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Cross Currents

Picked up some kind of bug and have been feeling (in the words of my 4yo daughter Treesie) “Gwoss.” Even with such minor discomfort, a Christian’s thoughts naturally turn to the cross. And it seems more and more likely that it’s always been that way. Consider the recent discoveries:

* In Syria, archeologists have found two cruciform cemeteries from the third century (here and here).

* In the Basque region, archeologists unearthed a town that had been covered by a third-century landslide; and in one home they found a crudely drawn crucifix, complete with corpus.

* Scholars have begun to reconsider the dating of some gems engraved with the crucifix, placing them, too, in the third century.

* Larry Hurtado has catalogued the occurrences of staurograms and other crypto-crosses in manuscripts as far back as the early second century. He says that the staurogram — usually an embellished rendering of the Greek letters tau or chi or the Coptic ankh — “obviously refers to the crucifixion/cross of Jesus, and so (along with the abundant textual evidence) reflects an importance given to Jesus’ crucifixion in Christian faith/piety, from at least as early as the late second century.”

All this, of course, runs counter to what I learned in school, and probably to what most people learn in school today. It has, for generations, been commonplace to say that there were no crosses before Constantine. The standard current textbook in Christian archeology states flatly that there was “no place in the third century for a crucified Christ, or a symbol of divine death.”

If cruciform figures appeared in digs, they were dismissed as random scratches, mere geometric ornamentation, or later “contaminations” in early strata. The argument followed a circular logic:

1. We know there were no crosses before 300 because we’ve never found any.

2. When we seem to find crosses, we know they’re late or not really crosses, because of course there WERE no crosses before 300.

3. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Hurtado points out that preachers and letter-writers in those early years often refer to the cross of Christ. Other scholars point to this very early anti-Christian graffito, which portrays a donkey hanging on a cross. It’s unlikely that bigots would seize upon that symbol unless it had already been widely used and cherished by the Christians.

My money’s with the vanguard in this controversy. It seems that when we suffer and we survey that wondrous cross, we’re very likely doing what the earliest Christians did.

5 thoughts on “Cross Currents

  1. You have stated, brilliantly and succinctly, what I think on this subject, and several others of scholarly import. Isn’t circular reasoning wonderful? You always end up concluding whatever you started out believing!

  2. Precisely. And how do the circulars deal with the documentary record? By imagining a class struggle in the early Church — painting proles versus rich preachers! As if it didn’t cost a small fortune to have frescos painted at your tomb!

  3. You and I are on the same page. BTW, hope you get to feeling better!

  4. when I was young I wondered why the infant church would adopt as its symbol a depiction of a common and horrible form of execution. After all St Paul told us the important proof of the Gospel is the Ressurection. A wise teacher of mine remnded me that ressurection would be a myth if Jesus was not in fact dead. As the early populations (not just Xtians) were familiar with this awful practice and knew for certain that if your were crucified, you died. Jesus was in fact dead therefore his testifiable reappearance must be ressurection from the dead. The ultimate proof. It would be surprising if the early Xtians were not just as keen to represent the cross.

  5. Its as Chesterton says in The Everlasting Man: “The other day a scientific summary of the state of a prehistoric tribe began…’They wore no clothes.’Not one reader in a hundred probably stopped to ask himself how we should come to know whether clothes had once been worn by people of whom everything has perished except a few chips of bone and stone. It was doubtless hoped that we should find a stone hat as well as a stone hatchet.” Because we haven’t found them, it doesn’t mean they didn’t exist.

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