{"id":60968,"date":"2016-04-07T07:00:38","date_gmt":"2016-04-07T14:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/?p=60968"},"modified":"2016-04-05T19:07:03","modified_gmt":"2016-04-06T02:07:03","slug":"icons-and-the-gospel-of-thomas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/2016\/04\/07\/icons-and-the-gospel-of-thomas\/","title":{"rendered":"Eastern Icons and the Gospel of Thomas?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-60969\" src=\"http:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Thomas.jpeg\" alt=\"Thomas\" width=\"300\" height=\"321\" srcset=\"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Thomas.jpeg 2448w, https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Thomas-280x300.jpeg 280w, https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Thomas-768x822.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Thomas-957x1024.jpeg 957w, https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Thomas-600x642.jpeg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/>If you ever visit an Eastern Catholic or Eastern Orthodox parish, you&#8217;ll find them adorned\u00a0with many icons and, as I&#8217;ve mentioned in <a href=\"http:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/2015\/11\/05\/symbolism-the-nativity-icon\/\">previous posts<\/a>, these icons are\u00a0dense with meaning.<\/p>\n<p>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\u00a0then\u00a0noticed the icon of St. Thomas and asked a question which\u00a0caught me off-guard:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px\"><em><span style=\"color: #000080\">&#8220;Is the scroll he&#8217;s holding a\u00a0reference to the &#8216;Gospel of Thomas&#8217;?&#8221;<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<p>I had never considered\u00a0that association\u00a0before! You see, the &#8220;Gospel of Thomas&#8221; is a non-Canonical work from the mid 2nd Century and was rejected by the Catholic Church.\u00a0Bishop Eusebius from 3rd Century described it as\u00a0<span style=\"color: #000080\"><em>&#8220;the fictions of heretics&#8221;<\/em><\/span>. Given all that, it&#8217;s rather unlikely that the scroll in Thomas&#8217; hand in a Catholic Church is a reference to a heretical work of antiquity!<\/p>\n<p>So&#8230;what\u00a0<strong>does<\/strong> the scroll in the Apostle&#8217;s hand represent? In Eastern iconography, a scroll represents <strong>holy wisdom<\/strong> and indicates that the person <strong>preached<\/strong> and held the rank of <strong>apostle<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you ever visit an Eastern Catholic or Eastern Orthodox parish, you&#8217;ll find them adorned\u00a0with many icons and, as I&#8217;ve mentioned in previous posts, these icons are\u00a0dense 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[2742,2746,2117,794,701,3627,2359,3626,808,3625,298],"class_list":["post-60968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faith","tag-apostle","tag-eastern","tag-eastern-catholic","tag-eastern-orthodox","tag-gnosticism","tag-gospel-of-thomas","tag-icon","tag-infancy-gospel-of-thomas","tag-preach","tag-st-thomas","tag-wisdom"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60968"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60968\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61073,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60968\/revisions\/61073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}