the first to make this identification was the church father Irenaeus. The ox, he noted, “was like a calf, signifying [the Son of God’s] sacrificial and sacerdotal order,” which he linked to the fatted calf that was sacrificed at the return of the Prodigal Son, a parable particular to Luke’s gospel. The lion symbolized Jesus’ royal power, he said, and belonged to John, who “relates His…glorious generation from the Father.” The human, “an evident description of His advent as a human being,” Irenaeus assigned to Matthew, whose gospel stresses the descent of Jesus from the line of David (in later tradition the human became an angel). The eagle signified “the Spirit hovering with His wings over the Church” and stood for Mark, whose gospel opens with a reference to “the prophetical spirit coming down from on high.”

Irenaeus’s successors quickly adopted the four living creatures as symbols of the evangelists, but wrangled for centuries about the designation scheme, as the table below shows.¹ About Luke, however, most agreed. Jerome applied the ox/calf to Luke “because he began with Zacharias the priest,” who was offering a sacrifice in the Temple at the beginning of Luke’s gospel, a point that Irenaeus had also raised. Augustine cited the scene in Luke 2:22–24 in which Mary and Joseph presented the infant Jesus at the Temple and offered the requisite sacrifice following childbirth (albeit a pair of birds, not a calf).

Though early Christian art reflected these diverse opinions about the depiction of the evangelists, Luke only appears with an ox or calf or later, a bull. An illumination in the MacDurnan Gospels (above), a ninth-century manuscript from Ireland, shows how closely Luke was identified with the ox: Instead of feet, Luke has hooves! As for the other evangelists, by the seventh century Jerome’s iconography had come to dominate the Western visual tradition.