Unknown French artist (Tours)

The Genesis Cycle, from the Moutier-Grandval Bible , c.830–40, Illuminated Manuscript, The British Library, London; Add MS 10546, fol. 5v, © The British Library Board (Add 10546, f.5v)

In the Beginning was the Word

Commentary by Jacopo Gnisci

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The opening of the Gospel of John tells us that Christ is the ‘Word’ (logos) of God, and is God himself, and that he existed before the world was formed (1:1–2).

This Gospel deeply influenced the development of the Church’s Christology and is rich in biblical citations. For example, its first words echo the first verse of the first book of the Bible as a whole: ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth’ (Genesis 1:1).

This connection reinforces the point that Christ has always existed in the Father, just as the Father exists in Christ. This interpretation was an obvious one to Early Church Fathers such as Jerome (d.420 CE—see his Hebrew Questions on Genesis; Hayward 1995: 30), who translated the Bible into Latin.

Early Christian and medieval artists drew on such interpretations of John’s Gospel for portraying God in the Old Testament. In treatments of Genesis, for example, the Creator is represented as Christ to underscore the fact that He existed prior to his Incarnation (Kessler 1971). This can be seen in a sequence of miniatures that served as a frontispiece to the book of Genesis in the Moutier-Grandval Bible: a large ninth-century pandect—that is to say, a manuscript that contains the entire Christian Bible.

The Genesis cycle starts in the upper left corner with the Creation of Adam (Genesis 2:7) and ends with the Expulsion of Adam and Eve, who must now respectively suffer the pains of labouring on the land and of childbearing (3:16–24). These illuminations show a youthful Christ with long hair—rather than an older man with white hair and beard, typical of representations of God the Father—engaging with humanity’s first parents.

In deciding to represent the divine Artifex in this manner, the artist must have had the third verse of the Gospel of John in mind: ‘through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made’ (1:3), as well as those passages where Jesus states that ‘anyone who has seen me has seen the Father’ (14:9), and ‘I am in the Father, and the Father is in me’ (14:11).

By adding a representation of Christ at the beginning of the first book of the Christian Bible, medieval artists thus stressed Christ’s divine and eternal natures as well as the connection between the Old and New Testaments.

 

References

Hayward, C.T.R (trans.). 1995. Saint Jerome’s Hebrew Questions on Genesis (Oxford: Clarendon Press)

Kessler, Herbert L. 1971. ‘Hic Homo Formatur: The Genesis Frontispieces of the Carolingian Bibles’, The Art Bulletin 53.2: 143–60

See full exhibition for John 1:1–13

John 1:1–13

Revised Standard Version

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was in the beginning with God; 3all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. 4In him was life, and the life was the light of men. 5The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7He came for testimony, to bear witness to the light, that all might believe through him. 8He was not the light, but came to bear witness to the light.

9 The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world. 10He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not. 11He came to his own home, and his own people received him not. 12But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; 13who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

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