Advent Calendar Day 4: Uriel and Lil' John the Baptist

Over the next month, I'll be offering thoughts on the Nativity set model (a large papercraft crèche that you can find and download here:

https://gumroad.com/l/ThkR

Uriel and John the Baptist:

Jesus’s cousin John, who will later grow up to be the wild-eyed desert mystic and prophet of the Gospels, is probably about six months older than Jesus, and thus presented a problem for theologians who accepted the version of events in which Herod ordered the slaughter of all Hebrew children under the age of two (a deliberate echo by the writer of the Gospel of Matthew to Pharaoh’s edict thirteen hundred years earlier).  Why wasn’t John killed?

The story that evolved was that he was spirited away to join the Holy Family whence they had fled in Egypt, and the vehicle of his deliverance was the angel Uriel. You can see a version of this story in the DaVinci painting Virgin of the Rocks.

Uriel is, according to Rabbinic tradition, one of the four archangels (the four that we’ve culturally come to accept are Uriel, Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael, listed by name in the Book of Enoch, composed between 100 and 300 BCE).

Angels are tricky.  We often take “Messenger of God” mentions as being angels, though context makes it unlikely that they looked inhuman, and rarely is there anything contextual (though theologically there is opposition to this idea) to conflict with the idea that the messengers ARE men, used by God for His purpose.  When angels are identified as such and described, often in the apocalyptic genre with books like Daniel and Revelations, man, they are out there. 

Uriel here takes his design partially from Daniel 10 (dressed in linen, belt of gold, eyes like torches, face like lightning, skin like burnished bronze) and partially from Ezekiel, where I pulled the four-faces thing (though this springs up in plenty of other books and in other forms).  I gave him human feet instead of calf hooves, though.

Lil’ John here hints at his future in the wilderness, with his filthy matted hair and casual feral nudity.