This may or may not qualify as a Great Debate, but it’s the recent postings here that have prompted me to post something I have always wondered about. Perhaps it’s more likely to inspire a Dull-and-Meandering Debate, but here goes:
It’s the Christian cross. Many Christians wear a cross as jewelry; crosses adorn church steeples; even holiday confectionaries are designed as crosses, as others have recently pointed out. The cross has come to represent the death (and resurrection, depending on your faith) of Jesus Christ.
Every so often, I’ll see a cross, and it will occur to me that the symbol folks are wearing/building/featuring on bumper stickers is actually an instrument of death. What I mean is, had our ancestors of Biblical times preferred an alternate form of condemning ‘criminals’, such as hanging, we’d see thousands of people wearing tiny gold nooses on chains around their necks. Had His enemies clubbed Him to death, followers of Jesus would be erecting large clubs atop their steeples; confectionary manufacturers would be flogging chocolate clubs at Easter…you get my drift.
I poked around a bit and found this:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_symb.htm
The use of the cross as a symbol was condemned by at least one church father of the 3rd century CE because of its Pagan origins. The first appearance of a cross in Christian art is on a Vatican sarcophagus from the mid-5th Century. 11 It was a Greek cross with equal-length arms. Jesus’ body was not shown. The first crucifixion scenes didn’t appear in Christian art until the 7th century CE. The original cross symbol was in the form of a Tau Cross. It was so named because it looked like the letter “tau”, or our letter “T”. One author speculates that the Church may have copied the symbol from the Pagan Druids who made crosses in this form to represent the Thau (god). 7 They joined two limbs from oak trees. The Tau cross became associated with St. Philip who was allegedly crucified on such a cross in Phrygia. May Day, a major Druidic seasonal day of celebration, became St. Philip’s Day. Later in Christian history, the Tau Cross became the Roman Cross that we are familiar with today.
Which really does not satisfy my curiosity. It simply seems strange to sport a symbol of death in such a manner, and I can’t fathom any reason for originally doing so. What would inspire someone to conceive of such a thing?
Any thoughts?
