Codex Aqvilarensis 37/2021, pp. 537-554, ISSN 0214-896X, eISSN 2386-6454 ART, RELIGION AND NARRATIVE: A COMPARISON OF EARLY CHRISTIAN AND EARLY BUDDHIST INDIAN ART ARTE, RELIGIÓN Y NARRACIÓN. UNA COMPARACIÓN DEL PRIMER ARTE CRISTIANO Y EL TEMPRANO ARTE INDIO BUDISTA JA ELSNER University of Oxford / University of Chicago jas.elsner@ccc.ox.ac.uk ORCID ID: 0000-0001-8378-4880 AbstrAct This article, in honour of one of the greatest living scholars of early Christian Medieval art, attempts to use a comparative method to examine the development and uses of narrative in the arts of early Christianity and early Buddhism – both new religious interventions in their respective landscapes, which conducted major revisions of their visual and dogmatic worlds, and employed visual imagery in relation to Scripture. In particular I compare images that conflate different times from the arts of each religion – a typological juxtaposition of Old and New Testaments in a fourth century Roman sarcophagus found in southern France and the thematic juxtaposition of a scene from the Buddha’s final life with ones from his earlier in- carnations as recounted in the Jātaka tales on a probably third-century CE frieze from a stūpa in southern India. At stake art historically are the ways that images supplied commentarial competition to the forms of commentary and exegesis offered by texts in both religions and cultural contexts, through parallels of visual narrativity implied by the themes juxtaposed. Keywords: Early Christian art, Sarcophagus, Typology, Narrative, Buddhist art, Stūpa, Amarāvatī, Jātaka, Nālāgiri, Comparison. resumen Este artículo, en honor de uno de los mayores estudiosos vivos del arte medieval paleocris- tiano, intenta utilizar un método comparativo para examinar el desarrollo y los usos de la narrativa en las artes del cristianismo temprano y del budismo temprano, unas y otras nuevas intervenciones religiosas en sus respectivos paisajes. Ambos llevaron a cabo importantes re- visiones de sus mundos visuales y dogmáticos, y emplearon imágenes visuales en relación [Recepción del artículo: 03/05/2021] [Aceptación del artículo revisado: 05/07/2021]