[Vision2020] Christianity Without Crucifixion in the Early Church

[Nicholas Gier]

Greetings:

For those who did not see it, this was my Easter column for the Daily News.
It was obvious that the early Christians were embarrassed by the fact that
their savior died a horrible death, an execution reserved for criminals and
revolutionaries.

nfg


*Christianity without Crucifixion in the Early Church*


          In July 2002, Rita Brock, a Disciples of Christ minister, and
Rebecca Ann Parker, former president of Starr King Theological School, set
out on a Mediterranean journey to confirm a claim that had been made for
many years: Christian art did not show a crucified Christ until the 10th
Century.

Brock and Parker found Christ as a victorious king and as a good shepherd
with a live lamb on his shoulders, but they did not find any images of
Jesus dying on a cross. When Jesus is shown on the Cross in these early
centuries, he is very much alive and looking straight out into the world.

In the 6th Century St. Apollinare Nouvo Church, there are 26 panels
depicting the life of Christ. The tenth panel is Simon of Cyrene carrying a
cross, and the next and final panel shows the angel and the two women at
the tomb.  Curiously but significantly, Christ crucified is not represented.

Cyril of Jerusalem preached that the Eucharist represented a “spiritual
sacrifice of a bloodless offering.” At the moment that the bread and wine
were consecrated the Holy Spirit descended to earth and reopened the gates
of a New Eden and a new humanity was restored by Christ.

Many early churches were decorated in ways that made them an earthly
paradise—a heaven on earth.  St. Ambrose, the Italian bishop who baptized
St. Augustine in AD 387, believed that Paradise was not only present in
churches but also in the souls of all believers at baptism.

Before the 10th Century, the sacramental bread and wine represented a
heavenly transfer of Christ’s glorified body and blood, but after that
orthodoxy required that one believe that it was the crucified body and
blood. The New Testament, however, is clear that Jesus declared the wine
and bread as his blood and body *before* he was executed.

The first known crucifix was made by a Saxon artist who carved a life-size
dead Jesus from oak. Called the Gero Crucifix it was produced in AD 965 and
is displayed in the cathedral in Cologne, Germany.

The ancient Saxons worshipped trees and they were converted by
Charlemagne’s troops at the point of the sword.  As Parker and Brock state:
“The cross—once a sign of life—became for them a sign of terror. Pressed by
violence into Christian obedience, the Saxons produced art that bore the
marks of their baptism in blood.”

In a supreme and terrible irony the humiliated Saxons identified with the
crucified Jesus and they saw their own wounds—physically and spiritually—in
his tortured figure.

Church authorities imprisoned and tortured Saxon theologians, who continued
to believe the Eucharist contained the heavenly Christ rather than the new
view of the judging crucified Christ.

          Brock and Parker draw political conclusions from the replacement
of Churches of Paradise with Churches of Crucifixion: “Charlamagne fused
church and state in new ways, altered the long-standing Christian
prohibition against the shedding of human blood, and made Christianity a
colonizing tool.  He aligned the Cross with military victory and laid the
axe to the root of sacred trees.”

Over the next hundred years pogroms against Jews increased
dramatically.  Significantly,
the Christian leaders who did focus on the Crucifixion, such as Melito of
Sardis, were also those who called the Jews “Christ killers.” As Brock and
Parker state: “Melito’s sermons show how easily a focus on the death of
Jesus spilled over into the vilification of Jews.”

Under the banner of a huge red cross the Crusades sent military expeditions
against “infidels” in Asia Minor, killing many innocents on the way. In the
centuries to come it would witches and heretics who would die, and
Christian violence continued in the great European empires of the 16-19th
Centuries.

Nick Gier taught religion and philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31
years.

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they
shall never sit in.

-Greek proverb

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.
Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance
from another. This immaturity is self- imposed when its cause lies not in
lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without
guidance from another. Sapere Aude! ‘Have courage to use your own
understand-ing!—that is the motto of enlightenment.

--Immanuel Kant
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