Asian Christ Mosaic

Until I get my next post finished, here's an interesting image I came across at this website featuring lots of Bible-related art from several different cultures and time periods.  Jesus sits upon a lotus flower, giving two mudras: His right hand showing the mudra of Abhaya, symbolizing protection, peace, benevolence, and dispelling of fear, while his left hand displays the Varada mudra, symbolizing ‘open-handed’ generosity such as charity or the granting of wishes.  Wikipedia writes that "it is nearly always shown made with the left hand by a revered figure devoted to human salvation from greed, anger and delusion."  Behind his head is a cross halo.  Fiery bands emanate from him, like an aureola.

A Brief History of Visual Contextualization in India Part 4: Saint Thomas Christians

For this installment in my series "A Brief History of Visual Contextualization in India," I'll be discussing India's first Christian community, the Saint Thomas Christians (or "Nasrani").  Saint Thomas Christians traditionally live in the southwestern coastal state of Kerala and descend from a union of the local Indian population with a Jewish diaspora community, who had become Christians in the earliest days of the faith.  The Saint Thomas denominations use a Syriac liturgy in their church services and trace their spiritual heritage back to the assumed arrival of the Apostle Thomas ("Doubting Thomas") in southern India in 52 A.D.  In the third century, Nestorian Christian missionaries from the Church of the East in Persia began to settle in Kerala and organize the churches there according to their beliefs and liturgy.  Later in 1665, due to religious pressure from Portugese Catholics, the Saint Thomas Christians began to split into various factions along Catholic/Nestorian lines.  Today, this schism has resulted in several different Saint Thomas denominations, including Nestorian, Catholic, Orthodox, and even (since 1961) Evangelical!

Headstone with Lotus and Cross

While I'm slowwwwly writing the next post on my series A Brief History of Visual Contextualization in India, here's a cool image from the USF Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History that I came across showing a beautiful Christian headstone from China.  It dates from the Yuan dynasty (1272—1368) and is now located in the Quanzhou Maritime Museum.  The caption reads:

Headstone showing a cross on a lotus flower and a cloud design set within a plain border following a curved outline. This basic design is repeated extensively in the Christian monuments dated to this period, although its iconographic import is unknown.