Nanner
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Pre-Christian cross symbols (from online resource).
The cross-shaped sign, represented in its simplest form by a crossing of two lines at right angles, greatly antedates, in both East and West, the introduction of Christianity. It goes back to a very remote period of human civilization. It is supposed to have been used not just for its ornamental value, but also with religious significance.
Some have sought to attach to the widespread use of this sign, in particular in its swastika form, a real ethnographic importance. It may have represented the apparatus used in kindling fire, and thus as the symbol of sacred fire (Burnouf, La science des religions) or as a symbol of the sun, denoting its daily rotation. It has also been interpreted as the mystic representation of lightning or of the god of the tempest, and even the emblem of the Aryan pantheon and the primitive Aryan civilization.
Another symbol that has been connected with the cross is the ansated cross (ankh or crux ansata) of the ancient Egyptians, which often appears as a symbolic sign in the hands of the goddess Sekhet, and appears as a hieroglyphic sign of life or of the living.
In later times the Egyptian Christians (Copts), attracted by its form, and perhaps by its symbolism, adopted it as the emblem of the cross (Gayet, "Les monuments coptes du Musée de Boulaq" in "Mémoires de le mission française du Caire", VIII, fasc. III, 1889, p. 18, pl. XXXI–XXXII & LXX–LXXI).
In the Bronze Age we meet in different parts of Europe a more accurate representation of the cross, as conceived in Christian art today, and in this shape it was soon widely diffused. This more precise characterization coincides with a corresponding general change in customs and beliefs. The cross is now met with, in various forms, on many objects: fibulas, cinctures, earthenware fragments, and on the bottom of drinking vessels. De Mortillet is of opinion that such use of the sign was not merely ornamental, but rather a symbol of consecration, especially in the case of objects pertaining to burial. In the proto-Etruscan cemetery of Golasecca every tomb has a vase with a cross engraved on it. True crosses of more or less artistic design have been found in Tiryns, at Mycenæ, in Crete, and on a fibula from Vulci.
Of these forms, certain writers, accept for the gibbet on which Jesus died only the form indicated by the original and primary meaning of the Greek term stauros (σταυρός), which, along with "xylon" (ξύλον), is used of it in the New Testament.
(Lets not forget that these were the original scriptures and not that which we are accustomed to reading today - our KJV Bible and other writing are "translations" not the original scripts and I know thats hard to always remember, but yet it is fact
The word "σταυρός" originates from the same root as the verb στημι and means primarily but not solely an upright stake or beam. The Greek-English Lexicon of Liddell and Scott, the major such reference work on the Greek language from Homeric to early Christian times reports that the meaning of the word in the early Homeric form of Greek, possibly of the 8th to 6th century B.C., and also in the writings of the 5th-century B.C. writers Herodotus and Thucydides and the early-4th century B.C. Xenophon, is that of a stake; but that in the writings of the first-century B.C. Diodorus Siculus and in later writers, such as Plutarch and Lucian, it refers also to a cross.
The word "ξύλον"was used of wooden objects as varied as firewood, a cudgel, a wooden collar or stocks for a prisoner, a gallows, a stake, a table, a wooden spoon, and a live tree.
Much the same can be said of the Latin word crux, which was used by writers from the second century onward to refer to that on which Jesus died.
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WEARS CROSS (Read 4650 times)
