Acts of the Apostles 8:26–40

The Ethiopian Eunuch

Commentaries by Michael Banner

Works of art by Abraham van Linge, Jusepe de Ribera and Unknown artist, Spain

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Abraham van Linge

St Philip preaching to the Eunoch, c.1637, Stained glass, Balliol College Chapel, Oxford University, Oxford; n.6, Photo © Painton Cowen

Water on a Desert Road

Commentary by Michael Banner

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The book of Acts does not have a central place in many lectionaries. And the story of the Ethiopian eunuch’s baptism—despite its dramatic quality—has not always had the same prominence in preaching and visual representation as it has in Acts’ chronicle of the spread of the gospel.

The scene did, however, gain some popularity in the Protestant Netherlands in the mid-sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries, as part of a turn away from saints and their legends in favour of biblical characters and incidents. In addition, the logic of the eunuch’s conversion suited Protestant expectations and polemic. His faith begins with his intense study of Scripture, is nurtured by Philip’s exposition and preaching of ‘the good news of Jesus’, and—with the addition of verse 37—is finally expressed in an explicit confession that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, leading directly to baptism.

These painted windows skilfully present the whole narrative. In the two right-hand lancets (not reproduced in this exhibition), Philip, in a rich blue robe, animatedly addresses the lavishly dressed Ethiopian, who is seated in a grandly appointed chariot and attended by a considerable retinue. In the two lancets shown here, we see (in the right background) Philip seated in the chariot as he expounds the text from Isaiah which the eunuch had been reading without understanding. Then, in the left foreground, at the end of a long and twisting path, Philip baptizes the eunuch in a pool formed by a lively stream which flows dramatically from high up on the left.

In seventeenth-century English (as also in its Greek and Latin equivalents), ‘desert’ referred not only to dry and barren regions, but to any wild or uninhabited place. Abraham van Linge’s landscape, though green and well-watered, is, with its rocky outcrops and steep and winding road, such a place.

In such a place, even a meeting between apostle and eunuch seems something of a miracle, let alone that it would result in one of the first signs of the fulfilment of the promise of the risen Lord given at his ascension—‘you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth’ (Acts 1:8).

So—though it is not demanded by the text—the eunuch’s confession and baptism are worthy of the crowd the artist has assembled, with us, to witness the scene.


Unknown artist, Spain

Our Lady of Mercy between Saint Peter and Saint Paul (altarpiece fragment), c.1500–25, Polychrome wood, Museu Federic Marès, Barcelona; MFM 1147, Museu Frederic Marès; Photo: © Guillem F-H

Under (and not Under) the Virgin’s Cloak

Commentary by Michael Banner

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The origin of the motif of our Lady of Mercy is uncertain, but by the fifteenth century it had become popular, especially in Catalonia where this sculpture was probably made. A benignly smiling and rosy cheeked Virgin Mary stretches out her arms to shelter an assembly of people under her richly decorated cloak, supported by Saints Peter and Paul. The Virgin and her saintly assistants are many times larger than those she draws around her, allowing her to protect a goodly number; but her stature also adds to the image’s evocation of a sheltering presence.

In some versions of the motif, Mary offers protection to particular groups (members of a religious community, for example), but here she gathers something of a cross-section of society. The variety of headgear signals the variety of persons and ranks under her protection—there is a papal tiara, a cardinal’s hat, a mitre, and a crown, as well as fashionable turbans, caps, and wimples for male and female laity. And at the right-hand edge of the group is a male of African descent, kneeling and looking upwards expectantly.

Should we be surprised by his presence—as many of the first readers of the Book of Acts might have been surprised by the presence of the Ethiopian eunuch amongst the first gentiles to accept the gospel? In some ways the appearance of this Black man is a reflection of the artist’s social reality—the first enslaved Africans had been brought to Europe only some seventy-five years before this sculpture was fashioned. Spain in particular had a sizeable Black population in the early sixteenth century, estimated to be as much as 10% in major centres such as Seville.

And yet such social reality—as later history would prove—was never sufficient, by itself, to ensure the presence of Black people (enslaved or otherwise) under the protecting wings of the Virgin or ‘Mother Church’. As Martin Luther King, Jr would say some 450 years after this object was made: ‘11 o’clock on a Sunday morning is America’s most segregated hour’.

The presence of this single Black person under the unsegregated cape of salvation, like the conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch, is a sign of the gospel’s reaching to the very ends of the earth—even if the church has found it hard in practice to accept the universalism of Christ’s promise.


Jusepe de Ribera

Magdalena Ventura with Her Husband and Son (The Bearded Lady) , 1631, Oil on canvas, 194 x 126 cm, Fundación Casa Ducal de Medinaceli collection, displayed at the Museo Fundación Lerma, Toledo; Bridgeman Images

Behold, a Woman, Bearded

Commentary by Michael Banner

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Jusepe de Ribera and his artistic contemporaries regularly depicted people whose mental or physical conditions were perceived as abnormal (people with dwarfism, extreme curvature of the spine, etc.)—sometimes as a foil to their portrayals of elegant courtiers (Royal Academy 1976: 52).

In this painting, a broken tablet at right bids us behold a ‘Great Miracle (or Wonder) of Nature’. The artist means to commend his artwork, of course, with all its virtuosity—but also the woman whose story the tablet recounts.

According to that tablet, Magdalena, 52 when she was painted, had become hairy at the age of 37, growing a beard ‘more worthy of a man than of a woman who had borne three sons’. That luxuriant beard, a traditional symbol of ‘masculinity’, is juxtaposed with her prominently bared breast (anatomically misplaced, as if to draw attention to it) and the child about to suckle. It is this juxtaposition which might seem to be the wonder.

But Magdalena Ventura does not invite our curiosity or pity. This grave life-size figure meets us head on, or eye to eye. Her husband remains in the shadows—a latter day Joseph perhaps. But Magdalena steps forward into the strong light, her dignified pose evoking both the Virgin Mary and, at the same time, Simeon with the Christ child. Ribera presents no ‘curiosity’ of the sort that would later be touted in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century ‘freak shows’, nor even a merely resolute woman. From the shadows of her own life Magdalena has emerged with dignity and grace, the head of a holy family.

Strangely, we don’t know the eunuch’s name in Acts 8. ‘Behold a man, Ethiopian, a eunuch’ would be the literal translation of verse 27. And five times Luke refers to him as ‘the eunuch’, as if it is this supposed ‘unmanliness’ (by conventional measures) which makes him a wonder—just as being a bearded (‘unwomanly’) woman is what brought Magdalena to the attention of Ribera’s patron.

But as Ribera asks us to see beyond that superficial attribute, so too does Luke. This ambiguously gendered outsider is arguably the first gentile convert in the book of Acts, and in his devout study of the Scriptures, his openness to the preaching of Jesus, and the alacrity with which he seeks baptism, we are to see him first of all as one who steps into the light, a recipient of God’s grace.

 

References

Royal Academy of Arts, London. 1976. The Golden Age of Spanish Painting (London: Royal Academy)


Abraham van Linge :

St Philip preaching to the Eunoch, c.1637 , Stained glass

Unknown artist, Spain :

Our Lady of Mercy between Saint Peter and Saint Paul (altarpiece fragment), c.1500–25 , Polychrome wood

Jusepe de Ribera :

Magdalena Ventura with Her Husband and Son (The Bearded Lady) , 1631 , Oil on canvas

‘What is to Prevent my being Baptized?’

Comparative commentary by Michael Banner

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The three artworks gathered here were created relatively close in time, at a turning point in the representation of Black people in European life and culture. In the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries a Black person could appear as a Christian warrior (St Maurice) or as one of the three kings. If these representations, various as they are, are inflected with certain exoticizing attitudes and assumptions, nonetheless (as with the figure under Mary’s cloak) they presented the Black person as a significant figure within the story of salvation.

But as elements within Western ethnocentrism hardened into the speciously ‘scientific’ racism which would finally fully emerge in the nineteenth century, the Black person in art would more often appear as an accoutrement in the portraits of refined courtiers and rich merchants than as saint or king. For such they had become: possessions to augment the lives of their owners. The relatively brief popularity of the image of the eunuch at his baptism in the early seventeenth century (as seen in the painted glass from Oxford) was—at least for a time—something of a last flourish for the representation of the Black person as called to the service of Jesus Christ.

We may imagine that the book of Isaiah held a special place for the eunuch, seemingly an Ethiopian adherent of Judaism—enough for him to be reading it (surely somewhat uncomfortably), as his chariot trundled away from Jerusalem through the desert. Whereas Deuteronomy 23:1 excludes the eunuch from the covenant (‘He whose testicles are crushed and whose male member is cut off shall not enter the assembly of the Lord’), Isaiah (56:3) seems to abrogate that exclusion. And to eunuchs and to foreigners (the Ethiopian is both), is made the great promise: ‘my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples’ (56:7).

But if the eunuch may have been drawn to the book of Isaiah by its taking one side in an argument between exclusion and inclusion, this wounded man—this man who had been cut off—may also have been especially engaged by the mysterious passage he is reading aloud when Philip hears him. It is part of one of the so-called songs of the suffering servant, and refers to this servant’s ‘humiliation’. Eunuchs were often especially privileged officials, as was the Ethiopian—and yet their privileged place was itself founded on their degradation in the eyes of the world.

‘Of whom does the prophet speak?’, asks the eunuch. Philip interprets the passage as speaking of Jesus Christ. But of course, if the eunuch identified with the suffering servant he was not mistaken—for to be baptized into Christ was to be baptized into his death, and especially so (as it would turn out) for the Ethiopian’s fellow African and their descendants. If one of their number is found beneath the protecting mantle of the sixteenth-century Spanish Madonna of Mercy, his place at the very edge of the cloak would come to seem prophetic.

For James H. Cone (1938–2018), one of the first and distinctive voices in Black theology, it is the problem of suffering which is the problem of Black theology. ‘What is to prevent my being baptized?’ the eunuch asks. ‘The suffering of my people at the hands of Christian nations’, his descendants might well have answered. But for Cone, as African Americans struggled to ‘affirm humanity despite the dehumanizing conditions of slavery and segregation’ (Cone 1975:169), they accepted their vocation to be God’s suffering servants with and alongside Jesus Christ, for the establishment of God’s justice and kingdom—just as Magdalena Ventura seems to have accepted her suffering, and not been overcome by it.

The lively narrative of Abraham van Linge’s window gives us three instalments in the eunuch’s story, but as our eye moves around and around its lancets seeking the narrative’s logic, we are surely left to wonder, as the bystanders may be wondering, ‘what next?’ He ‘went on his way rejoicing’ Luke tells us (v.39), but over the rest of his history a veil is drawn. As we remove the veil from that sorry history, we may discover a miracle, not of nature, but of grace—the story of a people who, as the American novelist and essayist James Baldwin (1924–87) puts it, ‘in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity’ (Baldwin 1963: 18). Such was Mother Pollard (c.1882/1885–before 1963) the church elder who after many weeks of walking during a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, replied to the suggestion that she should take a bus for the sake of her health with the words: ‘My feets is tired but my soul is rested’ (King 1963: 517).

 

References

Baldwin, James. 1990 [1963]. The Fire Next Time (London: Penguin Classics)

Cone, James. 1975. God of the Oppressed (New York: Seabury Press)

Luther King Jr, Martin. 1986 [1963]. ‘The Strength to Love’, in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches, ed. J. M. Washington (New York: Harper Collins), pp. 491–517

Next exhibition: Acts of the Apostles 9:1–31

Acts of the Apostles 8:26–40

Revised Standard Version

26 But an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Rise and go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” This is a desert road. 27And he rose and went. And behold, an Ethiopian, a eunuch, a minister of the Candaʹce, queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of all her treasure, had come to Jerusalem to worship 28and was returning; seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah. 29And the Spirit said to Philip, “Go up and join this chariot.” 30So Philip ran to him, and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet, and asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” 31And he said, “How can I, unless some one guides me?” And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him. 32Now the passage of the scripture which he was reading was this:

“As a sheep led to the slaughter

or a lamb before its shearer is dumb,

so he opens not his mouth.

33In his humiliation justice was denied him.

Who can describe his generation?

For his life is taken up from the earth.”

34And the eunuch said to Philip, “About whom, pray, does the prophet say this, about himself or about some one else?” 35Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this scripture he told him the good news of Jesus. 36And as they went along the road they came to some water, and the eunuch said, “See, here is water! What is to prevent my being baptized?” 38And he commanded the chariot to stop, and they both went down into the water, Philip and the eunuch, and he baptized him. 39And when they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord caught up Philip; and the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing. 40But Philip was found at Azoʹtus, and passing on he preached the gospel to all the towns till he came to Caesareʹa.