The Gospel of John and Christian Origins

Moses

1 Moses Not everybody knows that besides the sublime frescoes of Michelangelo that adorn its ceiling the Sistine Chapel in Rome also contains frescoes painted between 1481 and 1483 by four other great Italian artists, including Domenico Ghirlandaio, to whom Michelangelo was for a time apprenticed, and Sandro Botticelli (not to mention several tapestries by Raphael). The paintings on the middle sections of the two side walls of the chapel portray a series of episodes from the Old Testament, opposite scenes from the New Testament they were thought to have prefigured. Moses, on the left (south) wall, confronts Christ, on the right. The original sequence began on the altar wall itself with the Finding of Moses and the Birth of Christ (events also associated in Matthew’s Gospel), but both of these paintings were subsequently destroyed to make way for Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, painted over a half-century later in the new mannerist style. (The two final paintings on the entrance wall, opposite the altar, deteriorated so badly that they had to be replaced.) The remaining dozen paintings of the sequence, six on each wall, have survived and can still be seen today, starting with two paintings of Perugino, the Circumcision of the Son of Moses and the Baptism of Christ. Next come two pictures of Botticelli, one depicting the Temptation (or Trial) of Moses in the desert, the other the Temptation of Christ, in which the three temptations of Jesus are placed in the upper register of the painting. Then comes Ghirlandaio’s Crossing of the Red Sea opposite his Calling of the Apostles. After that the Dispensation of the Ten Commandments, by Cosimo Roselli, showing the handing over of the tablets of the law, is paralleled by the Sermon on the Mount. (Although Roselli was undoubtedly the weakest of the four, he was still an artist of considerable talent.) Another pair of pictures by Botticelli represents occasions of disarray or rebellion (conturbatio): one in the life of Moses, based on the story in Numbers 16 according to which the rebellious Korah ends up being swallowed up into the ground (while his sons, in accordance with Num. 26:11, are shown tucked 7 away in the lower left corner, relieved and somewhat bemused to be still alive); and the other in the life of Christ (with the arch of Constantine in the background). In the last two surviving paintings the Death of Moses is shown opposite a painting of the Last Supper. Although four different artists were involved, the frescoes are broadly similar in conception: the scale of the figures is the same, and so are the range of colors and the style of the landscapes. Moses, a dignified and authoritative figure who appears in each of the paintings on the south wall (several times in some of them), is depicted throughout wearing a yellow robe and an olive-green cloak. There can be no doubt that the series was conceived from the outset as a unified whole.1 Sixtus’s secretary, Andreas of Trebizond, who probably masterminded the whole series, summed it up as paintings of two legal systems, a summary borne out by the Latin inscriptions above the pictures: for five of the six captions on the south wall include the words lex scripta—the written law—and five of the six on the north wall contain the words evangelica lex—the law of the gospel. The caption above Roselli’s picture of the Last Supper, for instance, reads, surprisingly, Replicatio legis evangelicae a Christo—Christ’s repetition of the law of the gospel. The parallel picture, whose central scene shows Moses reciting the law to the assembled multitude on the eve of his death, bears the caption, Replicatio legis scriptae a Moise.2 This makes the other title slightly more comprehensible; but it is still very strange. It can hardly be doubted that had Martin Luther ever seen the paintings on the walls of this chapel (completed thirty-five years before he posted the famous ninety-five theses on the door of a church in Wittenberg in 1517) he would have been no less offended by the assumption that the gospel was a system of law matching the law of Moses than he was by the sale of indulgences that helped to pay for the paintings. Some justification for this way of looking at the moral teaching of Jesus can be found in the declaration attributed to him in Matthew’s Gospel (5:17) that...