The Cross before Constantine: The Early Life of a Christian Symbol

Description

This book brings together, for the first time, the relevant material evidence demonstrating Christian use of the cross prior to Constantine. Bruce Longenecker upends a longstanding consensus that the cross was not a Christian symbol until Constantine appropriated it to consolidate his power in the fourth century. Longenecker presents a wide variety of artifacts from across the Mediterranean basin that testify to the use of the cross as a visual symbol by some pre-Constantinian Christians. Those artifacts interlock with literary witnesses from the same period to provide a consistent and robust portrait of the cross as a pre-Constantinian symbol of Christian devotion. The material record of the pre-Constantinian period illustrates that Constantine did not invent the cross as a symbol of Christian faith; for an impressive number of Christians before Constantine's reign, the cross served as a visual symbol of commitment to a living deity in a dangerous world. Preliminaries ix 1. The Cross in Its Place 1 2. The Cross and Non-Christian Society 21 3. The Cross in a Jewish Cradle 49 4. The Cross in Textual Images 61 5. The Cross in the Material Record 73 6. The Cross in a Pompeii Bakery 121 7. The Cross in the Literary Record 149 8. The Cross and Its Advocates 163 9. A Very Short Conclusion 185 Bibliography 189 Index of Subjects 207 Index of Modern Authors 215 Index of Ancient Sources 221 Index of Locations 231