Almighty God, maker of all things,
whose Son Jesus Christ gave to thy servant Bede
grace to drink in with joy
the word which leadeth us to know thee and to love thee:
in thy goodness
grant that we also may come at length to thee,
the source of all wisdom,
and stand before thy face;
through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

For The Epistle: Wisdom 7:15-22
The Gospel: St Matthew 13:47-52

St Bede was born and, as far as we know, lived his entire life in the north of England, yet he became perhaps the most learned scholar in all of Europe. At the age of 7, he was sent to Wearmouth Abbey for his education; at age 11, he continued his education at the new monastery at Jarrow, eventually becoming a monk and remaining there until his death. He lived a routine and outwardly uneventful life of prayer, devotion, study, writing, and teaching.

Bede’s writings cover a very wide range of interests, including natural history, orthography, chronology, and biblical translation and exposition. He was the first to translate the Bible into Old English. He considered his 25 volumes of Scripture commentary to be his most important writings. His best-known book is Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731. This work earned him the popular title “Father of English History”, and not just because it was the first attempt to write a history of England. His historical research was thorough and far-reaching. For example, he asked friends traveling to Rome to bring him copies of documents relevant to English history, and he made use of oral traditions when written materials were not available. The book provides much historical information that can be found in no other source.

His pupil Cuthbert, later Abbot of Jarrow, has left a moving eyewitness account of St Bede’s last hours. Bede fell ill shortly before Easter 735, when he was in the midst of translating the Gospel of John into the Anglo-Saxon language. Everyone realised that the end was near, but he was determined to complete the translation. Between Easter and Ascension Day, he persisted in the task while continuing to teach his students at his bedside.

After a restless night, he resumed dictating the translation on the morning before the Ascension. That afternoon he called the priests of the monastery to him to distribute his remaining earthly possessions. Seeing they were overcome with grief, he comforted them with these words:

“If it be the will of my Maker, the time has come when I shall be freed from the body and return to Him Who created me out of nothing when I had no being. I have had a long life, and the merciful Judge has ordered it graciously. The time of my departure is at hand, and my soul longs to see Christ my King in His beauty.”

The young man who had been writing down the translation said there was still one sentence remaining, and Bede dictated the final words.

After a short while the lad said, “Now it is finished.”

“You have spoken truly,” he replied. “It is well finished. Now raise my head in your hands, for it would give me great joy to sit facing the holy place where I used to pray, so that I may sit and call on my Father.”

And thus, on the floor of his cell, he chanted, “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit” to its ending, and breathed his last.

When he received word of the great scholar’s death, St Boniface, who had used Bede’s Bible commentaries, said, “The candle of the Church, lit by the Holy Spirit, has been extinguished”. Within a generation or two, St Bede was being called “Venerable”. His bones were translated from Jarrow to Durham Cathedral in the mid-11th century; in 1370 they were placed in the cathedral’s Galilee Chapel. (A photo of the tomb can be seen about halfway down this page).

These are the final words of the Ecclesiastical History:

I implore you, good Jesus, that as in your mercy you have given me to drink in with delight the words of your knowledge, so of your loving kindness you will also grant me one day to come to you, the fountain of all wisdom, and to stand for ever before your face.

St Bede is the only Englishman named in Dante’s Paradise. He is also the only English Doctor of the Church.

(Most of the above is a slightly revised version of a post of 9 October 2006.)

I have known about the Shroud since I became a Christian in the early 1980s, but my interest dissipated after the radiocarbon dating of 1988, which concluded that it originated between 1260 and 1390. Despite that finding, however, scientific research and historical investigation have continued. Several experts now say the radiocarbon dating was invalid because fibres were analysed from a part of the shroud that was repaired during the Middle Ages.

Also, earlier this month a researcher at the Vatican found documents suggesting that Knights Templar acquired the shroud during the sack of Constantinople in 1204 and brought it back to France at that time. That would predate the earliest estimate yielded by radiocarbon dating.

Anglican Curmudgeon mentions many peculiar and puzzling features of the shroud and its image. No one can explain how an artist of the Middle Ages could have created it. No one today knows how to re-create it.  The image has been shown to exhibit characteristics of a hologram. The cloth contains blood stains that were placed there before the image itself.

All of this recent evidence leaves less and less ground for the skeptics to stand on, and is appropriately celebrated this Easter Day of 2009. The Shroud turns out to be, in effect, a first-century video clip, or (more accurately) an extended exposure over a span of thirty odd hours, culminating in the event that led to the Empty Tomb. It is a negative that has taken mankind some twenty centuries to learn how to develop for detailed viewing, and the more in-depth the examination of it, the more amazing the level of detail which it reveals.
[…]
“When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” said Sherlock Holmes. As the evidence mounts for the genuineness of the Shroud, Christians may draw on increased support for their faith, even if faith ultimately rests on much more than mere evidence. To be able to reduce other logical possibilities to insignificance after all this lapse of time is indeed a gift to us from the first century, and represents the proper use of such an intimate artifact, as the evidence allows. It is not so much that the Shroud needs to be venerated. Rather, the point is that its ability to emerge enhanced, and further strengthened, from all the disputes over its authenticity merits all the attention thus far bestowed upon it. God’s Easter miracle is alive and well in the ongoing revelation which the Shroud represents for us today.

My faith does not stand or fall with the authenticity of the shroud, but I do find the accumulating evidence very persuasive. The Shroud of Turin could well be the cloth used to wrap the crucified body of Jesus placed in the tomb and which he left behind when he arose from the dead and walked out of the tomb on the first Easter morning.

The official site of the Shroud of Turin is here. Read more here and here. Wikipedia has a length entry with links to other sites pro and con.

The church was forced to retreat to remote mountainous regions and borderlands, where small and insular Christian communities endured for centuries. For example, the Christian territories of Armenia and Georgia survived in the Caucusus, while Maronite Christians found refuge in the mountains of Lebanon.

As Philip Jenkins describes in The Lost History of Christianity, modern technology and the rise of the nation-state contributed to the final decline of many such isolated Christian communities.

[P]recisely the conditions that allowed Christian survival proved deadly dangerous with the emergence of modern states that sought to control their entire territory, and had no patience for the tolerance previously granted to dissident regions. Early modern states could tolerate minorities only within remote enclaves where the writ of government barely ran; but exactly those features made the existence of those enclaves intolerable to modern nation-states. Around the world, nineteenth- and twentieth-century states expanded their authority through military conscription, through censuses, and through compulsory education, making it ever harder to hide from authority. Railroads and newspapers, telegraphs and telephones, carried national standards into the farthest reaches of the land. In practice, the czar or sultan never could be kept away, and that development would be critical for minority survival. With a growing sense of national identity, reinforced by grave external dangers, the Ottoman and later Turkish regimes were deeply sensitive to minority regions that might well seek to break away.

In these circumstances, enclaves located near borders looked dangerously inviting for potential invaders. Furthermore, once the decision had been made to eliminate a troublesome community, the new technologies made it easier to send orders to local authorities, to ensure they were obeyed, and to supply the means for mass murder. Although not as central as they would later be in the Nazi genocide, railroads were an important weapon for the Turkish ethnic cleansings after 1915. New forms of transportation contributed to the spread of Muslim militancy by allowing Muslims to travel widely by train and steamship, to share ideas: the multimillion-strong crowds of pilgrims flocking to Mecca are a strictly modern phenomenon. Such wide travel encourages the creation of Pan-Islamic ideologies. Moreover, a fire-breathing sermon preached in Cairo or Constantinople could within days have grim practical consequences for Christians hundreds of miles away. In this new world, not only did the factors that once protected Christians cease to matter; they even invited official intervention. There was no place left to hide. [Quoted from pp. 240-41, emphasis added]

Modern technology fostered the rise of the modern nation-state, which brought the capability for uniform administration of justice across wider territories—but it also enabled uniform administration of injustice as nationalist regimes were able to wipe out “traitorous” groups within their borders. Thus did Turkey cleanse its territory of religious and ethnic minorities during the 20th century.

[T]he future of the monastery and the Christian minority is threatened by a series of lawsuits against the monks and the prestigious religious institution. In August of 2008, the leaders of three Muslim villages around the monastery accused the community of proselytism, for having students to whom they can hand down the Christian faith and the Aramaic language. Their case has not yet been accepted by the Turkish court. But the village leaders are also asking that the monastery’s land be appropriated and divided among the villages; that a wall be knocked down that was built during the 1990′s (when the monastery was on the front of the conflict between the Turkish army and the Kurdish communist party (PKK)). According to the Muslim leaders, there used to be a mosque on the land where the monastery was built. “The accusation is absurd,” says David Gelen, leader of the Aramaic Foundation, “the monastery dates from 397 A.D., about 200 years before the prophet Mohammed and the construction of any mosque whatsoever. And yet the court has considered hearing the case.”

In the 1960s, about 130,000 Syriac Christians lived in Tur Abdin. Intimidation and persecution have caused most to flee to Europe. Today, only some 3,000 remain.

Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom sees the monastery as an example of the Muslim world’s increasing religious intolerance.

“An ideology of extreme intolerance is sweeping the Muslim world today. Even moderate Western allies, such as Turkey and Iraq, have turned an unwelcoming, indeed hostile, face to the Christians and other non-Muslims in their midst and driving them out. This is a problem, not only for the ancient churches but for Western geopolitics. It is an ideology of religious intolerance that undergirds jihadism. All of our leaders — East and West — need to recognize this and work to end it.”

Assyrian International News Agency has regular updates on the progress of the lawsuits, as well as a page of beautiful photographs of the monastery, whence the photo below.

Most gracious God,
who didst call thy servant Antony to sell all that he had
and to serve thee in the solitude of the desert:
grant that we, following his example,
may learn to deny ourselves
and to love thee before all things;
through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St Peter 5:6-10
The Gospel: St Mark 10:17-21

What we know about Saint Antony (or Anthony) the Great, the father of monasticism, comes mainly from the influential biography written by St Athanasius of Alexandria.

Born at Coma (present-day Memphis), Egypt, to Christian parents, he was orphaned at age 18.  A church service shortly thereafter included a reading of Jesus’ words to the rich young ruler, “Sell all that you have and give to the poor …”.   Antony heard this as God’s message to him, and he obeyed those words.

For the next twenty years, he lived in the desert as a hermit and ascetic.  It was during this time that he experienced the temptations that were frequently depicted in medieval art.

Despite living alone, his story became widely known and many would-be followers sought him out in the desert.  He eventually became spiritual father to a group of disciples, whom he organised in 306 into a loose community under his leadership and guidance.

He left the isolation of his monastery near the Red Sea twice to come to the aid of Christians in Alexandria.  In 311, he travelled there to support believers being persecuted by Maximinus II.  In 355, he returned to debate followers of the Arian heresy.

St Antony was not the first anchorite, but he was the first to be hailed as an example of piety and holiness to be extolled and imitated.  Athanasius’ biography, written soon after Antony’s death and translated into Latin within 25 years, disseminated the ideals of monasticism throughout the Western and Eastern churches and became a model of Christian hagiography.  The monk’s life was portrayed as one of asceticism, unceasing prayer, and spiritual warfare.

A simple man of Coptic background, he did not know Greek and was probably barely literate.  Yet, during his lifetime, he was considered a living saint and miracle worker.  His character and influence converted many to Christ.

Athanasius’ Life of St Antony can be read online at Christian Classics Ethereal Library or New Advent.  St Nicholas Orthodox Church, Billings, Montana, has a page on St Anthony the Great.

Artwork:

• Saint Anthony the Great, mid-16th century. Icon, State Historical Museum, Moscow.
• Martin Schongauer, Saint Anthony Tormented by Demons, c. 1470-75.  Engraving, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

O God,
the Desire of all the nations,
you chose your servant John Horden
to open the treasury of your Word
among the native peoples of Canada.
Grant us, after his example,
to be constant in our purpose and care
for the enlargement of your kingdom;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.

Source: Give Us Grace: An Anthology of Anglican Prayers, compiled by Christopher L. Webber. Anglican Book Centre, Toronto, 2004, p.456.

John Horden was born in Exeter, England. While a young boy at school, he resolved to be a missionary and, when he was 23, the Church Missionary Society (CMS) offered him a post as a teacher and missionary near James Bay. He and his young wife set sail on 8 June 1851, arriving at Moose Factory on 26 August.

Horden gave himself whole-heartedly to his work. Within eight months he was able to teach and preach to the indigenous people in the Cree language. In the summer of 1852, Bishop David Anderson of Rupert’s Land travelled 1500 miles to visit his new minister, initially planning to bring him back to Red River for theological training. The young man’s conscientiousness and maturity were so impressive, however, that Bp Anderson changed his plans and ordained him priest on 24 August.

Rev Horden ministered to the James Bay Cree and Hudson Bay Company employees for many years and visited aboriginal peoples all across the region. He translated the Gospels, a hymnal, and a prayer book into Cree, and sent them to England for printing. Because no one was competent to proof-read the master copies, the CMS sent him a printing press and told him to print the books himself. Horden needed many long, frustrating days to teach himself how to assemble and operate the press, which was soon producing Christian literature in Cree. He also wrote a grammar of the Cree language.

In 1872, Bishop Robert Machray of Rupert’s Land decided that his diocese had grown too large and should be sub-divided. Thus, at Westminster Abbey on 15 December 1872, the Archbishop of Canterbury consecrated John Horden the first Bishop of Moosonee.

Bp Horden continued to travel his vast diocese. By the end of his life, most of the Cree of James Bay had been converted, as well as many Ojibwa, Chipewyan, and Inuit. Also, he laboured on translating the Bible into Cree until he died unexpectedly on 12 January 1893. He is buried at Moose Factory.

Biographies of John Horden are posted here and here.

Philip Jenkins, author of The Lost History of Christianity, outlines the story in Christianity Today online.

[U]nderstanding the history of Iraq’s churches should make us still more keenly aware of the tragedy we see unfolding. Not only are these churches — Chaldean, Assyrian, Orthodox — truly ancient, they are survivals from the earliest history of the church. For centuries indeed, the land long known as Mesopotamia had a solid claim to rank as the center of the church and an astonishing record of missions and evangelism. What we see today in Iraq is not just the death of a church, but also the end of one of the most awe-inspiring phases of Christian history.
[…]
When the Roman Empire became Christian, Mesopotamia became the main refuge for those theological currents that the empire now labeled heretical: the Monophysites or Jacobites, and the Nestorians. Ultimately, most of the Christians of modern Iraq look to one of these movements as their spiritual ancestor.
[…]
These Mesopotamian monasteries were also the base camps for one of the greatest missionary enterprises in Christian history. Especially between the 7th and 9th centuries, the Church of the East was establishing bishoprics and metropolitans across Asia — through Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, into Tibet and Kyrgyzstan, and as far as India and China.

Looking at the world in 850 or so, few observers would have doubted that the Christian future lay in the Middle East and Asia, rather than in the barbarian-ravaged lands of Western Europe.

But it was not to be. Muslims began systematically persecuting Christians in the 13th and 14th centuries, obliterating the church across the Middle East and Central Asia. That persecution has continued to the present day, even intensifying during the 20th century, thus bringing us to what appears to be the impending destruction of Christianity in Iraq.

h/t: Sanctus

Images of Jesus with a beard may also have developed through a wish to symbolize ugliness. There was some debate in the early Church as to whether Jesus was in appearance the most handsome, or the most repulsive of men. One view was that since God is supremely beautiful, and Jesus was God on earth, so Jesus too must have been supremely beautiful. The opposing view was that God the Son took on himself all human misery when he entered the world, and so had a horrible, diseased appearance. This ‘ugly’ view claimed support from the Prophet Isaiah: ‘he had … nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others … surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases’ (Isaiah 53:2-4). Bearded and unbearded images of Jesus appeared concurrently until around the eleventh century. The theory runs that during this period, if an artist wanted to emphasize Jesus’ divinity then he would take the ‘beauty’ side of the debate, and symbolize this by having Jesus beardless, whereas he would portray him as bearded if he wanted to emphasize Jesus’ humanity and supposed ugliness. From around the eleventh century, images of Jesus with a beard took the ascendance.

Images of a bearded Jesus originated from a need to represent human ugliness? Surely not.

Only then were leaders of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, with the indispensable aid of imperial authority, able to root out teachings and texts deemed threatening to church order and stability.  Given the opportunity, they ruthlessly suppressed alternative scriptures containing Gnostic, proto-feminist, egalitarian, or other subversive accounts of Jesus’ life and teaching.

In The Lost History of Christianity, Philip Jenkins shows that this view doesn’t make sense by looking at ancient texts of the Syriac-speaking Church, which came into existence in the Middle East soon after Christ’s resurrection.

An Assyrian Christian named Tatian, a disciple of Justin Martyr for many years, wrote a book around AD 170 that became an authoritative text in the Syriac Church.  The Diatessaron of Tatian, the first harmony of the four canonical gospels, was popularly accepted as the Gospel text until a complete Syriac Bible with Old and New Testaments was translated and compiled.  This was the Peshitta, which was completed in the early 5th century and remains the authorised version in Syriac churches (both Nestorian and Monophysite) to this day.

The Diatessaron and the Peshitta speak decisively against the claim that the early church accepted numerous contradictory texts written by putative apostolic authors.

The problem with all this is that the Eastern churches had a long familiarity with the rival scriptures, but rejected them because they knew they were late and tendentious. Even as early as the second century, the Diatessaron assumes four, and only four, authentic Gospels. Throughout the Middle Ages, neither Nestorians nor Jacobites [Monophysites] were under any coercion from the Roman/Byzantine Empire or church, and had they wished, they could have included in the canon any alternative Gospels or scriptures they wanted to. But instead of adding to the canon, they chose to prune. The Syriac Bible omits several books that are included in the West (2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and the book of Revelation). Scholars like Isho’dad wanted to carry the purge further, and did not feel that any of the Catholic Epistles could seriously claim apostolic authorship. The only extraneous text that a few authorities wished to include was the Diatessaron itself. The deep conservatism of these churches, so far I removed from papal or imperial control, makes nonsense of claims that the church bureaucracy allied with empire to suppress unpleasant truths about Christian origins.

Although they did not include them in the canon of scripture, all the Eastern churches knew many ancient Christian texts, including apocryphal Gospels and apocalypses, and many scholars quote from now-lost patristic texts and commentaries.

(Footnotes omitted, quoted from p. 88.)

Isho’dad of Merv (in present-day Turkmenistan) was a ninth-century Nestorian bishop and Bible scholar.

That Eastern churches were familiar with alternative accounts of Jesus and his teachings is further corroborated by the fact that the Gnostic texts discovered at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945 are in Coptic, the language of Egyptian Christians.

I reviewed The Lost History of Christianity here.

Christianity became European only because churches in Africa and Asia were shattered or destroyed.  About 500 years ago, two-thirds of the Christian world was virtually wiped out.

The rise and fall of the African and Asian churches is the subject of The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died, the latest book by one of today’s leading historians of religion, Philip Jenkins.

The book opened my eyes to an intriguing and gripping history of Christians who built a great culture and held wide influence across a vast territory encompassing many lands with a diversity of peoples, languages, and religions. Anyone with an interest in Christian history would find it fascinating. The book is well written, thoroughly researched, and extensively documented. It is at the same time scholarly and accessible—popular history at its best, in my view.

Why have these Christians been forgotten?  One reason is theological: They subscribed to doctrines concerning the Person of Christ that were judged heretical during the fifth century. Christians in Mesopotamia, Persia, and farther east followed the teachings of the Patriarch Nestorius, which were rejected at the First Council of Ephesus (431). Christians in Africa and much of the Middle East and Asia Minor tended to be Monophysites, who rejected the Christological statement of the Council of Chalcedon (451). Both Nestorians and Monophysites were orthodox according to the fourth-century Nicene Creed, but later controversies split them off from the Catholic and Orthodox branches of the Christian church.

They were also cut off by language. Middle Eastern Christians generally spoke Syriac, a language very closely related to the Aramaic of Jesus and his first disciples. Latin and Greek, of course, were the languages of the churches centred in Rome and Constantinople.

At one time, the Nestorian and Monophysite churches were apparently greater in size and influence than Western churches. Consider Timothy I of Baghdad, patriarch of the (Nestorian) East Syrian Church from 780, about whom Jenkins writes:

At every stage, Timothy’s career violates everything we think we know about the history of Christianity—about its geographical spread, its relationship with political state power, its cultural breadth, and its interaction with other religions. In terms of his prestige, and the geographical extent of his authority, Timothy was arguably the most significant Christian spiritual leader of his day, much more influential than the Western pope, in Rome, and on a par with the Orthodox patriarch in Constantinople. Perhaps a quarter of the world’s Christians looked to Timothy as both spiritual and political head. At least as much as the Western pope, he could claim to head the successor of the ancient apostolic church.
[...]
To appreciate the scale of the Church of the East, we can look at a list of the church’s metropolitans—that is, of those senior clergy who oversaw inferior hierarchies of bishops grouped in provinces. In England, to give a comparison, the medieval church had two metropolitans: respectively, at York and Canterbury. Timothy himself presided over nineteen metropolitans and eighty-five bishops.
[...]
The presence of metropolitan seats in Turkestan and central Asia is amazing enough, but the list of bishoprics and lesser churches includes just as many shocks: Arabia had at least four sees, and Timothy created a new one in Yemen. And the church was growing in southern India, where believers claimed a direct inheritance from the missions of the apostle Thomas.
[...]
Timothy himself was committed to the church’s further expansion, and he commissioned monks to carry the faith to the shores of the Caspian Sea, even into China. He reported the conversion of the Turkish great king, the khagan, who then ruled over much of central Asia. In a magnificent throwaway line, Timothy described, about 780, how “[i]n these days the Holy Spirit has anointed a metropolitan for the Turks, and we are preparing to consecrate another one for the Tibetans.”

(Footnote omitted, quoted from pp. 6-11)

Although subject to legal discrimination and sporadic persecution, African and Asian Christians generally lived peacefully under Muslims who had conquered most of these territories in the 7th century. However, the Nestorian and Monophysite churches were decimated by a combination of adverse events in the 14th century: violence and political intrigues surrounding the Mongol and Turkish invasions, crop failures due to changing climate, and the Black Plague. Worst of all, says Jenkins, a wide-ranging and sustained campaign of persecution by Islamic rulers brought the church to its knees across the Middle East and Asia.

Persecution of remaining Christians continued for centuries, peaking in the 19th and 20th centuries. In Jenkins’s view, the Ottoman Turks bear particular responsibility during this time period. Their xenophobic nationalism gave rise to extensive ethnic and religious cleansing directed against Monophysite and Orthodox Christians.

This thought-provoking book opens up a forgotten era of Christianity and tells a story that Western Christians need to hear.

That digital reconstruction of “The Mystic Ark” will be reproduced in life size – about 13 feet tall and 15 feet wide – and displayed this month at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Rudolph will deliver two lectures about the mural at the museum on Dec. 14 and 15.

“The Mystic Ark” was conceived by the theologian Hugh of Saint Victor, from the monastery of Saint Victor in Paris. Hugh, whose writings are compared to those of Augustine, likely painted the mural on a cloister wall to teach advanced students, Rudolph said.

The mural exists today only in the detailed, 42-page description written by one of Hugh’s students. More than 80 of the parchment manuscript copies of this text have survived and recreate in words a painting that depicts all time, all space, all matter, all of human history, all of human learning, and all of human spiritual endeavor from the beginning of time until the Last Judgment.

The display at the National Gallery of Art represents the culmination of 20 years of research that Prof Rudolph has devoted to the work.

Rudolph’s 2004 book “First I Find The Center Point”: Reading the Text of Hugh of Saint Victor’s The Mystic Ark was published at an earlier stage of the project.

Hugh of Saint Victor’s The Mystic Ark is a forty-two page description of what seems to be the most complex single work of art of the entire Middle Ages, a fundamentally political painting also known as The Mystic Ark, making both the text and the painting among the most unusual sources we have for an understanding of medieval artistic culture and its polemical context.

The Mystic Ark, argues Rudolph, played a key role in initiating the Gothic era in Northern European art.

h/t: Science & Religion Today

In 1998 and 2002, Azerbaijan bulldozed parts of the cemetery. The last of the gravestones was deliberately demolished by sledgehammer-wielding Azerbaijani soldiers between 10-16 December 2005. The area is now a military shooting range.

The Stiletto blog has a hard-hitting and well-documented post on the tragic commemoration.

For years, Azeris had toppled or vandalized the cemetery’s headstones in retaliation for the six-year Nagorno-Karabakh War that ended in 1994 with 30,000 people dead, a million others displaced and resulted in the creation of an independent republic out of a 1,700 square mile area that Azerbaijan has claimed since the newly-established Soviet Union redrew the borders between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 1921 and put the regions of Nakhichevan and Nagorno-Karabakh on the Azeri side.

According to several accounts – and a real-time videotape by observers on the other side of the Araks river in Iran – in a final paroxysm of violence over the course of a week beginning December 10, 2005 some 100 Azerbaijani soldiers smashed thousands of headstones to bits with sledgehammers, throwing the chunks into the Araks.

To compound the destruction, at a meeting of European culture ministers earlier this month, Azerbaijan implied that the cemetery never existed.

The Djulfa Virtual Memorial and Museum contains a wealth of historical information and documentary evidence, including this five-minute film of the cemetery’s history with footage of the final destruction.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZu2zqFE_gI[/youtube]

The European Court of Human Rights announced a few days ago that it will consider the claim that Azerbaijan is guilty of destroying Armenian khachkars at Djulfa. Azerbaijan has persistently refused to grant official visitors access to the cemetery site.
For more reactions to the commemoration, visit Global Voices Online.

O eternal God,
whose servant Edmund kept faith to the end,
both with thee and with his people,
and glorified thee by his death:
grant us the same steadfast faith,
that, together with the noble army of martyrs,
we may come to the perfect joy of the resurrection life;
through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.

The Epistle; 1 St Peter 3:14-18
The Gospel: St Matthew 10:16-22

Edmund was raised a Christian and became king of the East Angles as a young boy, probably when 14 years old. In 869 the Danes invaded his territory and defeated his forces in battle.

According to Edmund’s first biographer, Abbo of Fleury, the Danes tortured the saint to death after he refused to renounce his faith and rule as a Danish vassal. He was beaten, tied to a tree and pierced with arrows, and then beheaded.

His body was originally buried near the place of his death and subsequently transferred to Baedericesworth, modern Bury St Edmunds. His shrine became one of the most popular pilgrimage sites in England, but it was destroyed and his remains lost during the English Reformation.

The cult of St Edmund became very popular among English nobility because he exemplified the ideals of heroism, political independence, and Christian holiness. The Benedictine Abbey founded at Bury St Edmunds in 1020 became one of the greatest in England.

St Edmundsbury Borough Council has posted a history of Saint Edmund’s legend.

Artwork: St Edmund the Martyr, stained glass, c 1420-40. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Almighty God,
who didst call Martin from the armies of this world
to be a faithful soldier of Christ:
give us grace to follow him
in his love and compassion for those in need,
and empower thy Church to claim for all people
their inheritance as the children of God;
through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.

For The Epistle: Isaiah 58:6-12
The Gospel: St Matthew 25:34-40

One of the most popular saints of the Middle Ages, Martin was born to pagan parents and, although intending to become a Christian, followed his father into the Roman army. About three years later, in Amiens, France, came the famous incident portrayed in the El Greco painting seen here.

On a cold winter day, he met a beggar at the city gates. Drawing his sword, he cut his military cloak in two and gave half to the man. In a dream that night, he saw Christ wearing the half-cloak he had given away and saying, “Martin, yet a catechumen, has covered me with his garment”. He was baptised shortly thereafter.

After being discharged from the army, he met St Hilary at Poitiers upon the latter’s return from exile in 360. Hilary provided a piece of land where Martin founded the first monastic community in Gaul. He lived there for ten years until 371, when he reluctantly accepted a call from the people of Tours to become their bishop.

During his episcopate, Martin gained a reputation as a healer and an apologist against a Gnostic sect known as the Priscillianists. In 386, Priscillian was accused of sorcery, a capital offence, at the emperor’s court. Martin protested the death sentence, arguing that religious differences should not be punished by the emperor but left to the church to deal with. His stand was very unpopular and failed to prevent the execution of Priscillian, the first execution for heresy.

He died on 8 November 397 and was buried three days later at Tours. A great basilica built later at the site was destroyed during the French Revolution. His relics now rest in a replacement church. Thousands of churches in France, England, and elsewhere in Western Europe are dedicated to him.

Artwork: El Greco, St Martin and the Beggar, 1597-1599. Oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

In medieval Cordoba, the capital of Muslim Spain (711-1492), Christians faced similar questions. Followers of Christ were tolerated and “protected” as long as they did not publicly question Islamic beliefs.

In the mid-ninth century, however, following allegations of “blasphemy” and defamation of Mohammed, forty-eight Cordoban Christians were executed by the authorities. Some Christian leaders wanted believers to knuckle under and avoid criticising Islam. Others refused to remain silent but insisted on speaking forthrightly about their beliefs, even if that meant being killed for offending Muslims.

The priest Eulogius and his friend Alvarus represented the pro-martyr group; Eulogius was himself put to death in 859.

Eulogius countered that Muslims did not believe in God because they rejected Christ’s claim to divinity, and that they were indeed persecuting Christians. Alvarus argued, “What could be a greater persecution, what more severe kind of degradation is to be feared than when a person cannot say in public what he believes by reason in his heart?” What good was it to say Christians were “protected” if they could not criticize Islam publicly? Were Christians not obligated to resist this form of persecution and proclaim the truth as they believed it? This was the position of the martyrs.

As a Christian and a freespeecher, I’m with Eulogius and Alvarus.