Paralytic

PARALITICO. - S. Giovanni Evangelista (5, 1-15) narra che Gesù, venuto a Gerusalemme, si fermò in un luogo vicino alla chiesa odierna di S. Anna, dove era una piscina chiamata dagli Ebrei

Bethsaida (Bethsada or Bethesda) with five porticoes, beneath which sick people of every kind camped, waiting for an angel from heaven to descend and agitate the waters, and he healed the paralytic who for 39 years had been waiting for someone to throw him into the water at the propitious moment.

Christian art naturally took hold of this episode, depicting it repeatedly, albeit in various ways. However, painters preferred to represent the other scene of the healing of the paralytic of Capernaum (Mt. 9:6 ff.; Mk. 2:12; Lk. 5:25 ff.) in which the healed man walks away with his bed on his shoulders; and they often place this scene near another of Baptism (cf. the depictions in the Greek Chapel of Priscilla and the crypt A° of the Sacraments in S. Callisto), thereby highlighting the symbolic connection existing between the healing of the paralytic and regeneration from sin. The healing of the paralytic was frescoed in the 3rd century in the baptistery of Dura Europos (Enc. Catt., IV, pl. 126). Sculptors, on the other hand, exploiting the possibility of rendering multiple scenes, sometimes superimposed, and the very nature of relief, which takes advantage of the background to create a reality richer in details, left behind some representations in which almost all the elements of the Johannine text recur. Only a few are known, but in compensation the compositions are all identical and occupy the center of the front of sarcophagi, which all possess, in the same order, an identical series of scenes. In Gaul the following fragments are found: a) at Die (Wilpert, Sarcofagi, pl. 230, 2), the upper scene with the three-arched portico almost intact; b) in the Museum of Clermont (ibid., pl. 230, 5), the two superimposed scenes, but the portico is reduced to a single arch, according to the typology of columned sarcophagi; c) at Arles (ibid., fig. 184), only an arch with two heads of the infirm; d) in the Museum of Vienne (ibid., pl. 230, 4), almost the entire upper zone and part of the wide wavy band that divided the two scenes.

Two other sarcophagus fronts, the most complete and important, are Lateran 125 (ibid., pl. 230, 6) and that of the Cathedral of Tarragona (ibid., pl. 230, 3), a faithful copy of the first. From these two fragments the traditional iconography of the composition can be deduced: the lower scene represents the paralytic lying on the bed and surrounded by the sick, while Jesus approaches from the right; the upper one, separated from the underlying one by means of an undulating band, which is meant to signify the water contained in the pool of Bethesda, shows the sick again, the Lord in the gesture of giving his command, and the healed man walking away with his bed on his back. All these fragments, the only ones that have come down to us, are to be assigned to the 4th century, with a single exception: the fragment from Die, because of the hinted nimbus around the Lord's head, must be placed in the 5th century.

Also in the Museo Nazionale alle Terme in Rome there are two fragments of sarcophagi with the paralytic (R. Paribeni, La collezione cristiana del Museo nazionale romano, in N. bull. arch. crist., 21 [1915], pl. 4, no. 2). The miracle of the paralytic was then depicted in gold glasses (R. Garrucci, Storia dell'arte cristiana, Prato 1876-81, pl. 177, nos. 3 and 4) and is found on an ivory in the Louvre Museum (J. Marquet de Vasselot, Un ivoire chrétien du Musée du Louvre, in Monuments Piot, 28 [1925-26], pp. 175-86, and pl. 14).

In the New Testament mosaic cycle in S. Martino in caelo aureo, today S. Apollinare Nuovo, the scene of the paralytic is the most complete (M. van Berchem and J. Clouzot, Mosaïques chrétiennes, Geneva 1924, p. 131, fig. 156).