When Argentinian artists Marianella Pirelli and Pool Palini released a series of religious Barbie and Ken dolls back in 2015, they made headlines around the world. Argentinian artists risk religious wrath with Barbie, read the UK's Telegraph headline. Check out the images in the show notes. Among them are, and I hate to say this, crucified Jesus Ken doll.

Jesus the Shepherd Ken doll and baby Jesus Barbie. The artists told The Telegraph at the time that they wanted to update religious icons to reflect contemporary ideals. Plenty of people didn't like it. And guess what? Their exhibition was cancelled.

Apparently, though, they're trying to bring it back soon as part of the 2023 Barbie movie cultural moment. Yes, I have seen Barbie. Thank you very much, producer Kayleigh. These artists aren't the first people to try and make Jesus fit with contemporary ideals. Actually, we probably all do it all the time.

Our guest today has written, "With varying degrees of self-awareness, each one of us may worship self-help Jesus, historical Jesus, super angry Jesus, arch conservative Jesus, lefty anarchist Jesus, or some combination thereof." The fact is, throughout history, people have tended to emphasize different aspects of Jesus' character and story that seem to resonate with that moment in time.

Now, this was true of the ancient period. One of the oldest churches ever uncovered over in Douro Europis in Syria has a fresco depicting Jesus wearing the philosopher's robe with the philosopher's distinctive short haircut. You may remember our episode, Jesus, Philosopher. In the Renaissance, people like to highlight Jesus' humanity, you know, his meals with tax collectors, his passion on the cross, and so on.

Today, we're focusing on the period between antiquity and the Renaissance, the so-called Middle Ages. They may not have played with Barbies back then, but they had some pretty interesting ways of looking at Jesus. Some of their ideas were weird, but others, as we'll see, were beautiful.

it might be the case that those backward, medieval, dark ages folks actually have some light to shed again. I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions

This season of Undeceptions is sponsored by Zondervan Academic. Get discounts on master lectures, video courses and exclusive samples of their books at zondervanacademic.com forward slash Undeceptions. Don't forget to write Undeceptions. Each episode here at Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, philosophy, history, science, culture or ethics.

that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. And with the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out. - So the medieval world differed from our world in a lot of ways, but a huge one that people often, it's helpful to orient yourself around is that this is before the Reformation. So before Martin Luther has nailed up his theses on the church door,

And it spans from about 500 to 1500, but people use all kinds of different definitions, but that's sort of the rough working one that I like to use. So you think from about the end of Augustine's writing to the Reformation.

That's medievalist Dr. Grace Heyman. Among other things, she's the author of the marvelous Jesus Through Medieval Eyes, just out. Her podcast is Old Books with Grace, and I'm sure there are some Undeceptions nerds who will love her talk of old literature and theology.

We had two episodes on the 16th century Reformation last season. Check them out if you didn't listen to them. That topic needed a double whammy because it's one of the greatest ruptures in Western history and it sort of blacked out the period that came before it, the middle period.

The word medieval is from the ecclesiastical Latin phrase medium ervum, middle age. It became popular in the 19th century as a way of talking about the period in between the apparently more exciting periods of Roman antiquity, up to about the year 500, and the early modern period from about 1500s on. So a thousand years of human history is relegated as just the middle bit.

For some, it's the dark bit too. So, yeah, just picking up on that Dark Ages perception that's out there that I know annoys medieval scholars. But was this period you're talking about a period of literary output, philosophy, learning, art, philosophy?

etc? Oh, yeah. So the Middle Ages gave us some of our most important institutions. So if you think of hospitals and universities, those were born in the Middle Ages. Those started developing in the later Middle Ages. So this is not some sort of benighted world of just superstitious fanatics. This is

People who are thinking super deeply about philosophy and theology in the birth of the universities, people thinking about what hospitality means, what it means to care for one another and for the sick and for the needy in the birth of the hospital.

And it also gives rise to some really interesting things architecturally and in art. So you think of the absolutely stunningly beautiful and dramatic medieval cathedrals. You walk into York or Notre Dame and you are amazed by the amount of engineering and architecture that they were capable of. So

People think of the Dark Ages and have obviously Dark Ages is a very negative name. But in this time, there was a lot of different cultural and artistic, philosophical and theological development going on that were very vibrant and alive in ways even that we are surprised by and that can teach us.

Before we talk specifically about Christianity and Jesus in the medieval period, obviously one of the great differences was the ability to read and write. And so therefore, I'm assuming that really only elites could read and write. And therefore, art was one of the principal ways people conveyed ideas. Or am I slightly off there?

No, I think that it's a generalization, but it's definitely a generalization that has a lot of truth in it. So a lot of middle class folks by the end of the Middle Ages, there was a big rise in literacy. But the main source that a lot of people were receiving their spiritual education from was through art, which is why when you go into these beautiful

beautiful medieval cathedrals or medieval churches, you see so much art there. Gregory the Great described art as a way for the illiterate to read and understand.

Gregory the Great, by the way, was the Bishop of Rome in the year 600. He was amazing. He sent the first missionaries to England. He wrote the most influential leadership book in history. And it's all about humility. And it turns out he was a lover of art. He definitely gets an episode one day.

Pictures are used in churches so that those who are ignorant of letters may at least read by seeing on the walls what they cannot read in books. Gregory the Great, Letter to Bishop Serenus

There are certain representations of Jesus that were very popular in the Middle Ages. So one of these representations that appeared over and over in medieval churches was Christ as a judge at the end of days, on the doomsday, as they would have called it, on doom. And so Christ

Christ was sitting in judgment above those who were going to be saved and those who were going to be damned. And this was a very popular subject to portray because it reminded everybody sitting in church that they were all going to be together again on the last day and that they too were going to be called to account and think about the choices that they had made and actually see the face of Jesus again.

And these portrayals are really fascinating because they are the parts that show hell and heaven are a little frightening and scary. But at the center of these portrayals is Jesus, and he's always showing his wounds. So they were really emphasizing Christ as the same Christ who died on the cross and not just terrifying vision of judgment for Judgment Day.

One of the best examples of a doom painting can be seen in St Thomas' Church in the medieval cathedral city of Salisbury in the south of England. Like many doom paintings in cathedrals across Europe, it was painted over during the Reformation.

Not because the reformers hated art, though they weren't huge fans, sadly, but more as a theological statement. Well, in 2020, the Salisbury Doom restoration was complete, with another 60 paintings being restored around England.

The Salisbury Doom is huge. It reaches 45 feet above the nave of the church, where the public would sit during church services. It shows the dead climbing naked from the grave at the resurrection, with sinners then being dragged down by demons into the mouth of a fiery dragon, while the righteous, the saved, are lifted up to heaven by angels.

Interestingly, the painting includes two kings and a bishop among the damned. Sitting above the chaos is, of course, Jesus, sitting in judgment of all people. Check out the show notes to see it. It's kind of scary.

You say these were popular, but do we know that the people liked them? Or were the priests just doing that bully pulpit thing where they said, hey, look, this will be you if you don't listen to my sermon or you don't come and experience the Eucharist? Do we have any sense that the average people quite liked this idea of Christ as judge and yet the wounded saviour versus just it being the church pulpit

Telling people they're all going to hell.

It's a great question. And obviously we can't kind of, I wish we could, but we can't open up the minds of the illiterate folks and the writings that have disappeared and look at what people were thinking. But here's what we can see when we look at these is that in the portraits of those who are of the blessed and the damned are many, many figures of authority, right?

And so it's a really interesting picture of the leveling of community. And you think of, you know, the feudalism of the Middle Ages and the huge disparate differences in a peasant versus a king and a lord. And to think that you will both be called into account and held accountable, I think that must have been reassuring to a lot of people living under

under pretty deep oppression. So that's one thing that I think of when I look at them that I wonder if that was a common thought, because you can tell that they are temporal figures of authority, because a lot of times they would draw all the people below naked, because you didn't bring your clothes with you at Judgment Day, but they would add hats to show their profession. So we could see

naked people with plowman's hats and Pope's hats and Cardinal's hats. And you can see that your temporal authority isn't going to save you if you have held Christ in contempt by not practicing love and justice. So it's a bit like Dante's Inferno in that sense. It's very much like Dante's Inferno. Yes. Where it's,

Dante is pretty equal opportunity with the popes who have been, actually, there are more popes in hell than in heaven in his portrayal. So I don't think it was as straightforwardly, hey, obey church authority or you will be in the bad place. I think it was a reminder of what C.S. Lewis would later write about that no one you meet is ordinary, that everybody is going on into eternity. Yeah.

And we're all going to be there. I got news for you. The Bible says that Jesus Christ comes back to judge the world in righteousness. If you're living like a devil, you're a heathen, you're on your way to hellfire, and you deserve hell. That's a clip from Facebook from a page called Hell Shaking Street Preachers. And it might sound like the modern day equivalent of a doom painting. And yes, we cringe today.

According to Grace, many evil people were a lot more comfortable than we are using fear to motivate. And these works of art are meant to evoke fear in those listening and looking. And while fear isn't the highest of motivations, it's still one that makes sense. We use it with our children. Do this or fill in the blanks. The government does it with us. Don't speed or...

So it's not like it's a totally inappropriate motivator. And frankly, Jesus himself wasn't averse to warning of punishment. In Matthew 25, Jesus says he will be the judge of all the earth. When the Son of Man comes in his glory, he said, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne.

It's already sounding a bit like a doom painting. And then Jesus continues:

Then he, the son of man, the judge, that's Jesus, then he will say to those on his left, the goats, depart from me, you who are cursed into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

Whatever mistakes or exaggerations we might say medieval people made on this topic, likewise the Hellfire Street preachers, they were trying to highlight something real about Jesus, something that our contemporary culture has come to find distasteful.

Whenever I'm confronted by one of these clashes between people of yesteryear and ourselves, I always think it's wise to pause and ask, were they stupid and misled? Or am I blind to something they really saw? The answer is often somewhere in between. Okay, what about the portrayal of Jesus as a lover? Am I right that there's even some

sexed theology in these paintings? So the portrayal of Jesus as a lover is a very, well, it's one that we immediately feel, I think rightfully, a little squeamish about. We're a

Medieval monastic writers in particular, so this was less of a visual subject and more of one that people were really into the Song of Songs. And monastic writers in particular loved writing commentaries on the Song of Songs and reading it as an allegory of Christ's love for each individual soul. The book titled Song of Songs is in the Old Testament.

It's a well-known but often misunderstood section of the Bible. It's a collection of love poems telling a dramatic tale of mutual desire and courtship. It's been a great inspiration to many a composer, author and poet down the ages. And the Middle Ages was no different. And so they're writing in terms of Christ's spiritual love, but they write about how sometimes when our language gets too spiritualised...

It's hard for us to sense the deepness of love. We're embodied creatures and we need embodied language to help us understand how deeply Christ loves us. And so they took off running with the language of the Song of Songs in order to describe the wildly passionate and individual language of the love of Christ, one of the most famous

people using this image was Bernard of Clairvaux, but one that I particularly like was the writing of Mactild of Magdeburg, who was a nun by the end of her life, but wasn't a nun for a while. And she writes this amazing book called

where she talks about her experience of being Christ's lover. And it is this highly intimate, charged language. And I was actually transcribing a passage of it in a coffee shop while I was working. And I kept looking around at the tables around me because I was nervous that people would think I was writing a romance novel. I mean, that's the level that it is, is that

Mectil talks about the caress of love and she talks about nakedness and how there can be nothing left between God and the soul. We have nothing that hides us from his love. "And then he begins so to caress her that she becomes weak. She so begins to drink it all in that he becomes lovesick. Then he begins to limit the intensity because he knows better her limits than she herself does."

And then she writes ultimately in this ecstatic language of union that is very sensual. So it's kind of weird for us to read, but she's not trying to make a point. I think we get into hot water sometimes because then we want to sort of read that

back onto human sexuality in particular ways. And they were using the language of human sexuality in order to express something spiritual. And so that can be a little confusing for us sometimes, but that was the goal. It also, I think,

runs counter to our perception of the medieval period as so prudish as to never mention sex or anything like that. But the fact that they could freely use sex and love as a spiritual metaphor shows a kind of sexual maturity. Yeah, they weren't bothered and worried about it. I think you're right that it shows sort of our anxiety that we get really uptight and worried about

about this kind of language with the love of the Godhead, but they were not worried that it would muddy the waters. They thought, oh, well, we have this book, the Song of Songs, and the language there is highly explicit. And so we can read Christ as this lovesick and vulnerable lover offering his heart to us. And it doesn't

damage his sovereignty as God, but it expresses this intense longing that we have trouble ascribing to God sometimes, but that they felt very comfortable with and were deeply encouraged by. This reminds me of the John Donne poem, Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God.

For you as yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend, That I may rise and stand, earth-row me, And bend your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. I, like an usurped town to another Jew, labor to admit you, But oh, to no end, reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

but is captived, and proves weak or untrue, yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain, but am betrothed unto your enemy. Divorce me, untie or break that knot again, take me to you, imprison me, for I, except you enthrall me, never shall be free, nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Judge and lover are two depictions of divinity that can make moderns feel pretty uncomfortable.

But again, something real was being preserved by medieval Christians. For one thing, Jesus describes himself as the groom and his people as the bride on numerous occasions. Mark chapter 2, Luke chapter 5, as well as Matthew 9 and Matthew 25. That's the same Matthew 25 I mentioned earlier, where Jesus then describes himself as the judge of the earth. He is judge and lover.

And in the Old Testament, there are explicit depictions of God as the lover of Israel. He cared for her, he married her, and he slept with her. How's this passage?

I made you grow like a plant of the field. You grew and developed and entered puberty. Your breasts had formed and your hair had grown. I looked at you and saw that you were old enough for love. I spread the corner of my garment over you and covered your naked body. I gave you my solemn oath and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Sovereign Lord, and you became mine."

That's Ezekiel chapter 16, and Hosea chapters 1 and 2 say roughly the same thing. And if that feels weird, don't worry. After the break, it gets weirder.

This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.

And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.

Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith, he's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.

You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions.

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We all grow up fantasizing about finding true love with a knight in shining armor and living happily ever after. But that's all it is. Fantasy.

Are you okay? Fear not. I've been thrown much further by much faster horses than your steel steed. Not a scratch on him. That's a clip from the trailer of the not-so-classic Christmas flick A Night Before Christmas. And yeah, that's night with a K. The trailer is so cheesy. I'm a little embarrassed that producer Kayleigh has actually seen the film.

To her credit, it's not in her top 10 films like it is for director Mark. But still, I would have gone with the knights that say knee scene from the Monty Python and the Holy Grail. But apparently we reference Monty Python too much in this show or something. One of the other portraits of Jesus that you raise is Christ as a knight.

Now, I think we need to wind back and can you describe for us what a knight really was? Because I'm thinking of a Monty Python skit as soon as I say the knights who say me. I don't know if we'll play a portion of that in the podcast. Anyway, there's an idea for the producer. But what was a knight? How did they fit into society first? And then tell us how on earth Jesus could be a knight?

Yeah, this is one of the portrayals of Jesus that I initially felt very nervous about as well. Like the lover, these two were tough because knighthood is a social position. So we see Monty Python or we read the fairy tales with knights in them in shining armor. So we have this

sort of idea of this abstract literary persona or a chivalrous figure. But for them, a knight was a position in society. The medieval society was broadly split into three sort of classes or what they called estates.

And one was those who prayed, the clergy, those who fought, the knights, and those who worked, the laborers. And that was seen as sort of this God-ordained system, like set down from heaven that medieval society was composed of. And so when you're using this knight imagery,

you're specifically invoking a figure of violence. And sometimes that violence was in service of the good and of protection. But a lot of times that violence was in service of less idealized

So you think of the Crusades and what a disaster so much of that was. And you think of they had horrible techniques like the chevalier where knights would just burn large swaths of land so that they could run rampant over a territory. So this was like very, for me initially, I was very concerned that we were going to be sort of baptizing Jesus with this rhetoric of violence.

But along comes one of my favourite late medieval writers who loved this image and used it extensively. His name was William Langland, and he wrote this great poem called Piers Plowman in the 14th century. Piers Plowman is an allegorical work, and toward the end, one of the characters falls asleep and witnesses the events of Easter, Holy Week. Here comes Christ the Knight.

One, barefoot, came riding bootless on an ass's back, without spurs or spear. Sprightly, he looked, as is natural for a knight who came to be dubbed, to get his gilt spurs and cutaway shoes. And then Faith was in a window and cried, "Ah, Feely David!" as a herald of arms does when adventurous knights come to jousts.

He writes Jesus as a knight dressed like a plowman, which

If you think about the estates language and how medieval people were saying this was handed down by God and you stay in your place, you stay in your position, to have a knight dressed as a plowman is pretty shocking. And a picture of the incarnation where a higher, something that is so high status and knights were generally wealthy and had a lot of power,

And then dressing intentionally, coming in the garb of a plowman and then jousting as a plowman against death. Yeah.

And Satan is a really wild metaphor for the incarnation that ends up having so much fruit about how we think about our labours in the world and a lot of hope for and offering out courage and fortitude for our work in the world, regardless of what we're doing. So Langland really wrote this beautiful Christ's night portrait that I just love. I mean, again, it messes with the cliche of the medieval culture

believer as all about the distant judging God. But actually here is a motif that captures the humility of God in Christ. Absolutely. And it

It just, it would have been like the fanciest tech CEO joining laborers in their daily life. I mean, that's how much of a contrast and how much of a shock that humility looks like in medieval practice. Yeah. And again, it's straight out of the Bible, isn't it? Because I think of, as you were describing that poem, I was thinking of the portrait in the book of Revelation, where

Whether it's this giant portrayal of God and the Lion of Judah was on the throne and then you look and it's a lamb who looks like it's been slain. Yes. And I saw a mighty angel proclaiming in a loud voice, Who is worthy to break the seals and open the scroll? But no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth could open the scroll or even look inside it.

I wept and wept, because no one was found who was worthy to open the scroll or look inside. Then one of the elders said to me, "Do not weep. See the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David has triumphed. He is able to open the scroll and its seven seals." Then I saw a lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing at the center of the throne.

Revelation chapter 5. Totally upends Roman power models. That's exactly right. And Langland had a keen sense of that, of just the world turned upside down. Power has been emptied out. And this is the Jesus who has come to save medieval folks and us. Christ, Mother, who gathers under your wings your little ones, your dead chicks seek refuge under your wings.

For by your gentleness those who are hurt are comforted. By your perfume the despairing are reformed. Your warmth resuscitates the dead. Your touch justifies sinners. Console your chicken. Resuscitate your dead one. Justify your sinner. May your injured one be consoled by you.

May he or she who of his or herself despairs be comforted by you and reformed through you in your complete and unceasing grace. For the consolation of the wretched flows from you. Blessed, world without end. A prayer of Anselm of Canterbury, 1033-1109.

Anselm of Canterbury was one of the great minds of the Middle Ages. He was Italian, but he ended up Archbishop of Canterbury over in England. He noticed that while Scripture often says God is Father, nonetheless, the mother idea is also there. In the Old Testament, God is said to have given birth to Israel. And in the New Testament, Jesus describes himself as the mother hen.

The other portrayal is Christ as mother. It's weird. It is. Christ as a motherly figure. Describe to me, you know, where do we see this and what are they trying to do in this portrayal? Yeah, so this is one of my favorites, I must confess. It was the one that I initially started studying back in grad school and

And Julian of Norwich, who's just the beautiful, incredible contemplative writer of the 14th century, writes about this image. But how it really started...

Julian of Norwich was an English anchoress in the 14th century. An anchoress usually lives alone in a room or a cell in a church and devotes herself to prayer, contemplation, giving spiritual advice to passers-by, and in the case of Julian, writing about her experiences of God's love and presence.

We don't actually know her name. We call her Julian because she was anchored or housed in St. Julian's Church in Norwich. Anyway, in her book Revelations of Divine Love, she writes of God's kindness in motherly language. The mother's service is nearest, readiest and surest. Nearest because it is most natural. Readiest because it is most loving. And surest...

Blessed may he be.

So he carries us within him in travail and love until the full time when he wanted to suffer the sharpest thorns and the cruel pains that ever were and will be. And at the last he died. And when he had finished and borne us for his bliss, still all this could not satisfy his wonderful love. He revealed this in his words of great surpassing love. If I could suffer more, I would suffer more. But he could not die anymore.

But he did not want to seek working. Therefore, he must need Norrish us, for the precious love of motherhood has made him our debtor. Julian of Norwich wasn't the only one to use this type of language.

But how it really started, we think of it as we feel like it should be some kind of new age, weird, slightly unorthodox portrayal. But in actuality, monastic writers, again, those monastic writers, they were good readers of scripture. And they pick up on these themes that sometimes we today can miss sometimes.

So they started picking up on these feminine wisdom themes in the Old Testament and then also on Christ calling himself a mother hen and longing to gather his chicks under his wings and the language of being born again. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those set to you. How often I have longed to gather your children together.

as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. Luke chapter 13. Jesus said, "Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again." John chapter 3. And in a parable explaining why Jesus is searching for sinners, not the righteous, he depicts himself as a woman. Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Doesn't she light a lamp

Sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it. And when she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors together and says, Rejoice with me! I have found my lost coin! Luke 15. I mean, how strange that Jesus says, you'll be born again through me. I mean, he's talking about, he's using mothering imagery to describe himself and his mission. And so they pick up on this imagery and

And they start thinking about what it might mean to be in power and in authority, but with the traits of a mother. So what does compassionate...

authoritative mothering leadership look like? And that, of course, blows apart so many of our modern boxes just in one sentence. They started thinking really seriously about that, and they started conceptualizing Christ as a laboring mother. And then mystical writers like Julian herself and others really took up this image and thought about Christ as

birthing the church on the cross. And there's this crazy manuscript imagery around this. One of my favorites is showing Christ on the cross and little baby church is coming out of the wound in his side as if he's giving birth to her. It's Ecclesia with a little crown on her head and she's a baby, but Jesus is giving birth to the church and

out of his wounds. Hang on, is this a literary description or is this a painting? That is a painting, but there's also literary descriptions of it. The mind boggles. Yes. So they saw the passion as this intensive labor, an actual labor. And so then writers like Julian wrote a lot about this and they saw deep parallels between the

blood and the violence and the pain of passion, of the passion and of labor, but that it was all leading into birth. Head to the show notes to take a look at the manuscript Illumination of Christ Gives Birth to the Church from 1225 to 1249. It's currently held in the Austrian National Library. So it's not pain and suffering in the same way as some other things. It's this beautiful and horrible

process. And it's even more poignant when you consider that in the Middle Ages, pregnancy and labor were a very dangerous undergoing. And so to compare the passion to labor is more apt than it may apparently seem at first blush.

All of this is fascinating and it's fun to talk with Dr. Heyman about the weird and wonderful Middle Ages and their strange beliefs. But does any of it really matter for us today? Short of providing some interesting dinner party one liners like, oh, did you know that in the Middle Ages, Christians depicted Jesus as a woman giving birth? There's a challenge, undeceivers. Anyway, stay with us. Can you give me a sense, based on all these portrayals of Christ, what

it looked like to be a faithful medieval Christian? That's a big question because I think there was, just like today, a lot of different ways that that could take shape. So one of the most traditional ways of looking like a faithful medieval Christian would have been to take vows and become a monk or a nun or a clergyman.

And in the monastic life, monks and nuns devoted themselves to prayer 24 hours a day. They had different times of day that they were praying intentionally together. And so they really saw themselves as the prayers of their community. So that was one way. So were the workers, you know, the plowmen and so on, were they locked out of that true spirituality? So it depends again on who you're reading. I mean, this is the fun thing about the Middle Ages is that we inherit these

black and white pictures of them. And then you see that there's some truth in them. So for instance, Plowman, laborers, those folks, some writers were, and theologians were thinking of them as being lesser, as lesser in that scheme. But around this time, around the time Julian's writing and some of these other folks at the end of the Middle Ages and right around the 13th,

1300s, 1400s, you have this intense rise of materials meant for ordinary people and that wanted to pray the hours, the monastic hours, but couldn't fit them into their ordinary life. So these prayer books were sold, these books of hours that anybody could use who wasn't devoted to the monastic life. And some of them you didn't have to even be fully literate on. You had to memorize prayers, but you could use the imagery of the pages to pray.

Yes, there's an episode on monasticism coming. But just briefly, the Book of Hours was actually a medieval bestseller. No other book was created in greater quantities in the late Middle Ages. It was essentially a guide to daily spiritual devotion with psalms, hymns, prayers and readings to be recited during the eight so-called canonical hours of the day. That's matins, before dawn, lords,

Daybreak, Prime, 6am, Terse, 9am, Sext, noon, Known, 3pm, Vespers, at sunset, and Compline, in the evening. The Book of Hours was often heavily image-based, with beautiful illuminations to aid devotion.

And so on one way you're telling the story, it sounds like maybe the only way to be a good Christian is to be a professed religious. But we see this story complicated as we look at the actual materials coming out of the Middle Ages where a lot of people were praying. And the parish, which was the center of ordinary people's lives who weren't professed to the church, was

We can see in what we have left that all of these ordinary folks were participating in the life of their parishes very vividly and fully. And my favorite historian who writes about this is the historian Eamon Duffy, who writes this book called The Stripping of the Altars, which describes how

at an ordinary parish, you have people raising bees and donating honey to their churches or raising lambs and part of the lambs they give to the church. You have wills left where a merchant's wife leaves her second best dress to the church. So we have this glimpse into ordinary people living

and their devotion. And it looks different than ours, but it is real devotion. My final question, Grace, is do you think there's anything modern Christianity can learn from medieval Christianity? And if so, what? I definitely think so. I think there's a lot we can learn from them. I think that we are so...

We like to think of ourselves as part of the arc of history, right? Like as better than the people who came before us. We all kind of want to think that even if we don't admit to it, we kind of want to think that we've got it a little more figured out. We're on the right track.

But C.S. Lewis writes about how we all, no matter what era you're in, you're going to have a set of common blind spots or common misconceptions about the way the world works. And the only way that we can dispel those and work through them and see beyond our limited time and space and place is to read the books of the past. And I think that these medieval representations of Jesus, their very weirdness,

It exposes assumptions that we have about who Jesus is, about who we are as Christians, about the way the world works. And it's going to be, it's going to look different from person to person, but...

For instance, thinking of Christ as a mother, it didn't change how I thought about Christ's historical body in Palestine in the first century. But what it did do for me is open up to me a way of thinking about Jesus that was so much more loving and intimate than how I had been thinking of him. And I wouldn't have been able to

see that thread in scripture if it hadn't been for those monastic writers and mystical writers who were so interested in this theme. And that's just one example of many that they have really opened my eyes and I think can give that same gift to a lot of other people. ♪♪♪

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Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Mark Doom Hadley. Sophie Hawkshaw is on socials and membership. Alistair Belling is a writer and researcher. Siobhan McGuinness is our online librarian. Lindy Leveston remains my wonderful assistant. Santino DiMarco is chief finance and operations consultant. Editing by Richard Humwee.

Our voice actors today were Yannick Laurie and Dakota Love. We love you guys. Thanks so much. Special thanks also to our series sponsor, Zondervan, for making this Undeception possible. Undeceptions is the flagship podcast of Undeceptions.com, letting the truth and Undeceptions podcast. Interestingly, the painting includes two kings and a bishop among the damned. I like it. I really shouldn't say that.

But I do like it. I like that they were as self-critical as we... No, I love bishops. I love my bishops. I pray for my bishops every single morning. I'll have you know.