Early Christians were slow to adopt the cross as their emblem
The cross now stands for Christianity almost everywhere, yet for its first few centuries the faith used it sparingly. It recalled a deliberately agonising public execution, and opponents mocked believers as worshippers of the gallows. Only from the fourth century did the symbol spread widely, and the crucifix came later still.
Few images of the cross survive from second-century Christian art, and one explanation offered is discomfort with depicting an instrument of torture. Yet the sign was already linked to Christians by then. Writing in the early third century, Clement of Alexandria (dead by some point between 211 and 216) referred to it simply as the Lord's sign, and around 204 Tertullian described believers repeatedly tracing it on their foreheads while rejecting the jibe that they adored the gibbet. Very early New Testament manuscripts abbreviated the Greek word for cross with a compact monogram called the staurogram.
Possibly the oldest surviving picture of the crucifixion is a small jasper amulet from the second or early third century, now in the British Museum. It shows a bearded figure bound by the wrists to a T-shaped frame, with a Greek invocation on one face and later magical formulae on the other. Frederick Elworthy argued that a headless tau shape served as Christ's emblem for some centuries before the Latin form took over. The crucifix, bearing an image of the body, is not known before the 6th century AD.
The shapes vary widely. The Latin cross has a longer lower arm, the Greek cross has four equal ones, and heraldry added many elaborations. Practice varies too: Eastern and Oriental Orthodox believers usually receive a cross necklace at baptism and are expected to wear it constantly, and Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran and Anglican bishops put a small cross before their signatures. The Exaltation of the Cross on September 14 recalls the reported finding of the original cross by Helena, mother of Constantine, in 326.
Not every Christian group embraces it. Martin Luther kept the cross and crucifix, declaring that the cross alone was his theology, while some Reformed and Anglican writers of the 16th century condemned cross veneration as idolatry, a backlash that proved brief. Jehovah's Witnesses reject the symbol, holding that Jesus died on a single upright stake, and Latter-day Saints prefer imagery of the living Christ.
Source: Christian cross
