Just so, on the third day, the whale disgorged Jonas. Marjorie Carpenter in Kontakia of Romanos, Byzantine MelodistĪgain, Hades, crying out: “I am pierced in the stomach Romanos the Melodist, Fourth Hymn of the Resurrection, trans. So that I vomit forth those whom I formerly devoured.īut now lament with me, for we are despoiled of our common glory.” Since in His descent He has attacked my stomach, Hades, to the snake: “Let us both bitterly lament,.(“In adorationem venerandae crucis,” Patrologia Graeca 62, col. In a sermon among the spuria of John Chrysostom of the fifth to seventh century, the infernal serpent laments that a nail is implanted in his heart and a wooden lance pierces him, tearing him apart.In the Gospel of Bartholomew, upon hearing footsteps descending the stairs to his abode, Hades says, “My belly is rent, and mine inward parts are pained: it cannot be but that God cometh hither.”.For, lo, all those that I have swallowed from eternity I perceive to be in commotion, and I am pained in my belly.” If, therefore, we receive him here, I am afraid lest perchance we be in danger even about the rest. In the Gospel of Nicodemus, Hades frets to Satan about Jesus’s coming to the underworld after his crucifixion: “I not long ago swallowed down one dead, Lazarus by name and not long after, one of the living by a single word dragged him up by force out of my bowels: and I think that it was he of whom thou speakest.Seeing this, Death quaked and was terrified, and released all whom he held beginning with the first man.”-Ephrem the Syrian, “Sermo in pretiosam et vivicam crucem” (Sermon on the Precious and Life-Giving Cross) “With this precious weapon Christ tore apart the voracious stomach of Hades and blocked the treacherous fully opened jaws of Satan.Byzantine art curator Margaret English Frazer cites several such examples in her essay “Hades Stabbed by the Cross of Christ”: There is also an ancient literary tradition of Hades experiencing gastric troubles in response to Christ’s redemptive work-either being speared through his midsection with Jesus’s cross, or his stomach churning in nervous anticipation of Jesus’s approach. The iconography of Hades being stabbed is unique among surviving Byzantine representations of the Crucifixion, though it is present in some depictions of the Anastasis (Resurrection), known in English as the Harrowing of Hell. The New Testament writers use the word, roughly equivalent to the Hebrew Sheol, to refer to the unseen realm of the dead, where people’s souls reside between death and the general resurrection, or sometimes to the grave, the place of bodily decay. The Greek inscription clues us in to his identity: “The Cross Implanted in the Stomach of Hades.” This is the ruler of the underworld being subdued by Christus Victor, the conquering Christ! Icon with the Crucifixion, made in Constantinople, mid-10th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has in its collection a Byzantine Crucifixion ivory from Constantinople with an unusual figure at the bottom: a burly, bearded man in a reclining position, being stabbed through his belly by the cross.
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