Felicity Harley-McGowan

Christ the Miracle Worker in Early Christian Art

Arts & Literature

“Lee Jefferson casts welcome light on the brief but pervasive popularity of Jesus the miracle-worker in early Christian art, setting it into a matrix of Christian persuasion and late Antique social, medical, and religious practice to probe the ideas that converged in these images before miraculous healing passed to the relics of the saints.” —Annemarie Carr Southern Methodist University “Through early Christian art, Lee Jefferson’s study gives access to an appreciation of Jesus as a bodily healer that is not available in the literary sources.” —J. Patout Burns Vanderbilt University “In the history of art, the role of visual representation in early Christian communities remains one of the most complex and hotly debated issues. In this cogent study of the iconography of Christ as 'Miracle Worker' in the early Church, Lee Jefferson gives renewed attention to the question of art's capacity to elucidate complex theological concepts. Placing the images into their Greco-Roman cultural context, Jefferson draws on literary and visual evidence to ask: How did the earliest Christian communities conceive the person Christ? Readers from diverse backgrounds will find the ensuing discussion compelling.”

The Cross before Constantine

History & Biography

“This compelling study brings fresh insight to a thorny problem in the history of Christianity: the origins of the cross as a symbol in the early Church. Against the long-held view that cross-symbolism of any kind was avoided prior to the fourth century, Longenecker demonstrates not only the presence of the symbol in the material record of early Christianity, but its role as a symbol of power. Such a thorough and insightful analysis of both the material and literary evidence on this problem has been long overdue; and the findings demand attention from scholars and general readers alike.”