Presented by Christopher Frayling, Rector, Royal College of Art. - Images of Jesus: the history of the British peoples. - Jesus as a Roman god and Celtic warrior king. - The ruler of the medieval world. - Changing styles: a suffering Jesus. - The Reformation: shattering the image. - Jesus as cosmic Creator. - Jesus and Victorian responses to social and intellectual change. - Today: Jesus and the mass media. - 'Ecce Homo': Jesus as God made man.
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	[Headings] Vivid, powerful images, yet no-one knows what the Jesus of history really looked like. These portraits aren't, for the most part, supposed to be accurate portrayals Instead they tell a very British story. The story of a figure who reflects the hopes, ideals and terrors of British people over the last two millennia. This is the earliest image of Jesus to be found in Britain. Third century Christians pictured him like a Roman god. Later, Celtic Christians adapted their traditional patterns and decorations. This eighth century cross from Rothwell, in Scotland, shows Jesus like a Celtic warrior king, trampling death and sin underfoot. In the early Middle ages, Christianity's power had spread across Europe. Jesus's life on earth came to be seen as the very turning point of history. This medieval map shows him as the ruler of a world in which the holy city of Jerusalem, the focus of his ministry, lies right at the centre. So when the Holy Land and Jerusalem were conquered by Muslims in the eleventh century, soldiers from all over Europe rallied to save it. The Crusaders, going into battle, pictured Jesus as their military commander. It was the same powerful Jesus who looked down at people at prayer. For hundreds of years the paintings, carvings and windows in churches and cathedrals were illustrated scriptures - a book which even the illiterate could read. Here Jesus was often shown presiding over the last judgment at the end of time. Even in early representations of the crucifixion, Jesus is triumphant: eyes wide open, victorious over death. But by the fourteenth century, it was a very different story. Plague devastated Britain and the crucified Jesus came to reflect the suffering of ordinary people. Jesus appears as a very human figure, in terrible pain, totally identified with the human experience of death. These empty niches in Ely Cathedral tell the story of a radical upheaval in the history of Jesus in British art. As the Protestant reformation spread across Britain in the sixteenth century, vast amounts of medieval art and decoration were destroyed. The reformers, and later Cromwell and the Puritans, regarded images of saints, prophets and even of Jesus himself as idols, threatening to take God's place. Ornament was a crime. Public images of Jesus disappeared for nearly 200 years. When they re-emerged, scientific progress in the eighteenth century had transformed the British view of the world, and God. He is a cosmic creator of a universe governed by rational laws. To study the natural world is to see God himself. This Jesus has shed the mystery and majesty of earlier images; he is a rational and moral teacher and healer. In the Victorian era, people struggled to find ways to reconcile their ideas of Jesus with a period of huge social and intellectual upheaval. For the burgeoning middle classes, the 'gentle Jesus meek and mild', sitting with them as one of the family, confirmed their new-found values. Other artists put the mystery of Jesus firmly in the world of fact and science, as real as the factory or the steam engine. In Holman Hunt's Light of the World every detail is accurate to first century Palestine - the lantern, the plants, the clothes, even the door hinges. The twentieth century saw the rise of the mass media and, with it, an explosion of images of Jesus to suit all needs and agendas. He was portrayed as a victim of world conflict, a villager in Berkshire, a freedom fighter - even a film star. Multi-cultural, multi-national, multi-media. Jesus surveys London. In Mark Wallinger's statue Ecce Homo, Jesus is now one amongst us, God made man. Over the centuries he has been called King, Crusader and Saviour. How will we picture him in the next thousand years?