If you live anywhere near Dallas or plan to visit in the next few months, be sure to check out the latest exhibit at Fort Worth's Kimbell, "Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art."

My teaching assistant, Eva, went with me on Tuesday, which is the Kimbell's half-price day, to check it out.

What we found, I highly recommend. My biggest surprise was seeing how much the early Christians referred to the "Jonah" story, and also how few crucifixes (none) we saw. Eva, who knows more about early Christian history than I do, said that's because anyone who actually saw a crucifixion would have recoiled at the thought of making that image into art.

Other popular images were anchors; depictions of shepherds with sheep; the Daniel story about Shadrack, Meshack, and Abednego; and a strong Jesus who looked people in the eye.

Developed and organized by the Kimbell (its exclusive venue), the exhibit is guest-curated by Dr. Jeffrey Spier of the University of Arizona. It draws on recent discoveries to demonstrate how Christians in the third to sixth centuries gave visual expression to their religious beliefs. The Museum's web site says this:

A spectacular display of many of the greatest treasures of early Christianity from around the world, Picturing the Bible includes major loans from the Vatican, the Bargello and the Laurentian Library in Florence, the British Museum, the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and a number of other international institutions. A landmark event both for scholarship on the Early Christian era and for the broader appreciation of this crucial period in world history, this exhibition is the first major review of third-to sixth-century Christian art since The Age of Spirituality at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1977. There have been many important advances in scholarship since then, as well as a considerable number of new archaeological discoveries, all of which this exhibition fully reassesses.

For more info, you can go here.