Prior to about 1500 most depictions of the Last Supper in Western art showed unleavened bread on the table, but since then leavened bread has usually been shown. This change involved the abandonment of what was understood at the time to be a historically-accurate representation of the Last Supper, in favor of a historically-inaccurate one. The present article examines the combination of artistic, religious, and social factors that made this development uncontroversial when it occurred and that allowed it to persist during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation period when many aspects of religious art became subject to rigorous control.

The marriage of archaeological referencing and picture Bibles in the nineteenth century resulted in an astonishing variety of guises worn by the court of Ahasuerus in Esther. Following the exhibition of Neo-Assyrian sculpture in the British Museum and the wide circulation of such images in various John Murray publications, British illustrators like Henry Anelay defaulted to Assyrian models for kings and rulers in the Old Testament, including the principal actors in Esther, even though authentic Achaemenid Persian art had been available for illustrative pastiche for decades. This curious adoptive choice echoed British national pride in its splendid British Museum collection and imperial adventures in the Middle East.

Fatwa is often considered as a non-binding legal opinion. Some jurists use this caveat to reject any links between fatwa and violence. They argue that fatwa is one thing and violence is something else. This article is an attempt to disprove such a misleading argument by providing cases that took place in Indonesia. I argue that there is a strong connection between fatwa and intolerant actions.

One of the central elements of the secularist tradition is atheism. Atheism has a long history and is nowadays again heavily debated. This article tries to present a reflection on the nature of atheism. The central thesis is that atheism is often misunderstood. The most fruitful definition of atheism is a negative one: an atheist does not believe in the god that theism favors. The concept of atheism should be carefully distinguished from the motives that some people have not to believe in the theistic god. The confusion of these two things is responsible for much needless controversy about atheism.

Barabbas, unlike Pilate or Judas or even other biblical characters who, like him, are barely mentioned in various Gospel accounts and yet who have received much attention – such as Mary Magdalene or Salome – received little attention before the twentieth century. But since then his ambiguous status as bandit, murderer, or freedom fighter fits in well with the ambiguous positions of art and religion in the modern world. A person who was given just a few sentences in the Bible finally has become a subject of artistic interest, reflecting the contradictory aspects of modern culture in which rebellion can run the spectrum from noble self-sacrifice for the greater good to self-serving justification of the love of violence. Though some of the works exploring the meaning of Barabbas are obviously of inferior quality, the others offer trenchant explorations of an engrossing character, reflecting to us our struggles with religious faith in the contemporary, secularized world. Barabbas represents the condition most of us have experienced: through forces outside our control we are placed in a relationship with possible truth, a relationship we can either turn away from for other, proximate human truths, or we can turn toward, even if we cannot always decipher its meaning. Barabbas is a noble revolutionary, a vicious criminal, an accident of politics and mob psychology, perhaps even a love interest, and a shadowy figure whose brief contact with Jesus is left in the dark. In his own way, differing from that of Pilate or Judas, Barabbas can speak uniquely from the distant world of the Gospels to the modern world in ways we immediately recognize.