Ecce Homo: John 19:5, a Portrait of Jesus and a Tangle of Stories

Abstract

Abstract In the context of the Bible, reception history is about the inter-play of text and context. It is also about the capacity of stories to continue to be told, the practice of ongoing interpretation and about creativity and meaning making, often in ways that challenge the text/context divide. In exploring this challenge, I ask how a roughly drawn picture of Jesus as Ecce Homo from John’s trial scene (John 19:5), a piece of devotional art from 1940s Europe, might demonstrate the capacity of texts—John 19:5 and others—to act across a range of (loosely connected) contexts. How might diverse narratives—artistic, historical, ideological, biographical—engage with thought on reception theory and trouble the distinction between text and context, so as to demonstrate the surprising expansiveness of texts and textuality? When viewed via this picture, the words on the pages of canonical text are revealed to be dynamic, travelling through the cultural and devotional history of varying locations, times and epochs. These words are in a state of flux, continually being re-written, embellished upon and otherwise shaped and changed. Following their trails in connection with this picture of Jesus, I explore the complex qualities of story and textuality. These qualities have parallel implications for John’s Gospel, as an ongoing and increasingly tangled story of Empire, irony and ambivalence, a story that continues to play out in multiple, messy and often conflicting ways. Ultimately, to gather a number of narratives and to bind them within the frames of this picture becomes a way of demonstrating the slipperiness and even arbitrariness of historical reception. It elucidates the competing interests of context, scholarship and tradition, not to mention the ever-widening scope of possibilities for biblical textuality.