As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, baptism for infants arose early in the Christian Middle Ages, and signaled to all witnesses that the child had been admitted into the grace of God. “Team God” was obviously the side everyone wanted to be on, but it raised a problem — when Christians opposed each other, whose side was God on? In the Byzantine era, this issue played out with the filthy baptism of Emperor Constantine V (r. 741-775). Constantine became known as the “shit-named” or “Kopronymous,” because his enemies ended up on the victorious side of history. Constantine took sides against the veneration of icons (sacred images still very important in Orthodox Chriatianity). You can see a painting of an “iconoclast” rubbing out a holy image whose posture and actions parallel a bad Roman soldier maliciously stabbing Christ in the second image. Eventually, the “iconophiles” emerged as the winning side, and Constantine went down in the Byzantine chronicles as “a precursor of Antichrist.” (As Theophanes the historian termed him.) Back to the baptism story: A sign of Kopronymous’ monstrous nature from the beginning (so wrote the victorious iconophiles) was revealed during his baptism, because the infant defecated into his baptismal font. Historians today have a much higher appraisal of the emperor than did his enemies, who wanted to set for the record that Constantine V was not in God’s good graces. The first image is a 1,500 year old Byzantine baptismal font found this summer in the West Bank town of Bethlehem, just south of Jerusalem.
Source(s): Images: _Ancient Origins_ “1,500-year-old Concealed ‘Font within a Font’ Found at Jesus’ Birthplace,” Ed Whelan, 2 July 2019: Christian media center; Chludov Psalter, 9th century. Constantine V has an excellent write-up with references in Wikipedia.
