A winged man, a lion, an ox and an eagle walk into a church. It sounds like the start of a joke, but it is how Christian art has portrayed the four evangelists for centuries. The four creatures come from the visions of Ezekiel and the Book of Revelation, and Saint Jerome matched them to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. For a 4 apostles emoji, tradition has already done half the work.
The logic is lovely. Matthew opens with the genealogy of Jesus, so he gets the man. Mark begins with a voice crying in the wilderness: the lion, which Venice later put on every square. Luke starts in the Temple with the priest Zechariah: the ox, an animal of sacrifice. John soars from his very first line, “In the beginning was the Word”: the eagle. A note for purists: only Matthew and John were among the Twelve. Mark and Luke were second-generation disciples, close to Peter and Paul.
Your keyboard already has 🦁, 🐂 and 🦅, but they look like they wandered out of a nature documentary. What is missing is the point: the wings, the book held in their claws, and above all Matthew’s winged man, which 👼 cannot replace (that one is a baby). Draw all four as a set, or one symbol gathering them around an open book. Your design goes in the form just below.
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