During the
reign of Constantine, first Roman Emperor to profess the Christian faith, his
mother Helena went to Israel and there undertook to find the places especially
significant to Christians. (She was helped in this by the fact that in their
destructions around 135, the Romans had built pagan shrines over many of these
sites.) Having located, close together, what she believed to be the sites of
the Crucifixion and of the Burial (at locations that modern archaeologists
think may be correct), she then had built over them the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre, which was dedicated on 14 September 335. It has become a day for
recognizing the Cross (in a festal atmosphere that would be inappropriate on
Good Friday) as a symbol of triumph, as a sign of Christ's victory over death,
and a reminder of His promise, "And when I am lifted up, I will draw all
men unto me." (John 12:32)
Tertullian, in
his De Corona (3:2), written around AD 211, says that
Christians seldom do anything significant without making the sign of the cross.
Certainly by his time the practice was well established. Justin Martyr, in chapters 55 and 60 of his First
Apology (Defence of the Christian Faith, addressed to the Emperor
Antoninus Pius and therefore written between 148 and 155 AD), refers to the
cross as a standard Christian symbol, but not explicitly to tracing the sign of
the cross as a devotional gesture. In the ruins of Pompeii (destroyed 79 AD),
there is a room with an altar-like structure against one wall, and over the
altar the appearance of the plaster shows that a cross-shaped object had been
nailed to the wall, and forcibly pulled loose, apparently shortly before the
volcano buried the city. It is suggested that this house may have belonged to a
Christian family, and that they took the cross and other objects of value to
them when they fled the city. This is not the only possible explanation, but I
do not know of a likelier one.
The Christian
custom of tracing the sign of the cross on persons and things as a sign of
blessing is very old. Some think that it goes back to the very origins of
Christianity and earlier. In Ezekiel 9, we read that Ezekiel had a vision of
the throne-room of God, in which an angel was sent to go through Jerusalem and
put a mark on the foreheads of the faithful few who mourned for the sins of the
city. Afterwards, other angels were sent through the city to destroy all those
who had not the mark. We find similar visionary material in Revelation 7:2-4;
9:4; 14:1, where the mark on the forehead again protects the faithful few in
the day of wrath, and it is said to be the name of the Lamb and of His Father.
Now, the Hebrew word used for "mark" in Ezekiel is TAU, which is the
also the name of the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet (the ancestor of the
Greek letter TAU and our letter T), and it refers to a mark like an X or a +,
two short lines crossing at right angles. When the Essenes (the Dead Sea
Scrolls people) received converts into their community, they baptized them and
then signed them on their foreheads with a TAU, in token that they were part of
the faithful remnant who mourned the sins of Israel, and that they would be spared
in the day of God's wrath. It seems probable that John the Baptist and his
followers were in some measure influenced by the Essenes, and they had
certainly read Ezekiel. Accordingly, the tracing of a TAU on the forehead may
have been a part of John's method of baptism, and may have been adopted by the
earliest Christians. (We remember that some of the Twelve disciples had
previously been disciples of John the Baptist -- see John 1:35-37,40.) Very
possibly they began by tracing the TAU without asking what it meant -- it was
simply a mark, the mark mentioned by Ezekiel. Later, they may have identified
it with the Name of God. The Essenes, in some of their documents, used four
dots in place of the four letters of the Name of God, and sometimes arranged them
in a square. It would be easy to interpret the four ends of the TAU as
representing the four letters of the Name of God. Later, Christians, especially
Greek-speaking Christians, might interpret the sign as a CHI, an X-shaped
letter, the first letter of the word XPICTOC, or Christos, meaning the
Annointed One, the Messiah, the Christ. Again, Christians might understand it
to be the sign of the Cross of Christ, and it is this interpretation that has
prevailed. Today, in many Christian churches, when someone is baptized, the
baptizer afterwards traces the sign of the cross on the forehead of the newly
baptized person. Often, some of the water that has been used for baptism is
saved and placed in small bowls near the entrance to the church. Worshippers
entering the church touch the surface of the water and then cross themselves as
a way of reaffirming their baptismal covenant. (A few years ago, a Jewish
friend asked me, "May I go to the Easter Midnight service with you?"
I said: "Certainly, if you like. However, I must warn you that there will
be baptisms, and that afterwards the priest will take a bowl of baptismal water
and a sprig of hyssop, and walk up and down the aisle sprinkling the
congregation with the water, and if a single drop touches you, you will instantly
turn into a goy." He answered, "I will bring an umbrella and open it
at the appropriate time.") As we have seen, the practice of using the sign
of the cross in connection with Baptism may very well go back to the Apostles
themselves, and back before them into their Essene and other Jewish roots,
having its origin in the vision of Ezekiel. In fact, the concept may go back
further than that. We read in Genesis 4 that, when Cain had killed his brother
and was sent into exile, God set a mark (TAU) on Cain, so that no one would
slay him. Thus, from the start, the Sign of the Cross has been the protection
of the penitent and justified sinner.
What is the
significance of the sign of the cross? Well, in the first place, we often place
our initials or other personal mark on something to show that it belongs to us.
The Cross is the personal mark of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and we mark it on
ourselves as a sign that we belong to Him, just as in the book of Revelation,
as noted above, the servants of God are sealed or marked on their foreheads as
a sign that they are His.
Again, as one
preacher has said, if you were telling someone how to make a cross, you might
say (at least to an English speaker), "Draw an I and then cross it
out." As we make the sign, we first draw a vertical stroke, as if to say
to God, "Lord, here am I." Then we cancel it with a horizontal
stroke, as if to say, "Help me, Lord, to abandon my self-centeredness and
self-will, and to make you the center of my life instead. Fix all my attention
and all my desire on you, Lord, that I may forget my self, cancel my self,
abandon myself completely to your love and service."
The Shape of The Cross
Most of us
assume that we know what a cross looks like--that it is two beams of wood
fastened together at right angles. However, occasionally we meet someone who
claims otherwise. The counter-claim is likely to run like this:
"The churches will tell you that Jesus was put
to death on a cross, but that is a lie. He was nailed to a single upright beam,
with his hands directly over his head. The cross is a pagan symbol, actually a
letter T, or Tau, standing for the god Tammuz, who was worshipped by the
Canaanites. When you wear a cross, or make any religious use of a cross, you
are really worshipping Tammuz, whether you know it or not; and any church that
displays a cross, or sings hymns like "The Old Rugged Cross," or
"Beneath the Cross of Jesus", actually has its origins in
Tammuz-worship, and is an instrument of the Devil, and if you want to avoid the
wrath of God, you had better flee from all such churches and sign up with the
only organization in town that teaches Bible truth and is devoted to the pure
worship of God and not of idols like Tammuz, and here I am, ready to sign you
up."
It is therefore
of some interest to know what evidence we have about the shape of the device on
which Jesus was nailed up to die.
Minucius Felix,
a Christian who wrote a work called Octavius, probably a little
before 200 AD, says (chapter 29) that the shape of the cross is to be found everywhere
you look.
Indeed, we see the sign of the cross naturally
formed by a ship when it carries a full press of sail, or when it glides over
the sea with outspread oars.
Note that a
ship with a single vertical mast and a triangular sail is a modern device, used
for sailing upwind by repeated tacking. The ancients did not do this. They used
a ship with a square sail, and a vertical mast with a horizontal spar across it
to hold the top of the sail. Hence a cross shape. Note also, that it is not
necessary to agree with Minucius Felix that there is anything significant about
the many places that the shape of a cross can be seen. What matters is that he
knows that his readers will understand the shape of a cross to be two beams at
right angles, not just a vertical beam.
The Greek word
for the cross of Jesus, used many times in the New Testament and in early Greek
Christian writings, is STAUROS, and the corresponding verb is STAURIZO =
"crucify". Now, do any early writers use these words in a way that
would make it clear what shape they were talking about?
A pagan writer,
Lucian of Samosata, probable dates 120-180 AD, wrote a fantasy called The
Trial of The Vowels, in which the letter Tau is summoned before a panel of
judges, the seven vowels, and is accused of being a general mischief-maker. The
charges tend to be like this (to invent an example in English):
"Consider the word SUN. How good a thing the
sun is! It is the source of light and warmth, and is indispensable for life
itself. Along comes the letter T, and changes the word to STUN. What does it
mean to stun a man? It means "to knock him out cold--to ice him," or
to deprive him of warmth. It means "to punch his lights out," or to
deprive him of light. It means "to knock him dead," or to deprive him
of consciousness, and potentially of life itself. What a villain the letter T
is, to turn good into evil in this fashion. (Several other examples follow.)
And consider that evil thing, the STAUROS, instrument of torment and shame and
death. It takes its name from the letter TAU, because it is shaped like a TAU.
What an evil device, and what an evil letter it is named for!"
Before I
introduce my next writer, a digression is necessary. The Jews (beginning at
what time I do not know) often wrote numbers using the letters of their
alphabet, which has 22 letters. (Five of these letters developed distinct forms
when used at the ends of words, which gives us 27 letters in all.) If we use
the first nine letters for the numbers 1 to 9, the next nine for the numbers 10
to 90, and the last nine for the numbers 100 to 900, we can write anything from
1 to 999 in at most three characters. If we put a tick mark beside a letter to
multiply its value by 1000, then with repeated tick marks we can write any
positive whole number. (Note that not everyone used the five special forms.
Without them, you get as far as Tau=400 and then use Tau Qoph = 400+100=500,
Tau Resh = 400+200=600, etc.)
The Greeks used
a similar system, which you can find in the writings of Archimedes. Their
alphabet as we know it today has only 24 letters, but in an earlier version it
had 27 letters. To round it out, add an F (or Digamma) after the Epsilon, and a
Q (or Qoppa) after the Pi, and a Sampi (don't ask) at the end, and you have 27
letters. Use the first nine for 1 to 9, the middle nine for 10 to 90, the last
nine for 100 to 900, tick marks or underlinings for multiplying by 100, and you
are in business. If you omit the Hebrew letter Tsaddi, the remaining 21 letters
correspond exactly and in the correct order with the first 21 letters of the
27-letter Greek alphabet. (The Greeks got their alphabet from the Pheonicians,
whose language and alhabet were very similar to those of the Hebrews.)
With this
system in hand, some Jewish students of the Scriptures noted the numerical
values of various words or sentences, obtained by adding up the values of the
letters, and found symbolic significance in the results. This is called
GEMATRIA (from the Greek word for "geometry", here understood to mean
mathematics in general). Obviously, the possibilities are endless.
Some Christians
made similar use of the numerical values of Greek letters. Thus, since Jesus
was crucified on Friday, the sixth day of the week, 6 stands for evil and
death, as does its intensive form 666. But Jesus rose two days later, on what
may be called the eighth day of the week, and so 8 is the number of
resurrection, of renewal, of life restored and triumphant. It is thus no
accident that the letters in the name of IESOUS add up to 888.
Iota =
10
Eta = 8
Sigma = 200
Omicron = 70
Upsilon = 400
Sigma = 200
---
Total = 888
Now for a
particular example. In Genesis 14 we read that an invading army captured
Abraham's nephew Lot and some others, and that Abraham took a band of 318
warriors, followed the army and in a surprise attack rescued the prisoners.
Jewish scholars noted that 318 is written Cheth ("ch" as in
"Bach," please) Yod Shin. Now Cheth Yod spells "chai,"
which means "life." Shin is the first letter of "shalom,"
which means "peace, deliverance, wholeness, well-being." Thus
Abraham's group of warriors had 318 men in it, and was a source of life and
peace to the prisoners whom they rescued.
Sometime
between 70 (when the Temple was destroyed) and 135 (when Jerusalem was sacked
again and a pagan shrine built on the site of the Temple), a man called
Barnabas, or the pseudo-Barnabas, or Barnabas of Alexandria (not to be confused
with the companion of Paul mentioned in the book of Acts), wrote a book
called The Epistle of Barnabas, in which he points out that 318
written in Greek letters is Tau Iota Eta. Now, Tau clearly represents the
cross, and Iota Eta are the first two letters of the Name of Jesus. Hence, the
source of the life and peace that Jewish scholars had discovered in Abraham's
318 men is none other than the cross of Jesus.
Now, whether
you think that that is a remarkable insight, or think that Barnabas of
Alexandria is a complete air-head, is beside the point. The point is that he
would not have used this argument if he did not know, and expect his readers to
know, that a cross is shaped like a Tau.
Thus, we see that
among pagans and Christians alike in the second century of the Christian era, a
time when crucifixions were a common method of execution and everyone knew what
they looked like, there was a general understanding that if a man had been
crucified, it was probably on a vertical and a horizontal beam.
