7/3/2023 0 Comments Omega letter![]() ![]() He relates that King Abgar of Edessa sent a letter to Jesus at Jerusalem, asking Jesus to come and heal him of an illness. The entire history of such icons is quite fascinating.Īside from the legend that Pilate had made an image of Christ, the fourth-century Eusebius of Caesarea, in his Church History, provides a more substantial reference to a "first" icon of Jesus. This particular icon was written by the Russian icon painter Simon Ushakov. On The Origin of Ὁ ὬΝ in The Halo of Christ The Icon of Christ Entering Jerusalem, Palm Sunday I began by noticing that during the first millennium, Christ’s halo was sometimes empty and that, more rarely, it was absent. I therefore started searching for the answer to the following questions: when, where and why did Christians add these letters to Christ’s halo? Greek translators of the Hebrew Bible put Yahweh as Ὁ ὬΝ.īefore I began to study this subject, I also thought that these letters had always been part of the image of Christ, but in examining the images that have come down to us from the first millennium, and even after, I noticed that the Ὁ ὬΝ is universally absent, as much in the West as in the East. In Hebrew, he who was speaking said Yahweh, which is also a present participle. These words are the answer Moses received on Mount Sinai when he asked for the name of him to whom he was speaking. A literal translation of Ὁ ὬΝ would be “the being one,” which does not mean much. These letters form the present participle, ὤν, of the Greek verb to be, with a masculine singular definite article, ὁ. So it is for the three Greek letters found in Christ’s cruciform halo. ![]() We have perhaps forgotten that behind each feature there is a history and a theological meaning to discover and rediscover. We are so used to seeing the features of Christ in icons that we no longer pay attention to them, thinking they have always been there, as we see them, taking them for granted. Greek translators of the Hebrew Bible put Yahweh as Ὁ ὬΝ. So what are the origins of Ὁ ὬΝ in the halo of Christ? Image of the Savior Nerukotvorniy ( Made Without Hands): a traditional Orthodox iconography in the interpretation of Simon Ushakov (1658). What is the meaning of the three letters in the halo of the Acheiropoieta? ![]()
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