Quotes from Robin M Jensen

By the mid to late fourth century, a cross surmounted by a christogram began to signify Christ's conquest of death, a triumph that would be ultimately shared by his faithful followers. Before long, the christogram was a popular decoration for a Christian tomb, supplanting the praying figure and the dove as a symbol of hope.1 In time, the christogram itself was displaced as the cross emerged to become the primary symbol of the Christian faith.

What Constantine ordered, however, was not a cross-shaped object but rather a long, gilded spear, bisected by a horizontal bar, topped with a golden and gemmed wreath that surrounded two letters, chi and rho: the first two letters of Christos. Like Lactantius, Eusebius explains that this looked like the intersection of the Latin letters X and P. In addition, a banner hung from the bar, embroidered with portraits of the emperor with his two sons.

Christian sources, both literary and iconographic, do in fact draw parallels between Orpheus and Christ, just as Jewish art draws them between Orpheus and David. These, however, normally refer to the story of Orpheus as a musician whose playing could tame wild animals. Early Christian texts and images then adapted this theme to describe Christ as a "new Orpheus" who could tame human souls.

However one evaluates the character of Constantine's conversion, he clearly believed that the Christian God was his ally. Thus the cross, or its counterpart, the christogram, became a trophy of victory, not only over demonic foes but also over ordinary human ones.

Nevertheless, some surviving evidence indicates that Constantine himself was originally devoted to Apollo, supported by the fact that the god Sol Invictus continued to show up on the reverse types of Constantinian coinage until the mid-320s

Augustine explains that in the Manichaean system, this cross of light represents fragments of the divine nature that have become entrapped in human bodies or elsewhere in creation, particularly in vegetables or fruits. These fragments then feel acute pain when they are cut, cooked, chewed, or digested

Jesus's crucifixion was an inescapable fact and, for Paul, it must therefore have a profound meaning. Thus the crucifixion became, for Paul, the primary proof of Jesus as Son of God and the central event in salvation history, and he came to be regarded, over time, as arguably the most vehement and eloquent expositor of the crucifixion's significance.

THE IMAGE OF Christ crucified is so ubiquitous in Christian art that it seems impossible that it was not there from the first. Yet, art historians have been unable to identify an unambiguously Christian crucifix before the fourth or early fifth century, and only a few examples before the sixth century. Though crosses and episodes from the events of Christ's Passion began to appear on Christian artifacts by the mid-fourth century, none ever depicted Christ on the cross.

Added to the problem of establishing their dates, it is difficult to know if workshops fabricated these gems exclusively for Christian patrons or whether they could have been owned or used by anyone—Christian or otherwise—as magical amulets. The existence of two other crucifixion gems, one of them a possible forgery, supports the latter possibility.

Rather, these early believers favored devices like doves, anchors, or fish, which presumably alluded to the cross without actually depicting it. For example, in an introduction to living as a Christian, Clement of Alexandria enumerated the figures that believers might appropriately inscribe on their signet rings. While he approved of doves, fish, ships, lyres, and anchors, his instructions specifically omitted a cross.72