Jesus and Half Dome: Four Revealing Pictures

Of course for this approach to succeed, one needs to grant that the pictures of Jesus in the New Testament gospels aren't precise photographs so much as inspired paintings. If you've spent much time looking at paintings, you know that many are not "literal" in the photographic sense. Yet a great painting can capture a slice of reality that eludes the photographer. It can convey mood, feeling, and insight. And it can be profoundly "true" without being literalistic.

Consider, for example, the four paintings pictured above. You probably recognize these as different representations of Half Dome, the mammoth granite monolith that dwarfs the eastern end of Yosemite Valley in California. A couple of the paintings are more literal; a couple more suggestive. None looks exactly like a photograph. Yet it would be wrong to criticize the painters because their art wasn't photographic enough.

If you saw only one of these paintings of Half Dome, you'd have an idea what it really looks like. In fact, if you had never seen it before, either in person or in pictures, and you went to Yosemite Valley, from one painting alone you'd be able to identify Half Dome. Yet if you had seen all four paintings, you'd have an even better idea of what Half Dome really looks like in all of its subtlety and variety.

So it is with Jesus and the gospels. If you had access to only one of the four, you'd have a trustworthy picture of Jesus. It wouldn't be as detailed or as literal as a photograph. But you could trust it to reveal the truth about Jesus. With four gospels, you're able to see different things in Jesus and to know with greater accuracy what he was really like.