DAY 58
CHALLENGE
“The pagan roots of Christianity are shown by the popular Madonna-and-Child images depicting Mary and the baby Jesus. Similar images depicting a goddess and her child are found in pagan religions all over the world.”
DEFENSE
Images of the Madonna and Child neither date from the origin of Christianity nor prove it has a pagan origin.
Images of Mary and the baby Jesus did not become common in Christian art until the fifth century. There are a few possible examples of them from the second to the fourth centuries, but none from the first. These images do not go back to the founding of Christianity and thus cannot show it to have pagan origins.
The most they could show is that at some point Christian artists drew on themes that were already present in pagan art, but there is nothing sinister or surprising about mother and child images. They appear in every culture because of a simple fact: There are mothers with children in every culture!
What’s more, you don’t have to be a goddess to be represented in such images. Today, every mother has photos of herself holding each baby she has had, and before the invention of photography, families could have drawings or paintings of such scenes.
The depiction of mothers with children is a natural expression of mankind’s artistic impulse. Motherhood is a profound aspect of the human experience, and it is naturally reflected in a culture’s art.
In cultures that believed in goddesses, it was natural to depict some of them with their children, but that is not what is happening in Ma- donna and Child images. Although Jesus is God, Mary is a human being—not a goddess.
She is a noteworthy biblical figure who is mentioned in multiple books of the New Testament, and it is natural that she would find a place in Christian art. One of the easiest ways to indicate her identity in a work of art is to depict her with her even more famous Son. The fact that two Gospels have infancy narratives in which people visit Mary and the child Jesus (Matt. 2:11; Luke 2:16) made it certain that such images would be depicted in Christian art.