Good Shepherd

The Good Shepherd (Greek: ποιμήν ο καλός, poimḗn o kalós) is a pericope found in John 10:1-21 in which Jesus is depicted as the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep. Similar imagery is used in Psalm 23. The Good Shepherd is also discussed in the other gospels, the Epistle to the Hebrews, the First Epistle of Peter and the Book of Revelation in references to Jesus not letting himself lose any of his sheep.

Early Christian art

The image of the Good Shepherd is the most common of the symbolic representations of Christ found in Early Christian art in the Catacombs of Rome, before Christian imagery could be made explicit. The form of the image showing a young man carrying a lamb round his neck was directly borrowed from the much older pagan kriophoros (see below) and in the case of portable statuettes like the most famous one now in the Pio Cristiano Museum, Vatican City (right), it is impossible to say whether the image was originally created with the intention of having a Christian significance. The image continued to be used in the centuries after Christianity was legalized in 313. Initially it was probably not understood as a portrait of Jesus, but a symbol like others used in Early Christian art, and in some cases may also have represented the Shepherd of Hermas, a popular Christian literary work of the 2nd century. However, by about the 5th century, the figure more often took on the appearance of the conventional depiction of Christ, as it had developed by this time, and was given a halo and rich robes, as on the apse mosaic in the church of Santi Cosma e Damiano in Rome, or at Ravenna (right). Images of the Good Shepherd often include a sheep on his shoulders, as in the Lukan version of the Parable of the Lost Sheep.

Good Shepherd (disambiguation)

Good Shepherd may refer to:

In Christianity:

Church of the Good Shepherd:

In Education:

Edmonton Catholic School District

Edmonton Catholic Separate School District No. 7 or the Edmonton Catholic School District (ECSD) is the Catholic school board in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

Size

In size the Edmonton Catholic School District has 35,546 students, 1,910 certificated staff, and 1,238 classified staff. ECSD has a total of 88 schools.

History

In 1888, three nuns from the order of the Faithful Companions of Jesus began teaching 23 Catholic students in the very first Catholic school in Edmonton. In August 1888, Edmonton Catholic parents applied to organize a separate school district for their children. In October of that same year three sisters from the Faithful Companions of Jesus sailed from France to open a convent and a school in Edmonton. They began teaching at the newly formed St. Joachim Catholic School on 2 November 1888. That first year the sisters taught 23 students. At that time compulsory schooling began at age seven and was complete by the age of 12. From then they have grown from one school with 23 students to 88 schools with more than 35,000 students.