While the prophets Elijah and Moses stand securely upon this strip, the three frightened apostles appear to levitate. Later Byzantine representations of the Transfiguration always include a craggy mountaintop, but in the Sinai church there is only a horizontal strip shading off from green to yellow as it is illuminated by Christ’s radiance. The absence in the mosaic of a solid ground line is also disconcerting to the modern eye. The prostrate figure of St Peter appears to have two left feet and only one arm. Some of the mosaic work is excellent as in the figure of Christ, some anatomically and compositionally weak. Furthermore, the Transfiguration was only made known after the Resurrection, for Christ said (Matthew 17.9), ‘Tell the vision (to horama) to no man, until the Son of Man be risen again from the dead’. Only then will the great sight of the New Dispensation be revealed on Mount Tabor, and Moses will be there to see it. What did he mean by that? He meant ‘after I have traversed my earthly life, after the period of the Law has gone by’. Parelthon means literally ‘having gone by’. On Horeb (Sinai) Moses said (in the King James version), ‘I will now turn aside and see this great sight’, which in the Greek of the Septuagint reads, ‘ Parelthon opsomai to horama to mega touto’. On Sinai there was a dark cloud, on Tabor a luminous one. On Sinai Moses did not see God face to face on Tabor he, Elijah and the three chosen apostles were able to see Christ in His divine glory. The Transfiguration in the New Testament was the fulfilment of Moses’ incomplete vision in the Old. The sermon, whatever its exact date and authorship, was according to its text definitely delivered, not at Sinai but on Mount Tabor and explains at length the complementarity of the events at the two mountains. TO UNDERSTAND THE message of the Sinai mosaic we can do no better than read a sermon attributed to Anastasius Sinaites, said to have been a monk at the Sinai monastery in the seventh century. They are distant both spatially and temporally, the double meaning of the Greek word anôthen, both ‘from above’ and ‘from the past’.Ĭlicking an image will open an enlargement. What message was this mosaic meant to convey to the sixth-century pilgrim? Why was there portrayed in the church at Mount Sinai the Transfiguration which took place on another mountain, that of Tabor in Galilee, in addition to the two Moses scenes that took place at Sinai itself? These two latter scenes are placed very high up on the walls and do not immediately attract the worshipper’s gaze, which is directed towards the apse. At the top of the wall above the apse are two scenes from the Old Testament which occurred at Mount Sinai itself: Moses loosening his sandals before the Burning Bush and Moses receiving the tablets of the Law from the hand of God. In the apse the mosaic illustrates the Transfiguration as described in the New Testament, with Christ in a mandorla revealed to the prophets Elijah and Moses and to three apostles, John, James and Peter. THE GREAT APSE mosaic of Christ’s Transfiguration in the Sinai church, today partly hidden from view by the tall sixteenth-century iconostasis, raises a number of questions: Most controversially, what message was it meant to convey? And, when and by whom was it done? The mosaic is hidden behind the tall icon screen.
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