It was the time of the Gladiators, and Christians fed the lions.

Pressed down and persecuted on all sides, Christians met and worshiped in catacombs among the dead. This is where early Christian art emerged.

This past weekend, I visited the art exhibit, "Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art" at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. The exhibit surveyed Christian art in the early centuries, from the stylized drawings in the catacombs, to the more sophisticated carvings on the sarcophagi of believers, to the immersion of patron art under Constantine, and into the age of the Church of Rome.

What grabbed me was not the ornate crosses donated by the empire with semi-precious jewels dangling from the silver and gold but the simplicity of the beginnings of Christian art.

You won't find crosses or depictions of Jesus knocking on a door. You find fish, anchors, and peacocks. You find Old Testament stories. You find messages of hope in places of death.

The Christian art of the first centuries was dominated by resurrection themes, themes that spoke of a future time when mind, body, and soul would perfectly connect in all of God's creation: within each individual (meaning a perfect connection with God), between individuals, and with the world. Art and theology interacted, and that theology featured both Christ's resurrection and the believer's future hope of physical resurrection. They pictured these themes in stories of the Old Testament.

Jonah, swallowed by the fish (drawn in the ancient Greek style, what we would recognize as Leviathan) and spit back out on dry land, litters the walls. Jesus said, "For just as Jonah was in the belly of the huge fish for three days and three nights, so the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights" (Matthew 12:40, NET). In this sense, Jonah represented the Messiah's resurrection-his conquering death-and the Christian's hope to follow in his footsteps.

Noah also had his place among early Christian art. Pictured in the ark, arms outstretched in prayer, often at his side a dove bringing the olive branch that meant hope, life, and peace, Noah symbolized the Christian's new life through baptism. The Apostle Peter said, "In the ark a few, that is eight souls, were delivered through water. And this prefigured baptism, which now saves you not the washing off of physical dirt but the pledge of a good conscience to God through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who went into heaven

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