Eastern Icons and the Gospel of Thomas?
If you ever visit an Eastern Catholic or Eastern Orthodox parish, you’ll find them adorned with many icons and, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, these icons are dense with meaning.
At one point last year I brought a friend to my parish and we spent some time looking at the icons. He noticed that in the icons of the four Evangelists (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John), each of them is holding a book, symbolic of the Gospel attributed him. He then noticed the icon of St. Thomas and asked a question which caught me off-guard:
“Is the scroll he’s holding a reference to the ‘Gospel of Thomas’?”
I had never considered that association before! You see, the “Gospel of Thomas” is a non-Canonical work from the mid 2nd Century and was rejected by the Catholic Church. Bishop Eusebius from 3rd Century described it as “the fictions of heretics”. Given all that, it’s rather unlikely that the scroll in Thomas’ hand in a Catholic Church is a reference to a heretical work of antiquity!
So…what does the scroll in the Apostle’s hand represent? In Eastern iconography, a scroll represents holy wisdom and indicates that the person preached and held the rank of apostle.
How does the Eastern perspective on the Church differ from that in the West?
An introduction to Byzantine Vespers from Sister Vassa: