ABSTRACT
A number of the Durham Gospels’ themes, iconographic conventions and exegetical techniques seem relevant in studying the more elusive image in the Book of Kells. The Irish iconography of the Crucifixion, of which the Durham Gospels is the earliest manuscript version, preserves the Early Christian iconography of showing Christ’s hands outstretched on the Cross in orans pose. The priestly gesture of Christ in the Kells picture may carry a reminiscence of the ceremony of sustentatio which is already described in the earliest Roman ordines of c. 700. The mystery of Christ, encoded in Scripture, was seen to speak simultaneously through all the devices and images and layers of meaning but could never be reduced to any one of them. The image is a highly original creation but one within well-formed iconographic traditions and with parallels in the rhetorical and often arcane techniques of monastic lectio divina.
