Upon all points, therefore, our claim concerning the graffito is an ill-founded one; and it cannot be considered evidence regarding either cross or crucifixion.
There thus being no opposing evidence of any weight, it is quite clear from the fact that as late as the third century after Christ we find a Christian Father who venerated the sign or figure of the cross denouncing it as a symbol, that no material representations of that sign or figure were recognised as Christian till an even later date. And such a conclusion is borne out by the striking fact that when Clement of Alexandria at the beginning of the third century made out a list of the symbols which Christians were permitted to use, he mentioned the Fish and the Dove but said nothing regarding the Cross.[11]
As to the sign or figure of the cross referred to by the Fathers of the second and third centuries, even so high an authority as the Dean of Canterbury admits, as we shall see in the next
chapter, that it was not "mainly" as reminding them of the death of Jesus that the Christians of the second and third centuries venerated it. If, therefore, not in the main, and, it would follow, not originally as a representation of the instrument of execution upon which Jesus died, what more likely than that the early Christians venerated the sign and figure of the cross as the age-old and widely accepted symbol of Life and of the Sun-God we know it to have been?
Anyway Minucius Felix may be said to stand alone in denouncing the symbol of the cross as non-Christian. And as even he expresses veneration for the figure of the cross, and must have approved of the sign of the cross in the initiatory rite of baptism, that denunciation evidently applied only to material representations of the cross.
Moreover the denunciation in question was clearly due to the fear that such objects might degenerate amongst Christians, as they afterwards did, into little better than idols. And if the sign or figure of the cross did not mainly remind the early Christians of the death of Jesus, it must have mainly reminded them of something else.
[CHAPTER III.]
THE EVIDENCE OF THE OTHER FATHERS.
The works which have come down to us from the Fathers who lived before the days of Constantine make up over ten thousand pages of closely printed matter; and the first point which strikes those who examine that mass of literature with a view to seeing what the Christians of the first three centuries thought and wrote concerning the execution of Jesus and the symbol of the cross, is that the execution of Jesus was hardly so much as mentioned by them, and no such thing as a representation of the instrument of execution once referred to.
Another fact worthy of special note is that, whether the Fathers wrote in Greek and used the word stauros, or wrote in Latin and translated that word as crux, they often seem to