THE ILLUSTRATED JESUS THROUGH THE CENTURIES.<i> By Jaroslav Pelikan</i> .<i> Yale University Press: 254 pp., $35</i>

Clemenceau, among others, once remarked that war is too important to be left to the military. For Jaroslav Pelikan, Sterling professor of history emeritus at Yale, “Jesus is too important a figure to be left only to theologians and the church.� In the DeVane Lectures at Yale in 1984, this prolific scholar explained to an audience of “all ages, social backgrounds, educational levels, and religious persuasions� the place of Jesus, not in theology and church doctrine but in the general history of culture. The original publication of Pelikan’s lectures, “Jesus Through the Centuries,� sold more than 100,000 copies in English and was translated into more than a dozen languages. Pelikan’s masterpiece has been improved in this new and lavishly illustrated edition. There are over 200 more pictures in this oversized book than in the original volume and a “corresponding reduction of text.�

Pelikan is one of those rare academics who exercises both sides of his brain, and “The Illustrated Jesus Through the Centuries� enhances our access to Jesus through the imagery of art. Ever the historian, he lays out his subject genetically. He begins where all reflection about Jesus should begin, with his Jewishness. In the chapter entitled “The Rabbi,� Pelikan writes: “It is obvious--and yet, to judge by the tragedies of later history, not at all obvious--that Jesus was a Jew, so that the first attempts to understand his message took place within the context of Judaism.� The page on which these words occur is illustrated with Holman Hunt’s painting of a teenage Jesus discussing the Torah in a rabbinical circle (Luke 2:41-52). A much more evocative painting of the same theme by a Jewish artist, Max Liebermann, is relegated to a later chapter on the 18th century rationalist approach to Jesus as “Teacher of Common Sense.�

The famous parable (in Hebrew, mashal, “a riddle�) of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32) is illustrated by a James Tissot painting emphasizing the contrition of the spendthrift younger son and the father’s generosity in welcoming the wayward son home. Pelikan rightly notes that the central point disclosed at the end of the story is that the father assures the older son--a stand-in for the people of Israel--that “the historic covenant between God and Israel was permanent, and it was into this covenant that other peoples, too, were now being introduced.�

For me, the most moving image of Jesus in this volume is Marc Chagall’s “Yellow Crucifixion,� painted in 1943, when the world was soon to learn the full horror of centuries of hatred of Jews. The Jesus on this cross is not the sweet, blond Aryan of 19th century Romantic painting, exemplified in Heinrich Hoffman’s 1890 painting, “Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.� Chagall’s Jesus wears the phylacteries of a devout Jew on his head and has prayer straps on his bare arm. An angel bears a Torah scroll up to the pierced figure who, as Pelikan reminds us, recited Psalm 22 as he was dying.

Pelikan asks: “Would there have been such anti-Semitism, would there have been so many pogroms, would there have been an Auschwitz, if every Christian church and every Christian home had focused its devotion on images of Mary not only as Mother of God and Queen of Heaven but also as the Jewish maiden and the New Miriam, and on icons of Christ not only as the Cosmic Christ but also as Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of David, come to ransom a captive Israel and a captive humanity?�

This powerful question for 20th century Christians frames the entirety of Pelikan’s narrative of “The Illustrated Jesus Through the Centuries,� which concludes with the Second Vatican Council’s condemnation in 1965 of “the hatred, persecutions, and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews at any time and from any source,� presumably including, as Pelikan notes, “the official sources of the church’s past� such as papal documents and canon law.

The identity and mission of Jesus quickly became the central issue between the synagogue and the early church, which at first drew its explanations of Jesus from the imagery of the Hebrew Bible. Within a generation, Jesus was no longer just a learned rabbi come to restore the Torah and the prophets to full spiritual observance but was seen by Christians as the messiah, the anointed one born in Bethlehem; as one Christmas carol calls it, “royal David’s city.� After the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, Jesus the prophet announcing the imminent end of the Roman order and the restoration of God’s reign or kingdom was transformed into Jesus the coming judge of the world. By the end of the 1st century, Jesus was exalted as “Lord of lords and king of kings� (Revelation 17:14). His return in triumph was thought of much like that of a conquering Roman hero receiving the accolades of a victory celebration in the capital of the empire.

The Christian invention of a grammar of time and history was underway and came to a climax in Augustine’s “City of God,� which refuted the charge that Rome had fallen to barbarian invaders in the 5th century because it had adopted Christianity under the emperor Constantine in the 4th century. In the phrase of the 2nd century apologist Tertullian, Jesus was the “turning point,� the unification of divine and human history, the end and purpose of the universe. The most stunning illustrations of this belief in Pelikan’s volume are the Pantocrator mosaic in the apse of the cathedral in Cefalu, Italy, and icons from Greek and Russian Orthodox Christianity.

The sobering chapter on Jesus as “The Prince of Peace� illustrates the difficulties in reconciling the teaching and behavior of Jesus on violence with the practices of the church and state in the Christian centuries. We see a photo of British and American sailors on the deck of a naval vessel, where Winston Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt met in 1941 to formulate the Atlantic Charter, led by Anglican divines singing: “Onward, Christian soldiers marching as to war, / With the cross of Jesus going on before.� When nations assume a divine purpose for their own political ends, massive evil can ensue without fear of contradicting Jesus. No image of Coventry or Dresden, of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, accompanies this chapter.

As might be expected of a Reformation scholar, Pelikan offers in defense of war Luther’s theory of two kingdoms: the spiritual kingdom of Jesus, where love reigns; and the earthly kingdom of this world where, as Luther put it, a soldier must “stab and kill, rob and burn, as military law requires us to do to our enemies in wartime.� By clinging to the spurious distinction between a just war and the Crusades, Pelikan is able at least to excoriate the “Crusading fervor,� which “always provided an excuse for killing God’s enemies and led to pogroms against Jews and the sacking of Christian Constantinople--all of these being flagrant negations of the teachings of the very One whose cross [the Crusaders] bore.� But were the Crusades evil because they were inspired by Pope Urban II, and are the atrocities of our own high-tech wars justifiable under a fair reading of the teachings of the Prince of Peace?

Pelikan also offers an account of the rise of Christian pacifism among “the Anabaptists, Quakers, and other peace groups of the radical Reformation� showing that “christology constituted the heart of their argument�: that the followers of Christ could not wield the sword. In a chapter on St. Francis of Assisi, who is held up as a “second Christ,� Pelikan focuses on poverty in Franciscan spirituality and curiously ignores the contribution to pacifism made by the friar whose most famous prayer begins: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.� We also learn that the most broadly disseminated image of Jesus ever painted, in many hundreds of millions of copies, was Warner Sallman’s “Head of Christ,� in which light from a nativity scene shines on an American soldier reading the New Testament against the dominant background of the red, white and blue stars and stripes of the American flag. The Supreme Court has ruled numerous times that governmental endorsement of religion violates the 1st Amendment, but followers of Jesus might object that militaristic appropriation of the nativity scene is an oxymoron.

A chapter on Jesus as the liberator explores the ambiguity of Christianity over the institution of slavery. Pelikan cites scripture--the tiny epistle of St. Paul to Philemon--as making it illegitimate “to employ the sayings of Jesus as a weapon against slavery.� And he cites Augustine’s defense of the institution. But Pelikan insists that the spirit, if not the letter, of the teachings of Jesus called slavery into question, though it was not until the 19th century that abolitionists perceived new duties of liberation producing decisive action to end slavery. As Pelikan writes in his discussion of Tolstoy and his disciple Gandhi, “The rediscovery of Jesus the Liberator was confined neither to the debate over slavery nor to British and American thought.� Pelikan notes that Gandhi’s chief disciple in this century was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., for whom Gandhi was “the first person in history to live the love ethic of Jesus above mere interactions between individuals.� In the only instance in which Pelikan pays any attention to women in his narrative, he singles out Harriet Beecher Stowe for writing “Uncle Tom’s Cabin� and Julia Ward Howe for penning “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.� The first wave of American feminism under Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton goes unmentioned. Pelikan explores neither the support these brave women gave to the abolition of slavery nor the powerful movement they initiated for the liberation of women.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus, at the urging of his mother, Mary, worked his first sign of power by changing water into wine to save the newlyweds from embarrassment over a lack of hospitality. When the chief steward at the wedding tasted the fruits of this miracle, he noted with amazement that the best wine had been saved until last. In my view, Pelikan has saved the best art for the last chapter on “The Man Who Belongs to the World.� Here we see a Chinese depiction of Jesus stilling the tempest; an Ascension from Mughal, India, in which the disciples of Jesus are from many nations; a sculpture of the crucifixion by an Australian aboriginal depicting infinite score lines on the cross and on the body of Jesus to show the number of people for whom he died; a Canadian Totem Cross; face masks from Zaire and Nigeria; an African American painting of “Mount Calvary� showing the skin of Jesus as dark as it most likely was; an Italian American nativity scene depicting people of many cultures and social and economic classes united in adoration of the newborn child; and the statue of Christ overlooking Rio de Janeiro, extending a benediction to the whole human race.

All of these images illustrate through their universality and particularity that “[t]here is more in [Jesus] than is dreamt of in the philosophy and christology of the theologians. Within the church, but also far beyond its walls, his person and message are, in the phrase of Augustine, a ‘beauty ever ancient, ever new,’ and now he belongs to the world.�

Assume for a moment that the shopping frenzy we engage in annually at this time of the year has something to do with the birth of Jesus, that, as the slogan has it, “Jesus is the reason for the season.� Or at least acknowledge that, as Pelikan notes, “[i]t is from his birth that most of the human race dates its calendars, by his name that millions curse, and in his name that millions pray.� For a host of reasons ranging from historical curiosity to spiritual commitment, one of the best ways that all sorts of people might profitably spend some portion of this time before Christmas is to read (or reread) Pelikan’s masterful lectures--perhaps while listening to Bach’s “Christmas Oratorio� or Handel’s “Messiah�--and to study carefully the images he has collected in this magnificent treasury of sacred art.