Still thinking and meditating upon the beginning of John’s Gospel, I found myself looking at early spiral galaxies and working through the photos needing classifying through the ‘Galaxy zoo project ... and found that these widened my horizons, taking me back far further in time... and some paintings resulted based on “In the beginning was the Word...and the Word was with God and the Word was God... the same was in the beginning with God, all things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made... [John 1 v 1 - 18 ] This poetic beginning seems to spiral or circle around in rhythmic repetition... and so this painting began ... taking up the whole of Advent one year, as I turned the large canvas round and round to paint the spiral, basing my ideas on what I had seen via www.zooniverse.org and thinking all the time of those few verses at the beginning of John’s Gospel which went round and round in my mind...
Any of the early Christians who had grown up in a Jewish background would no doubt be reminded of the first few verses of the Hebrew Scriptures Genesis 1 v 1f where the first story of creation is written in a similarly poetic form :”In the beginning...” I always felt that because John’s Gospel echoed the beginning of Genesis, it would have made better poetic sense to have put his Gospel at the beginning of the New Testament.... maybe then it would have been easier to see the connection between God & His Word in the poetic story of creation... for it is only a few verses into Genesis 1 that we find : “And God said: Let there be light: and there was light” and we see the importance of God’s Word in creating...for what he says is done, like an echo of his command or his word... as pictured in this manuscript illustration below where the universe is being created through the eyes of a mediaeval artist...rather a different take on things with the huge compass...
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