“Christ cleansing the Temple”
Ambrogio Bon, late 17th-century
(Click to enlarge.)
It’s scarcely the only example, but this brief passage demonstrates beyond question that the Lord himself was capable of using irony (“it cannot be that a prophet should perish away from Jerusalem”) and negative description (“that fox”) in speaking about those who opposed him. He wasn’t bland. He wasn’t always inoffensive. He wasn’t the “consumptive schoolgirl” of some Victorian art that so repulsed the young C. S. Lewis and helped to ease his slide into atheism.
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