The Cross before Constantine
The Early Life of a Christian Symbol
- History & Biography
- Publisher: Augsburg Fortress
- Published: 2015
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Publisher's Description
This book brings together, for the first time, the relevant material evidence demonstrating Christian use of the cross prior to Constantine. Bruce W. 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.
Endorsements (3)
“This compelling study brings fresh insight to a thorny problem in the history of Christianity: the origins of the cross as a symbol in the early Church. Against the long-held view that cross-symbolism of any kind was avoided prior to the fourth century, Longenecker demonstrates not only the presence of the symbol in the material record of early Christianity, but its role as a symbol of power. Such a thorough and insightful analysis of both the material and literary evidence on this problem has been long overdue; and the findings demand attention from scholars and general readers alike.”
“Longenecker lays down an effective barrage on the insufficiently-examined position that the cross was not a Christian symbol prior to Constantine. There may well be objections to his proposals on some specific artifacts, but the sheer weight and diversity of the evidence that he gathers here cannot be denied by anyone ready to consider the matter fairly. With this richly documented work, we have the basis of a new and more evidence-based understanding of how the cross functioned in pre-Constantinian Christianity.”
“It has long been thought that the Christians only began to use the symbol of the cross when Constantine made it his imperial sign. In Bruce Longenecker's careful and wonderfully detailed survey, this is shown up as a modern myth. Though there is no uniform pattern, the cross was known and used as a Christian symbol from at least the 70s of the first century. This is revisionist historiography at its best.”
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