Between Death and Resurrection: Entering the Dead Christ
One of the most famous scenes in Dostoevsky’s novels—or at least one of its most riveting in The Idiot—comes when the Christ-like figure, Prince Myshkin, enters the room of his Luciferian opponent, Rogozhin. Upon seeing the painting owned by the corrupt Rogozhin—The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb by Hans Holbein the Younger—Prince Myshkin cries out, “Why, a man’s faith might be ruined by looking at that picture!”
Dostoevsky further describes the painting’s unsettling effect through the voice of the consumptive Hippolite:
“When I arose to lock the door after him, I suddenly called to mind a picture I had noticed at Rogozhin’s in one of his gloomiest rooms, over the door. He had pointed it out to me himself as we walked past it, and I believe I must have stood a good five minutes in front of it. There was nothing artistic about it, but the picture made me feel strangely uncomfortable. It represented Christ just taken down from the cross. It seems to me that painters as a rule represent the Saviour, both on the cross and taken down from it, with great beauty still upon His face. This marvellous beauty they strive to preserve even in His moments of deepest agony and passion. But there was no such beauty in Rogozhin’s picture. This was the presentment of a poor mangled body which had evidently suffered unbearable anguish even before its crucifixion, full of wounds and bruises, marks of the violence of soldiers and people, and of the bitterness of the moment when He had fallen with the cross—all this combined with the anguish of the actual crucifixion.
The face was depicted as though still suffering; as though the body, only just dead, was still almost quivering with agony. The picture was one of pure nature, for the face was not beautified by the artist, but was left as it would naturally be, whosoever the sufferer, after such anguish […] It is strange to look on this dreadful picture of the mangled corpse of the Saviour, and to put this question to oneself: ‘Supposing that the disciples, the future apostles, the women who had followed Him and stood by the cross, all of whom believed in and worshipped Him—supposing that they saw this tortured body, this face so mangled and bleeding and bruised (and they must have so seen it)—how could they have gazed upon the dreadful sight and yet have believed that He would rise again?”
As much as one might be tempted to ignore this corpse—especially in our era of desensitization to the macabre—we should remember that few of us have ever dealt with a dead body unprepared by the coroner, without chemicals or perfumes to stave off the stench and decay. For most of human history, rot appeared almost immediately, as surely as the deceased would empty its bowels.
Today, by contrast, we are met with the faint smell of carpet cleaner in the funeral home, the strange mix of embalming fluids, and a face puffed up with chemicals—almost like a grotesque Botox injection designed to keep the corpse “lifelike.”
We have also grown numb to the fact that, scripturally, most of the disciples had fled by the time Jesus was crucified. Only a small group—John, Mary the Theotokos, Mary Magdalene, and a few other women—remained at the foot of the Cross, confronted by the raw horror of His violently broken body.
Partly because the Gospel writers themselves wrote as those who already knew the end of the story—the Risen Christ—their interpretations of the event tend to clothe Christ’s Passion with the sense that something cosmic is happening and not yet finished. But as John the Evangelist plainly says, “For as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead” (John 20:9, ESV).
This knowledge not only softens the impact of that dreadful moment—when the faithful were left to stare at the mangled remains of their crucified Lord—but it can also lead us to misinterpret the gravity of what the evangelists were truly saying to their first-century audience. It’s this two-fold problem I want to draw out.First, there is no way to bypass the evangelists’ interpretive lens; we do not have a “pure,” unfiltered account apart from their theological perspective. Second, we must remember the raw history of a crucified Lord who was mocked, forsaken, betrayed by Judas, denied by Peter, and whose followers truly mourned His death. The real story is not simply the Risen Lord unveiling Himself by interpreting the Scriptures through the Holy Spirit at Pentecost; rather, it is that from the full reality of death emerged a movement that seized upon a form of life no longer confined or limited by death itself.
The moment captured in Hans Holbein’s painting is the very moment we must enter if we ourselves are to rise again. And know this is Christ, the Lord of Glory, whom we yet but see through a glass darkly.
Bravo and thank you!