That’s a somewhat unorthodox estimate about the dating of Mark and Luke. Most scholars put Mark no earlier than 60, no later than 75, with Luke and Matthew around ten or fifteen years after Mark. Not that we have hard evidence of an exact date for Mark at all, but the scholarly consensus for Mark is usually after Paul’s writings because none of Paul’s writings seem to be aware of the Gospels; for instance, none of these churches in Corinth, Phillipi, Rome, Galatia, or anywhere else seem to have copies of Mark or any other Gospel account. Surely if Paul were aware of such a thing, he’d reference it in his letters either to use it to bolster his points if he thought it were true or to repudiate it if he didn’t. He does, after all, quote at length from the Old Testament and seems to assume that his audience is familiar with it. Even in Paul’s longest and latest letter, his epistle to the Romans from about 58, he doesn’t reference the Gospels in any way, or even suggest that written accounts of Jesus’ life were being circulated. It’s barely possible that Mark was written earlier than that, but the Christian community world-wide was still very small, and the Greek-speaking Gentile community, in which the Gospels were written and Paul was working, even smaller. It’s conceivable that Gospels like Mark and Q were around in the 50s, but there isn’t any actual of it, even implied or circumstantial evidence.
I’ve got no quibbles with your dates for Matthew or John.
1.) The crucufiction I saw in the visitor’s center was a painting, not a physical cruifix. And this was in the 1980s. When did you leave? Not that it matters an awful lot – the Visitor Centers were constantly-evolving exhibits that were changing even while I was there.
2.) i dispute that the anti-cross/crucifix thing is really recent. I’ve seen an awful lot of LDS art and architecture from the entire history (including stuff the anti-Mormons dredge up that the Faithful would rather not see displayed). I can’t recall a cross or crucifix from any point in the history, except for that rather large Visitor Center painting of the Crucifiction.
Mormons always disdained the cross, as I understand it. Their focus is on Jesus’ visitations to North America, is it not? Thus the end of the story for all other Christian sects is just Act II for Mormons. (And who says there are no second acts in American lives?)
One of the things that really snapped the cross-as-symbol into focus for me was a bit of Robert Heinlein ‘making strange’ in which he mentioned a culture whose messiah was hanged… and all religious works were thus marked with a stylized gallows.
It was in the mid 80s, but the last I would have visited there would have been prior to 1981 when I went on a mission to Japan. I do remember a sermon given by a general authority who commented that in the visitors’ center, “we have the living Christ” instead of the dead Christ.
Did you read the linked article?
There is a difference between not using crosses and being venomously anti-cross; between “we don’t use them” and “they are the mark of the beast, which is why the Catholics wear them.” The “non” vs. the “anti.”
Crosses were never part of the Mormon religion, and probably one reason is that early Mormons didn’t see themselves as “Christian” as part of a group of like-minded fellow adherents to a common faith but as the One True[sup]TM[/sup] faith. Smith and his followers professed a belief that God had declared other Christian churches were
As for no crosses ever being wrong, you are mistaken here. From an article in the Mormon Church-owned newspaper The Deseret News
The article leads with an example of a large cross which the Mormons wanted to place on a prominent location in the Salt Lake Valley in the early twentieth century as an example of an earlier ambivolence toward that symbol. It goes on to quote the historian Reed as saying the nineteenth century American Protestants had an aversion to crosses as an anti-Catholic thing in response to the growing number of Catholic emigrants. However, there was an eventual Protestant acceptance of the cross, while the Mormons strong aversion developed later.
All interesting, but I was referring to church art. Aside from buildings being in the shapes of crosses, there doesn’t seem to be any. Putting a big prominent cross in the Salt Lake Valley would indeed be counter to this, but it didn’t happen.
You won’t find crosses on any of the Cuch’s temples or tabernacles, including the Kikland temple. I used to live near one of the older wards in the valley, built way before the 21950s, and it had no crosses (and wasn’t built in cruciform). I’ve seen the holdings of the LDS museum of historical art and gone through numerous books of church history.
People may, indeed, have worn crosses as jewelry – this is the first I’ve heard of it (I recall no examples from the above sources, and never saw it among my LDS friends either in Utah or elsewhere). But I wasn’t arguing that Mormons didn’t use crosses anywhere – I was making the point about Church Art.
Church windows and vents? I’;d like to see examples – i’ve never encountered any.
Ever heard of a Catherine Wheel? It’s a firework that’s circular, sometimes with radii or spokes like a cartwheel. You’ve just described the martyrdom of St Catherine of Alexandria which made the wheel her symbol and gave the name to the firework.
If I’m remembering correctly, one had the name Apollo written into the composition. Not that it isn’t regular iconography for Hermes. Although I seem to remember a story of Hermes stealing Apollo’s flock by forcing them to walk backwards, so that their tracks looked like they had just disappeared.
Indeed. If anyone is interested in learning more about my research, my MA thesis was expanded and revised to be published as a book. Its title is “Banishing the Cross: The Emergence of a Mormon Taboo” and is available on Amazon.
Your book looks interesting. I may have to get a copy.
But I think TokyoBayer confuses what I was saying, or is pushing his own agenda. The lack of crosses in LDS Church Art is manifestly obvious. If you look at old engravings of the Nauvoo Temple, at the existing Kirkland temple, the Salt Lake Temple, the Tabernacles in Salt Lake City and Cedar City, the older temples and stake and ward buildings, the Church art in the Museum of Church Art and reproductions in the books of both Church Histories and the anti-Mormons, you can’t help but be struck by the absence of crosses from these works. It’s not merely that they aren’t prominent – they’re not there. If you look up images from LDS cemetaries, they are , except for a few cases, missing from there as well. And this is all well before the 1950s. The existence of cruciform jewelry doesn’t detract from this wholesale absence from church art and architecture.
It’s not that there’s anything “scandalous” about this. You’ll look in vain for crosses at Friends (quaker) Meetinghouses. But crosses were pretty common among Protestant churches in general, and especially on protestant grave markers. To say that reaction against crosses have anything to do with Catholics seems odd. But I’ll have to see what your book says.
Interesting, although doing vanity searches at night must take up a lot of time.
I’m not sure what you are trying to argue here. No one is contesting that crosses are not part of the Mormon faith and are not generally seen. Reed apparently has found some exceptions which you appear to doubt. Whatever.
My point is not that crosses are used, which would be clearly wrong, but why they aren’t used and why did Mormonism have such a strong aversion to them, as I do not recall anything specifically taught by any of the early leaders. The very question I had can be sumarized from a quote in the linked review of Reed’s book.
Mormons don’t use crosses. Point conceded. But why not and when and why did displaying the cross cause such a visceral reaction among its members? This question would appear to be answered by Reed’s book and is fairly recent in historical terms.
A couple of years ago NHK had a year-long fictional series on Ryoma Sakamoto, a leader in movement to over through the shogun government. As a subplot he finds a geisha who is one of these kakure Christian and discovers the fact by a disguised artwork.
