Christian symbols

About christian symbols

Christians marked themselves with the cross long before they drew it. Tertullian describes believers tracing the sign on their foreheads through every ordinary action of the day, yet the cross is rare on Christian monuments of the first four centuries: the Catholic Encyclopedia counts not more than a score of examples. Clement of Alexandria suggested other images for a Christian's seal instead, among them a Dove, a fish, a ship and an anchor.

The cross most often shown on Christian monuments of every age is the Latin cross, with its crossbar set high. The equal-armed Greek cross was adopted by the East, and Russian Orthodox churches use a cross with three bars, for the title board, the arms and the footrest.

From the sign to the crucifix

Early Christians did not picture the Crucifixion. Walter Lowrie, in Monuments of the Early Church (1901), explains that the cross was still in use, like the gallows, for punishing criminals, and that the Crucifixion was never represented before the fifth century. Others did draw it: an old graffito scratched in plaster shows a man with an ass's head fastened to a cross, beside the words "Alexamenos adores God". James Grout's Encyclopaedia Romana points to an older exception, a magical amulet from the eastern Mediterranean, dated to the late second or early third century, carved with a crucified Jesus. When the Crucifixion did appear, Lowrie writes, it showed Christ alive, as it did until the twelfth century.

A crucifix or an empty cross

At Mass, the Catholic Church calls for a cross with the figure of Christ crucified upon it, on or near the altar, where the congregation can see it. Protestants differ among themselves. On the United Methodist Church's website, the Rev. Carol Cavin-Dillon explains the empty cross by the resurrection: Christ was raised, "and the cross is empty now." The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod reads it differently. In its answer on crucifixes, it says the crucifix was a regular feature of Lutheran worship, that the empty cross on Lutheran altars came from non-Lutheran sources, and that the empty cross is not a symbol of the resurrection: it and the crucifix both stand for the death of Christ.

Crosses of the Eastern churches

Three churches of the East each draw the cross in their own way. Egypt’s Copts receive a cross at baptism, and many have a small cross tattooed on the wrist, a tradition the Coptic Orthodox Diocese of Los Angeles traces to the earliest days of persecution; in Egypt’s first Christian centuries the ankh itself served as a cross, the crux ansata, a form the V&A calls peculiar to Egypt. The Armenian cross blossoms. On the khachkars, Armenia’s carved cross-stones, UNESCO describes the cross resting on a sun or wheel of eternity among plant ornament, and the Walters Art Museum reads it as the tree of life. In Ethiopia, the Metropolitan Museum of Art writes, the cross is an emblem of triumph rather than of death, and images of Christ are rare on the openwork Ethiopian crosses carried on staffs by the clergy.