Illustration in biblical manuscripts

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In the beginning…and after Christianity has always been a religion of the book. But unlike Judaism or Islam, Christianity, for most of its history, has also been to an extraordinary extent a religion of the image. Study of the combination of words and images in illustrated biblical manuscripts – how such illustration began, how it developed, how it was produced, how it was understood – thus forms a subject, or numerous subjects, of importance. The material with which to explore these subjects is vast and complex, and whereas the main features of the landscape have been mapped, much detailed exploration, notably in individual manuscripts, still remains to be undertaken. Unlike the Babylonian religious leader Mani (d. 276), who taught his disciples with the aid of a ‘picture book’ (Middle Persian ardahang / Greek eἰκών), Jesus made little use of images for instruction. The sole exception was the representation (eἰκών / Latin imago ) of Caesar on a coin, which Jesus employed to distinguish between the worldly and the divine (Matt. 22:20; Mark 12:16; Luke 20:24). Yet the ubiquity of the public and private use of images in the Graeco-Roman world, together with other factors not yet fully understood, meant that Christian themes, such as the promise of personal salvation, and simple narratives, for example Christ's healing of a paralytic, escaped the shackles of the written word and came to be given visual form from a surprisingly early date (as in the mid-third-century wall paintings at Dura Europos). By the fifth century we find the first examples of images included in biblical manuscripts (‘Quedlinburg Itala’, a fragment of the books of Kings with illustrations). And by the end of the sixth century a wide range of approaches to biblical illustration in biblical manuscripts had been explored in the Mediterranean world. It was on these foundations that traditions of biblical illustration were built, traditions that would last throughout the manuscript era, and which, as visual formulae, retain their familiarity and power to a great extent today. The complex interplay of visual tradition and visual invention over a long period gives the topic of biblical illustration its special character.