During Holy Week this year, I came across an explanation why the sign of the cross was not used by early Christians to symbolize their faith. They made use of lambs, a shepherd with a sheep on his shoulders, and often a fish. The Greek letters ΙΧΘΥΣ—iota, chi, theta, upsilon, and sigma—signifying the phrase “Jesus Christ Son of God Savior,” were associated sometimes with a simple drawing of a fish. There is an early third-century funeral monument in the Roman National Museum in Rome with two fish and the words in Greek, “fish of the living.”[1] Christians did not begin to use the cross as a symbol until after Constantine ended crucifixion in the Roman Empire. The gruesome cruelty of crucifixion needed to pass out of living memory for the cross to become more than a sign, not of suffering, but triumph.[2]
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