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I believe that Brock & Parker’s point is that there are no manned crucifixes in Christian art until Charlemange; that is, crosses with people on them. There are empty crosses, which signify resurrection and victory over death.

Great post, Michael.

The fish (ichthus)seems to have been the more dominant Christian symbol in the first 3 centuries. I suppose it allowed Christians to be a bit more circumspect in the face of persecution.

If I’m not mistaken, I believe crucifixion was practiced in the Roman empire up until the 4th century, the practice being abolished either by Constantine himself or by one of his successors. I suppose it’s a little easier to embrace the cross as a symbol for one’s faith when one no longer has to worry about winding up on one.

I also wonder how much the alleged discovery of the cross of Christ during the excavation for the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in 335 moved Christians of that period to begin to incorporate it in their art. The practice of veneration of relics of the cross seems to have taken root pretty quickly after that.

While usage of the cross in early Christian art may have been infrequent out of a fear of it being used as incriminating evidence against them, the more ephemeral act of making the sign of the cross on the forehead was already a customary practice in private devotion by the 2nd century. By the 4th century it had come into wider use in the liturgy.

Hard to explain in short form. They use it to show that crucifix centered Christianity was imposed on the Northern Europeans, but the older religons (sacred trees etc) persisted.

And another quote from the good old “Catholic Encyclopaedia”:

“It is probable that the custom of placing a crucifix on the altar did not commence long before the sixth century. Benedict XIV (De Sacrificio Missae, P. I, 19) holds that this custom comes down from the time of the Apostles. However, the earliest documentary evidence of placing a cross on the altar is canon III of the Council of Tours, held in 567: “Ut corpus Domini in Altari, non in armario, sed sub crucis titulo componatur”. Mariano Armellini (Lezioni di Archeologia Sacra) tells us that the early Christians were not accustomed to publicly expose the cross for fear of scandalizing the weak, and subjecting it to the insults of the pagans, but in its stead used symbols, e.g. an anchor, a trident, etc. A simple cross, without the figure of Christ, was fixed on the top of the ciboria which covered the altars.”

So if an altar crucifix was part of the rubrics from the 6th century on, that sort of contradicts “”The pithy opening paragraph of Saving Paradise sets up its startling premise: ‘It took Jesus a thousand years to die. Images of his corpse did not appear in churches until the tenth century’”, doesn’t it?

I find this very curious for two reasons:

1. The Eucharist is the body of Christ both from the cruxifiction and from the resurection. His body did not change John 20:27 (KJV)

“Then saith He to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.”

Trying to separate one from the other is like separating God the Son from God the Father or some kind of Pseudo-arian view of the Eucharist.

2. The words from the Lord him self rebuff her argument. Luke 22:19 (NAB)

Then he took the bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which will be given for you; do this in memory of me.”

The body “… my body, which will be given for you…” Christ’s words are rather blunt as to what the Eucharist is.

I am familiar with many churches that do opt for replacing the Crucifix with as I call it “super-jesus” which is one in which Jesus actualy looks like, well, superman leaping in to the air.

The first time that I saw it, and thankfuly it has only been once, I was a bit angry. People tend to forget things and as a person that separated him self from the Church as a teen and a young adult I know I forgot much.

However as I grew older the image of the crucifix never left my mind it is one of the most powerful images that I recolect from my early childhood. Even as a secularist and somewhat agnostic that I was, I knew what the image said.

I can not tell you the actual reason why the Crucifix was not popular until the beggining of the tenth century but if I was to venture a guess, I would say that in largely illiterate world which was in the middle of the dark ages when there was lots of suffering and little hope. The depiction of the sacrifice on the cross would of been something people could inmediatly understand.

Mmmm – post-Charlemagne, so we’re talking about 8th century onwards.

Except that, for example, the “Dream of the Rood” is dated to about 7th century, and Irish high crosses date from between 7th to 12th centuries, so this element was making its way into popular culture both pre- and post-Charlemagne.

So we’ve got a division between crosses and then (presumably) later crucifixes, i.e. between those crosses with and without the corpus. The development of representations of the Crucifixion and the Passion is complicated and intriguing, but I again would disagree that ’simple’ crosses are a distinct type from ‘crucifixes with the body’, in that I don’t think you can say that “putting the crucifix into the worship space” is indicative of a death-cult approach to religion, suddenly swerving away from the ‘paradisal’ imagery beforehand.