The Return of the Seventy: Jesus Christ as the Listener of Ages

Luke 10 records the commissioning, sending, return and debriefing of seventy disciples, dispatched to teach and minister. They had marvelous things to report: in their work, they’d proven able to carry out the same works they’d seen their Teacher do.

That debriefing struck me as an unusual incident, in that instead of ministering, we see Jesus Christ enjoying the reports of the seventy. Some day, all of us will tell him our own stories. The Return of the Seventy expresses my hope that he will have as much fun listening to our stories as he did to theirs.

The thumbnail seen here is pretty close to the final picture. One alteration: we didn’t want the lightning storm on the right, portraying Satan’s attempt to clean up the damage the Seventy had done to his kingdom, to be seen above any of the people. So the space was cleared out, and a small still life was placed there.

Months were spent casting each character. The Storyteller, originally envisioned as a John Candy type, went through several changes until we settled on the one seen in the final picture.

Much deliberation went into choosing a model for Jesus Christ. Such qualities as strength, warmth, intelligence, wisdom, love, courage and humor had to be portrayed. Scripture offers us no physical description of the Messiah, but I did my best to choose a model who embodied those seven characteristics. His pose also went through a lot of changes. In the thumbnail he appears relaxed, but in the final picture he leans forward aggressively.

Here are some oil sketches of the various characters. Some of these people were used, others ended up on the cutting room floor.

Biblical scholarship tells us that the return of the seventy took place sometime between the end of the Feast of Tabernacles and the beginning of the Feast of Atonement. On our calendar that corresponds to the nine weeks between October 11 through December 13. Resultingly, the grass upon which our characters are seated is turning brown; above them is a fall sky, and they’re all dressed in layers.

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Acts 27: The Miracle at Melita: A Portrait of an Answered Prayer

The account of Paul’s voyage from Tyre toward Rome is perhaps the most detailed account of a sea voyage in all of ancient literature. Whole books, a lot of them, have been written about it. It is a harrowing story, using over fifty nautical terms. The boat, a Roman grain ship, spent weeks in an horrendous storm. The Devil wanted Paul dead at all costs, but God told Paul that not only he, but the other 275 people on board would make it safely to land.

We chose the moment in which the passengers and crew abandon the ship, after wedging it into an inlet and anchoring it from the stern. The main character of the picture is the ocean waves, crashing towards shore. By rights, nobody should have lived through the trip, but Acts records all of them doing so, swimming or else clutching fragments of the ship.

The ship is accurately painted, as is its scale. These grain ships were huge. The original Greek tells us that the mainsail had been taken down; only the foresail was still in place, although if you look closely, its mast has snapped. The lines seen are the ship’s riggings, wrapped about the hull. The practice is called frapping, although the King James Version calls it “undergirding.” In these days of wooden hulled ships, frapping was the only way the vessel could possibly survive such a storm.

Life offers us all many impossible situations, too. If God could ensure the safety of all 276 on board, He can certainly take care of us.

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*Approach of the Magi* 2021. 20x24”. Oil on linen.

The Approach of the Magi to Jerusalem: When the Season is the Star

In February of 2019 I had occasion to paint a marvelous rack of cirrus clouds outside of Phoenix, Arizona. Such clouds, often called Mare’s Tails, are composed of ice crystals, much higher in altitude than the more familiar cumulus clouds. A sky like this screams winter. I chose to build a picture around that sky, using it to illustrate an event which took place in the year December, 2 BC. This is when the magi, a delegation of Persian astronomers, arrived at Jerusalem to pay homage to Judea’s new King.

One doesn’t often see snow in Biblical pictures, but it is mentioned 25 times in the Bible, and there’s no reason there wouldn’t have been patches of snow in the foothills leading to Jerusalem.

Traditional teaching is that there were three magi, but nowhere do the Gospels give a number. However many magi made the trip, they would have been accompanied by assistants and, in view of the costly gifts they brought, a formidable security detail.

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*The Capacity to Endure* YEAR. SIZE. MEDIUM.

The Capacity to Endure: Determining How Much of a Story Must Be Told

I was commissioned to paint Noah at work on the Ark. My immediate reaction was to show the magnitude of the project, with scaffoldings, construction equipment, and an army of hired laborers. But the purpose of the illustration wasn’t to display the construction technology of the ancient world. It was to run alongside a research article on tenacity, using Noah as an example. So it was decided to keep things simple.

There were actually two different models. A bodybuilder had the physique that Noah must have had, to work for decades on the Ark. Another man posed for his face. He had qualities of both strength and gentleness, which I thought were ideally suited to the patriarch.

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