BACKGROUND

Church Teaching

The principle Church documents which form the background to this site are:

The Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum) of the Second Vatican Council

The instructions of the Pontifical Biblical Commission on the historical truth of the Gospels (1964) and the interpretation of the scriptures

The Catechism of the Catholic Church 51-141

The Gift of Scripture, a teaching document of the Bishops of England and Wales and of Scotland.

A useful website for reference: www.catholic-resources.org

For an online bible, both the New American Bible and the Revised Standard Version are available.

Images

Most of the images used in this site come from the Carmelite shrine at The Friars, Aylesford.

The black and white images of the evangelists are in St Joseph's Chapel as is the mosaic of St John. The red images come from the lecterns in The Relic Chapel.

My thanks to Richard Copsey O.Carm. for photographing the images.

Images of the book of Kells are in the public domain. I have also used some mosaics from Ravenna.

The Four Living Creatures

Christians took the image of the four living creatures from the prophet Ezekiel (Ezk 1,1-14). The image is used again in the New Testament in the Apocalypse (Book of Revelation) (Apoc 4,6-9).

One way of looking at this image refers to the beginnings of the four Gospels as follows:

Matthew begins with the human ancestry of Jesus (1,1-18)

Mark begins with John the Baptist roaring like a lion (1,2-8)

Luke begins (and ends) in the Jerusalem Temple where oxen are sacrificed (Lk 1,5-23)

John begins with a prologue (and the entire gospel continues) with a message that soars up to the heavens like an eagle (Jn 1,1-18)

The message on the scroll of John used as a motif for this site is the last verse of the gospel:

"There are many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written" (Jn 21,25)