Sebald Beham’s Moses and Aaron: On Godly Law and Charismatic Authority in the Radical Reformation

Dated 1526, Sebald Beham's little engraving of Moses and Aaron presents bulky half-length figures seated together on a mountainside with an open codex on their laps, while the tablets of the law remain propped against a wall, uninscribed and ignored. A study in ambiguity, the engraving enfolds contrary interpretations: are these Old Testament heroes, guarantors of the "Hebrew Truth" in Scripture, prophets touched by the Holy Spirit? Or are they caricatured "Jewish" representatives of the Old Covenent, burdened by the law whose spiritual meaning they can never truly grasp? Only one year before Beham asked his learned audience, through a picture, how Christians should regard Moses, Luther published his sermon "How Christians Should Regard Moses," ostensibly meant to distinguish voluntary acceptance of the commandments from the false belief that such laws were binding on Christians. But the sermon also takes polemical aim at the "factious spirits," the evangelical radicals (Schwärmer) who sought to supplant the Gospel with the Law of Moses; who took the iconoclasm of "Moses" literally; and who cited Israel's "election" to declare war upon the godless. This paper proposes a reading of Beham's engraving as a liberating, but politically muted, response to the straitjacket Luther's "two kingdoms" doctrine placed upon Christian valuations of Mosaic Law. Beham may also have been reflecting on his own experiences as an religious exile. In early February 1525, Sebald and his brother Barthel were sentenced to banishment for ten months for blasphemy, and henceforth branded -- by none other than Luther himself -- "godless painters" (gottlosen Maler). Might the image of the exiled Moses and Aaron, suspended between the wastes of Egypt and the bounty of Canaan, have embedded a self-reference to the painters' embattled situation, at home in neither of Luther's "Two Kingdoms" and unable to countenance their separation?