The
origin of the current Brotherhood of Jesus –Nazareno– is linked to two of the
first known Brotherhoods in our city, that of the Blood of Christ and that of
the Dulce y Santísimo Nombre de Jesús, whose antiquity can be traced back to
the first decades of the fifteenth century. With that mark of antiquity they
appear mentioned in the Description and Relation of the Villa de Cieza that, by
mandate of Felipe II, wrote the Bachelor Alonso Marín y Mena in the year 1579:
"On the twenty-fifth day of the month of March, year of the birth of our
redeemer Jesus Christ, one thousand five hundred and seventy-nine, the bachelor
Alonso Marín y Mena, aged forty, and Joan García, the elder, aged eighty, and
Martín Ruiz de Soler, the elder, aged seventy-one, residents and natives of
said town.... At the forty chapters they said: there are three Brotherhoods,
one of the said Apostle Saint Bartholomew, another of the Blood of Christ, and
another of the Sweet and Most Holy Name of Jesus”.
On
the one hand, and as revealed by the local journalist at the end of the s. XIX
and beginning of the XX Ramón María Capdevila, the Brotherhood of the Blood of
Christ made in 1655 "an Image with the Cross on its back for the Holy Week
processions" and received a license from the Bishop to build an altar in
the parish church.
But
in 1692, the Brotherhood of Jesus of Nazareno (and with it that of Nuestra
Señora de la Soledad) requested its establishment establishing its own
constitutions to "be able to solemnize the holy week of each of the
processions that are held with these holy Ynsinias on Thursdays and Friday” (it
will even take over the Paso El Santo Sepulcro when the Brotherhood of the
Blood disappears). Both Brotherhoods, Nazareno and Soledad, will remain, on the
other hand, closely linked to each other since then in their cults; In fact,
during the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, they jointly organized
the Novenario de Dolores, then the Novenario de Jesús y Dolores, equally paying
for the altar for the same, which began at the end of the 19th century and
ended in 1908 after its gilding by Pedro Valch.
With
that and other invocations the Brotherhood will appear named from that moment:
Brotherhood of Our Father Jesus, Brotherhood of Our Lord Father Jesus or
Brotherhood of Our Father Jesus Nazareno, and popularly Brotherhood of Jesus;
Thus, for example, in 1722 the testament granted by D. Luis Daroca Marín:
"and likewise the Brotherhood of Our Father Jesus assists me and
accompanies my body in accordance with its obligation and with the
consideration of having been his Big Brother".
On
the other hand, when the Brotherhood of Jesus was constituted, it is very
probable that it took over the purposes of the Brotherhood of the Sweet and
Most Holy Name of Jesus; In fact, still at the beginning of the 20th century,
the Brotherhood of Jesús Nazareno organized and financed the Function of the
Dulce Nombre de Jesús, of which there is evidence of its celebration as early
as 1671 and which appears in the relation of a Chapter Act of 1693: "This
town has as custom and devotion to attend different festivals and general processions
by decrees and boots so that at all times it is recorded that those that are
agreed upon were the Sweet Name of Jesus,...").
The
Brotherhood of Jesus -Nazareno- would therefore happen to be, among all those
currently existing and that have maintained their continuity over time, the
oldest passion-making Brotherhood in Cieza; This seems to be corroborated, on
the other hand, by a letter dated November 12, 1858 and preserved in the Parish
of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción de Cieza in which the Bishop of Cartagena, Don
Mariano Barrios Fernández, dictates regulations for compliance in the
Processional Parades: "... each Brotherhood is placed with its respective
effigy or Step in the place and place that corresponds to it, not subject to
its greater or lesser antiquity, but to whichever is natural to it, keeping the
historical order that each Step represents in the Passion of Our Lord Jesus
Christ.....However, and as an evident sign of what is acceptable to the right
of antiquity, we agree that the Elder Brother who for a time was of the
Brotherhood of Our Father Jesus, occupies in the indicated Processions the
place that corresponds to the antiquity of the Brotherhood whom it represents
with what keeps all rights safe" (curiously a photograph of the Paso de
Santa María Magdalena opening the Processional procession on the morning of Vi
Ernes Santo at the end of the 19th or beginning of the 20th century shows us in
the foreground, leading the Procession, D. Antonio Aguado Moxó, Big Brother of
the Brotherhood of Jesus).
The
Brotherhood had a marked penitential character: it was customary for the
Brothers to attend the Procession with their tunic, cross and rope, with bare
feet, anonymously, without speaking to each other, and carrying wax torches
(some reminiscence of that penitential character is still in force today: its
Third of Nazarenes parade with wooden crosses in the Procession of Penitent
Good Friday in the morning and until a few years ago it was not uncommon for
many of them to do so barefoot). The habit of asking for alms during the
Procession and at the doors of the churches during the visit to the Monuments
provided the Brotherhood with substantial income to which must be added the
many others derived from testamentary orders. Part of them were destined to
cover the expenses derived from the burials of the Brotherhoods; thus D.
Mariano Ruiz-Funes in his 1916 work Customary law and popular economy of the
province of Murcia recounted that “in Cieza there is a custom of announcing the
burials of the brothers of the Brotherhood of Our Father Jesus. A boy walks
down the street, silent, ringing a bell. The people who know the act, ask him
the name of the deceased, and he says it”.
Between
the end of the 18th century and the mid-19th century, the rise of the
Brotherhood was such that, in addition to its owner, it acquired or grouped
around it Pasos such as El Señor de la Columna (later completed with the Images
of two Sayones), La Oración del Huerto , Risen Jesus and, as previously stated,
The Holy Sepulcher (whose pallium was renewed by the Brotherhood in 1851), of
which it pays for its successive repairs and restorations as reflected in the
Accounts Book of the Brotherhood (1850-1963), and its The parade is headed by a
script that was renewed several times (1902 and 1923) before its disappearance
and a large horn on wheels, also integrating a group of bugles into the
procession. It is also probable that on the same dates the Brotherhood of the
Convocation of Jesus, the popular "Armaos" (today Tercio Romano del
Santo Sepulcro), whose activity during Easter it focuses essentially on the
representation of the Arrest, an Act that it itself organizes and pays for; and
it is even possible that the Paso de Jesús Nazareno - Arrested - ceased to
participate in it after the implementation of the Arrest, which was celebrated
with said Paso a day before, to do so again definitively after the Civil War;
this seems to emerge from some chronicles of Holy Week at the end of the 19th
century in which this Paso does not appear in the list of those who paraded in
the General Procession.
In
the second half of the 19th century, when Mr. Antonio Aguado Marín was the
older brother, who would later be succeeded by his son, Mr. Antonio Aguado Moxó
(who appears as such in the Constitution Act of the Procession Board in 1915),
the Brotherhood of Jesús Nazareno has a large number of Brotherhood members who
pay tarja, which allows it to hire music bands from other towns for the
Processions (this is the case of the Band of Abarán in 1855) and even has its
own office. But despite its importance and prominence, the Civil War caused its
disarticulation and at the end of it the Brotherhoods of La Oración del Huerto
and of Jesus Resurrected would emerge, as its affiliates in the first moments, but
completely independent in a short time.
After
its reorganization in the early years of the 1940s, the Brotherhood substituted
the traditional tailed tunics with trimmings and esparto cinches for the
current ones.
Two
of the sculptures of the Image of Jesus Nazareno have succeeded in time. The
graphic testimonies of the first, destroyed in the burning of Santos in 1936,
speak of an Image of undeniable affiliation to the Andalusian school, whose
authorship several scholars have tried to attribute to the School of the
Sevillian image maker Juan Martínez Montañés (1568-1648). , specifically Juan
Sánchez Cordobés, according to the studies of Professor Sánchez Moreno. The
Image was a sculptural piece of great merit and its singularity stood out above
the rest, drawing the attention of both the residents of the town and those who
came close to it, in the case of D. Manuel González Simancas, author of the
Monumental Catalog of Spain. , who visited Cieza in 1893, or who under the
initials E.B. he signed a newspaper article in which he stated: "The
effigy of Jesus is the best sculpture of these Processions". The
veneration that the people professed him must also have been very important,
since in the 19th century the printing and sale of his prints was very frequent,
and his participation in prayers.
The
second, the current one, was commissioned by D. Mariano Martínez Montiel from
the Valencian Ignacio Pinazo, who finished it for Holy Week in 1942. It is an
Image dressed in a rich purple velvet tunic that belonged to the previous Image
and which, disappeared during the civil war, it was recovered by chance years
later in El Palmar (Murcia). In the Procession of the Penitent, Good Friday
morning, the Image parades crowned with thorns (with a crown carved in silver from
the last century) and with a cross on her shoulder (restored in 2005 by
Bonifacio Pérez Ballesteros), which adapts to her articulated arms and hands
made in 1946 by the ciezano image maker Manuel Juan Carrillo Marco, and which
replaces the cross with which he paraded since the last century, unique for
having one arm shorter than the other. The Image was always preserved in the
Basilica of Our Lady of the Assumption, its chapel being located in the place
it occupies today between the years 1680 and 1710, during the remodeling and
expansion works of that one.
The
throne on which the Image of Jesús Nazareno processions, a substitute for
another made in 1861 by Antonio Torres and gilded three years later, is a work
of art in carved and gilded wood. Beneath it, in its inner part, is the
following inscription: "This Throne for the Image of Our Father Jesus of
this parish was paid for by the ladies Doña Piedad and Doña Amalia Angostos
Peña, waitresses of said Image. It was built in Murcia by the master carver D.
Pedro García Migal year of 1899 and was gilded in Cieza by the neighbor of the
same D. Ignacio Amoraga Latorre native of Murcia in the year 1900". The
throne was restored and gilded again in 1999 by the artist from Ciez, Bonifacio
Pérez Ballesteros, who also carved a set of rod tips for it in 2004.
The
Brotherhood also owns the Paso de Santa María Salomé made in 1953 by the
sculptor Octavio Vicent and whom he initially tried to make into the owner of a
filial Brotherhood of the same name, without this initiative coming to
fruition. It is a dressed Image that parades on Good Friday night in the
Procession of the Holy Burial, carrying in its hands the crown of thorns and
the nails of Christ, and in the Procession of the Risen Christ, Easter Sunday,
without the attributes of the Passion The throne on which it processes is the
work of Manuel Juan Carrillo Marco, who was commissioned in 1954, being
completely finished and parading for the first time two years later; like that
of the main Paso, it was restored and gilded again in 2001 in the workshops of
Bonifacio Pérez Ballesteros, who carved in wood and gilded a set of rod tips
for it in 2007, and also restored the Image of Santa María Salome a year later.
In
1996 the Brotherhood, under the mandate of Mr. Francisco López Yuste, acquired
a purple velvet banner embroidered in gold and precious stones for the
Religious Justinianas Madres de Dios of Murcia and two lanterns for the Third
of Nazarenes carved in silver in the Talleres de the Ramos Brothers from Seville;
and in 1998 Mari Carmen Lozar Vázquez made, in gold-embroidered purple velvet,
the new Galas for the throne of the titular Paso.
Under
the Presidency of its current one, Mr. Antonio Camacho Vázquez, the Brotherhood
added a medallion to its costumes in 2006 and three years later, in 2009,
incorporated the Coronation of Thorns Paso to the General Procession, and
replacing its Head , a sculptural group formed by the Image of the Lord -carved
in wood- and that of a Roman soldier -to dress- by the famous Cordovan sculptor
Francisco Romero Zafra who parades on a throne carved in wood with silver
details, whose realization began that same year in the Cordovan workshops of
the Higuera González Brothers. Likewise, Sisters of the Brotherhood made in
2010 a velvet dress and a brocade cloak for the Image of Santa María Salomé.