Influences of the East on Early Christian Iconography

Abstract

The Roman imperial cult is traditionally considered to have been the main root to have exerted a major influence on early Christian iconography. Numerous visual and original literary sources illustrate the replacement of the Roman and Greek deities by the characters of the newly born religion – that is, Christianity. After the legalization of Christianity in the Roman Empire, the honor given to the Roman Emperor was naturally shifted to Jesus Christ, in terms of worship. Establishing the capital of a remote province, such as the Eastern part of Tracie, was a strategic political decision. Roman and later Christian practices inevitably embraced the local cults and traditions. Consequently, both Eastern and Western traditions can be traced in the practices of the new religious faith of the Roman Empire. This paper investigates the major Eastern sources which are often underestimated, while they are present in the Paleo-Christian visuals of the first centuries of the Common Era (CE) in the Eastern territories of the Roman Empire. One of these is the Buddhist visual representations of Gandhara art, which was later endorsed by Manichaeism in order to facilitate the rapid propagation of Mani’s teaching. One can observe the oscillating movement of Greek visual representations from the East, with Greek sculptors and painters giving an iconic shape to the existing Buddhist tradition and later back to Christianity on Byzantine territory. These representations were later diluted in equal quantity in the style of Byzantine late antiquity and early medieval visuals.