Another example might be a print from 1654 of the Presentation of Christ in the temple. Rembrandt departs from what is recorded in Scripture to emphasize a particular theological point. He might even be generating new theological meanings with the visual medium. Usually you have Christ with his parents in the temple to be presented to the priests. The blind old prophet Simeon recognizes Christ as the Messiah and declares that he will suffer, but also that he is the light for the Gentiles and the salvation of the world. Another figure, Anna, also recognizes Christ. Normally these figures are the exception to the rest of the temple -- they recognize that this is the Messiah and the beginning of the unfolding of the Christian drama and the succession of Christianity.

Rembrandt emphasizes the contrast between those figures -- Christ, Simeon, and Anna -- and the temple priests, the hierarchy. Many other artists merged Simeon with the temple priests, so that he is dressed as a great ecclesiastic who takes the baby in his arms to announce that here is the Savior. With Rembrandt, there is a stark separation. You see Simeon kneeling with the child in his arms and with his back turned to Mary and Joseph, who are blackened out in impressions of this print. Simeon holds the baby up to a seated priest who is there with an attendant holding a giant crozier. The priest is reading a sacred text that falls open on his lap, and he looks at Simeon with an expression of actual interest. There's an unprecedented way that Rembrandt shows Christ's presentation to the temple hierarchy as the fulfillment of the prophecies of the Old Testament and the abolition of the ceremonial attachment to Mosaic law and its prescriptions in favor of the gospel -- the light to the Gentiles that Simeon preaches.

I'm not sure we can know what Rembrandt believed or ever retrieve that fully. What I see Rembrandt doing is investing tremendous importance in the potential of a Christian image to communicate a very particular theological meaning. Here is a Protestant artist who is obviously a visual thinker, able to convey meaning in visual form and moving away dramatically not only from what is reported in Scripture but also from what Protestant leadership had defined for the image -- its subordinate status in relation to the word. Here we have a sophisticated, ambitious artist fully aware of the canon for representing sacred subject matter, but in his hands it becomes a flexible set of tools with which to articulate theological meaning.

At times Rembrandt gives the Bible his meaning, and at other times it is a meaning he would have probably understood to be embedded within Scripture. But he understands that visual tradition allowed him to generate meaning by altering some of its motifs and conventions, to reimagine slightly what might have happened in order to emphasize a theology he would have understood as fully consistent with scriptural truth.