Pagan Crosses and Cross of Holy Bible
- Matthew 8:18
[ The Cost of Following Jesus ] When Jesus saw the crowd around him, he gave orders to cross to the other side of the lake. - Matthew 9:1
[ Jesus Heals a Paralytic ] Jesus stepped into a boat, crossed over and came to his own town. - Matthew 10:38
and anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. - Matthew 14:34
When they had crossed over, they landed at Gennesaret. - Matthew 16:24
Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. - Matthew 27:32
[ The Crucifixion ] As they were going out, they met a man from Cyrene, named Simon, and they forced him to carry the cross. - Matthew 27:40
and saying, “You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! Come down from the cross, if you are the Son of God!” - Matthew 27:42
“He saved others,” they said, “but he can’t save himself! He’s the King of Israel! Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. - Mark 8:34
Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. - Mark 15:21
[ The Crucifixion ] A certain man from Cyrene, Simon, the father of Alexander and Rufus, was passing by on his way in from the country, and they forced him to carry the cross. - Mark 15:30
come down from the cross and save yourself!” - Mark 15:32
Let this Christ, this King of Israel, come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe.” Those crucified with him also heaped insults on him.Luke 9:23
Then he said to them all: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. - Luke 14:27
And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. - Luke 23:26
[ The Crucifixion ] As they led him away, they seized Simon from Cyrene, who was on his way in from the country, and put the cross on him and made him carry it behind Jesus. - John 19:17
[ The Crucifixion ] So the soldiers took charge of Jesus. Carrying his own cross, he went out to the place of the Skull (which in Aramaic is called Golgotha). - John 19:19
Pilate had a notice prepared and fastened to the cross. It read:|sc JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWS. - John 19:25
Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. - John 19:31
Now it was the day of Preparation, and the next day was to be a special Sabbath. Because the Jews did not want the bodies left on the crosses during the Sabbath, they asked Pilate to have the legs broken and the bodies taken down. - Acts 2:23
This man was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. - 1 Corinthians 1:17
For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel—not with words of human wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. - 1 Corinthians 1:18
[ Christ the Wisdom and Power of God ] For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. - Galatians 5:11
Brothers, if I am still preaching circumcision, why am I still being persecuted? In that case the offense of the cross has been abolished. - Galatians 6:12
Those who want to make a good impression outwardly are trying to compel you to be circumcised. The only reason they do this is to avoid being persecuted for the cross of Christ. - Galatians 6:14
May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. - Ephesians 2:16
and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. - Philippians 2:8
And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death— even death on a cross! - Philippians 3:18
For, as I have often told you before and now say again even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ. - Colossians 1:20
and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. - Colossians 2:14
having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross. - Colossians 2:15
And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. - Hebrews 12:2
Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
The above are the references to the Cross in the New Testament. There are no references to the cross specifically in the Old Testament.
There are all types of crosses and from all types of cultures that range from
The Cross
The following is more of a Jehovah’s Witness view. NOT MINE. I give my own view to follow and why it differs. Also, I have another part on the Cross of Christ on my blog here. It shows more WHY I stand firm on the Cross of the Bible and not against it.
A tradition of the Church which our fathers have inherited, was the adoption of the words “cross” and “crucify”.
These words are nowhere to be found in the Greek of the New Testament. These words are mistranslations, a “later rendering”, of the Greek words stauros and stauroo. Vine’s Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words says, “STAUROS denotes, primarily, an upright pole or stake … Both the noun and the verb stauroo, to fasten to a stake or pole, are originally to be distinguished from the ecclesiastical form of a two-beamed cross.
The shape of the latter had its origin in ancient Chaldea (Babylon), and was used as the symbol of the god Tammuz (being in the shape of the mystic Tau, the initial of his name) … By the middle of the 3rd century A.D. the churches had either departed from, or had travestied, certain doctrines of the Christian faith.
In order to increase the prestige of the apostate ecclesiastical system pagans were received into the churches apart from regeneration by faith, and were permitted largely to retain their pagan signs and symbols. Hence the Tau or T, in its most frequent form, with the cross piece lowered, was adopted .
Dr. Bullinger, in the Companion Bible, appx. 162, states, “crosses were used as symbols of the Babylonian Sun-god … It should be stated that Constantine was a Sun-god worshipper … The evidence is thus complete, that the Lord was put to death upon an upright stake, and not on two pieces of timber placed at any angle.”
Rev. Alexander Hislop, The Two Babylons, pp. 197-205, frankly calls the cross “this Pagan symbol … the Tau, the sign of the cross, the indisputable sign of Tammuz, the false Messiah … the mystic Tau of the Cladeans (Babylonians) and Egyptians – the true original form of the letter T the initial of the name of Tammuz … the Babylonian cross was the recognised emblem of Tammuz.”
In the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition, vol. 14, p. 273, we read, “In the Egyption churches the cross was a pagan symbol of life borrowed by the Christians and interpreted in the pagan manner.” Jacob Grimm, in his Deutsche Mythologie, says that the Teutonic (Germanic) tribes had their idol Thor, symbolised by a hammer, while the Roman Christians had their crux (cross). It was thus somewhat easier for the Teutons to accept the Roman Cross.
Greek dictionaries, lexicons and other study books also declare the primary meaning of stauros to be an upright pale, pole or stake. The secondary meaning of “cross” is admitted by them to be a “later” rendering. At least two of them do not even mention “cross”, and only render the meaning as “pole or stake”.
In spite of this strong evidence and proof that the word stauros should have been translated “stake”, and the verb stauroo to have been translated “impale”, almost all the common versions of the Scriptures persist with the Latin Vulgate’s crux (cross), a fallacious “later” rendering of the Greek stauros. Why then was the “cross” (crux) brought into the Faith?
Again, historical evidence points to Constantine as the one who had the major share in uniting Sun-worship and the Messianic Faith. Constantine’s famous vision of “the cross superimposed on the sun”, in the year 312, is usually cited. Writers, ignorant of the fact that the cross was not to be found in the New Testament Scriptures, put much emphasis on this vision as the onset of the so-called “conversion” of Constantine. But, unless Constantine had been misguided by the Gnostic Manichean half-Christians, who indeed used the cross in their hybrid religion, this vision of the cross superimposed on the sun could only be the same old cosmic religion, the astrological religion of Babylon. The fact remains: that which Constantine saw, is nowhere to be found in Scripture.
We read in the book of Johannes Geffcken, The Last Days of Greco-Roman Paganism, p.319, “that even after 314 A.D. the coins of Constantine show an even-armed cross as a symbol for the Sun-god.” Many scholars have doubted the “conversion” of Constantine because of the wicked deeds that he did afterwards, and because of the fact that he only requested to be baptized on his death-bed many years later, in the year 337. So, if the vision of the cross impressed him, and was used as a rallying symbol, it could not have been in honour of Yahushúa, because Constantine continued paying homage to the Sun-deity and to one of the Sun-deity’s symbols, the cross.
This continuation of Sun-worship by Constantine is of by his persistent use of images of the Sun-deity on his coins that were issued by him up to the year 323. Secondly, the fact of his motivation to issue his Sunday-keeping edict in the year 321, which was not done in honour of Yahushúa, but was done because of the “venerable day of the Sun”, as the edict read, is proof of this continued allegiance to Sol Invictus. We shall expand on this later.
Where did the cross come from, then? J.C. Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols, p. 45, aptly summarises it, “Cross – A universal symbol from the most remote times; it is the cosmic symbol par excellence.” Other authorities also call it a sun-symbol, a Babylonian sun-symbol, an astrological Babylonian-Assyrian and heathen run-symbol, also in the form of an encircled cross referred to as a “solar wheel”, and many other varieties of crosses. Also, “the cross represents the Tree of Life”, the age-old fertility symbol, combining the vertical male and horizontal female principles, especially in Egypt, either as an ordinary cross, or better known in the form of the crux ansata, the Egyptian ankh (sometimes called the Tau cross), which had been carried over into our modern-day symbol of the female, well known in biology.
As stated above, the indisputable sign of Tammuz, the mystic Tau of the Babylonians and Egyptians, was brought into the Church chiefly because of Constantine, and has since been adored with all the homage due only to the Most High.
The Protestants have for many years refrained from undue adoration of, or homage to the cross, especially in England at the time of the Puritans in the 16th – 17th centuries. But lately this un-Scriptural symbol has been increasingly accepted in Protestantism.
We have previously discussed “the weeping for Tammuz”, and the similarity between the Easter resurrection and the return or rising of Tammuz. Tammuz was the young incarnate Sun, the Sun-divinity incarnate. This same Sun-deity, known amongst the Babylonians as Tammuz, was identified with the Greek Adonis and with the Phoenician Adoni,96 all of them Sun-deities, being slain in winter, then being “wept for”, and their return being celebrated by a festivity in spring, while some had it in summer – according to the myths of pagan idolatry.
The evidence for its pagan origin is so convincing that The Catholic Encyclopedia admits that “the sign of the cross, represented in its simplest form by a crossing of two lines at right angles, greatly antedates, in both East and the West, the introduction of Christianity. It goes back to a very remote period of human civilization.” It then continues and revers to the Tau cross of the pagan Egyptians, “In later times the Egyptian Christians (Copts), attracted by its form, and perhaps by its symbolism, adopted it as the emblem of the cross.”98 Further proof of its pagan origin is the recorded evidence of the Vestal Virgins of pagan Rome having the cross hanging on a necklace,99 and the Egyptians doing it too, as early as the 15th century B.C.E.100 The Buddhists, and
Ancient Egyptian Rot-n-no priests. Note the crosses on the robe, and hanging from their necks. However, these crosses has a loop at the top to represent the sun over the cross.
Numerous other sects of India, also used the sign of the cross as a mark on their followers’ heads. “The cross thus widely worshipped, or regarded as a ‘sacred emblem’, was the unequivocal symbol of Bacchus, the Babylonian Messiah, for he was represented with a head-band covered with crosses. “It was also the symbol of Jupiter Foederis in Rome.103 Furthermore, we read of the cross on top of the temple of Serapis,104 the Sun-deity of Alexandria.
This is Tammuz, whom the Greeks called Bacchus, with the crosses on his head-band.
After Constantine had the “vision of the cross”, he and his army promoted another variety of the cross, the Chi-Rho or Labarum or sometimes . This has subsequently been explained as representing the first letters of the name Christos, the being the Greek for “Ch” and the being the Greek for “r”. but again, this emblem had a pagan origin. The identical symbols were found as inscriptions on a rock, dating from the year ca. 2 500 B.C., being interpreted as “a combination of two Sun-symbols”, as the Ax or Hammer-symbol of the Sun- or Sky-deity, and the or as the ancient symbol of the Sun, both of these signs having a sensual or fertility meaning as well.
Another proof of its pagan origin is the identical found on a coin of Ptolemeus III from the year 247 – 222 B.C. A well-known encyclopaedia describes the Labarum (Chi-Rho) as, “The labarum was also an emblem of the Chaldean (Babylonian) sky-god and in Christianity it was adopted…”Emperor Constantine adopted this Labarum as the imperial ensign and thereby succeeded in “uniting both divisions of his troops, pagans and Christians, in a common worship … according to Suicer the word (labarum) came into use in the reign of Hadrian, and was probably adopted from one of the nations conquered by the Romans. “It must be remembered that Hadrian reigned in the years 76 – 138, that he was a pagan emperor, worshipped the Sun-deity Serapis when he visited Alexandria, and was vehemently anti-Judaistic, being responsible for the final near-destruction of Jerusalem in the year 130.
Another dictionary relates the following about the Chi-Rho, “However, the symbol was in use long before Christianity, and X (Chi) probably stood for Great Fire or Sun,and P (Rho) probably stood for Pater or Patah (Father). The word labarum (labarum) yields everlasting Father Sun.”
NOW MY OWN PERSPECTIVE OF THE CROSS OF SCRIPTURES VS OTHER CROSSES CREATED TO COPY THE TRUE CROSS OF WHICH CHRISTIANS WEAR AND WHO LOVE CHRIST.
All the pagan crosses have a sign or symbol over them or under them or on them or in some way twisting or contorting the cross. Decorating or degradation of the cross is pagan. There are celtic crosses of which also have the circle and german nazi crosses that are twisted versions. There are the satanic upside down cross that blasphemes the one simple cross Christ died on for the sins of the world. These that add to or twist or turn or re-shape or decorate ARE paganized/blasphemized crosses.
The devil knows his time is short right? How does he know his time is short? For him to know this, he MUST somehow have an understanding of future events. Telepathic powers maybe or who knows, maybe he’s a remote viewer or able to move through time to see forward and past. If he knows his time is short. So, would he also not know that Christ was going to eventually die on a cross? Highly possible! And if he knew this was coming…what would be his best attack to make people reject that WHOLE EVENT? start making crosses of ALL types? Start trying to reproduce the event in other ways through the world before the true Messiah died and resurrected? Highly possible too. He has dominion over the earth until Christ returns again. So, here then he starts up the egyptians which were before Christ and what do they have? A CROSS. And then the Celts or druids with their cross and all the many other crosses that came before the one of Christ. Now, he’s flooded the market. After all, he knows his time is short. He knows what’s coming. He knows he’s got to do something to confuse people about the whole event of Christ’s death. I’m giving some food for thought.
So, is the cross of scriptures that satan turns upside down to blaspheme it…REALLY a BAD symbol? Or does it REALLY represent something of Christ’s followers? Would satan bother to turn it upside down if it wasn’t? Would scriptures that have lead MILLIONS over time…to Christ as their Messiah, be wrong in its words? Or would the bibles that claim the Savior was merely an angel? or something less than the one who is called Savior of the world? Why would so many occultists seek SO many times to blaspheme the cross with Christ on it? Look at those who have absolutely NO believe in Christ as being Savior and those who hate Christ…and not far from them will be their HATRED for the cross of Christ. I have seen people try to post Christ with breasts on the cross. I have seen pictures with people trying to post Christ with hookers next to him and snakes slithering on the bottom of the cross. I have seen frogs with their tongues out and eyes buldging out stuck up on crosses and mockery words of Christ on those pictures.
So, is the CROSS, the ONE cross of CHRIST….REALLY pagan? Or REALLY have power? And those who hate Christ and who hate the cross….know it and that’s why they blaspheme it? Ya NEVER see them blaspheme an image of Christ on a stake or stauros…correct? It’s ALWAYS A CROSS.
Sometimes you have to look to see the actions of the enemy of Christ to see what direction to look for answers to finding difficult questions. If the STAKE was REALLY the threat to evil…wouldn’t the devil be turning Christ upside down on a stake? I think so. And wouldn’t all those pictures I’ve seen of hate for Christ doing my research…also show Christ on a stake? I think so.
Well, you can be the judge. You have the choice to pick and choose and research and don’t have to take my word on this. but just food for thought. satanists HATE the CROSS! They don’t HATE the stauros. Do they?
Does the enemy of Christ know more than we think he knows? He knows his time is short doesn’t he. But the important thing is that Christ died for the sins of the world…not a wooden Cross. Right?
The blood of Christ is THE most important. But the NIV speaks of the power of the CROSS.
Example. Group of people are drinking and cursing at a job. They make video games and their boss is a millionaire. Its a small group and one day, they’re all smoking and working on their video game and suddenly their boss comes in laying up on a cross carried by four strippers. He’s drunk and everyone laughs and he starts talking to all of them like he’s God. He’s drunk as a skunk and the group is puffing on their cigs and cracking up laughing. The guy is not a believer of Christ. His games are called by demonic names and have pictures of trolls and demons on the front covers. He sells them world wide and makes millions. He’s laughing, the strippers half dressed are laughing and the employees are laughing.
I was told this was the boss of an x friend I had. When I told him how low that was…our freindship ended soon after. A true event that happened. The friend I thought I knew was not a believer. It just never came up until that point. At that time, I realized his level of belief in Christ as Messiah and he realized MINE. He said, I never really knew you were so spiritual, but good luck in life. later.
And that was it. Sure, that’s not undeniable proof that Christ died on a cross…but stuff like this goes on world wide EVERY DAY. Artists, sculptures produced, books, games, t-shirts, music cover albums that have been pulled off the shelves all blasphemed what?
The cross of Christ. My belief is…once Christ died on that cross, even though it WAS a pagan symbol for torture or crucifixion…the CROSS from THAT point ON…became another symbol of the death of Christ and shedding of His blood for the sins of the WORLD. Now, it represents the suffering of Yeshua for all sins of those who believe and follow Him as Messiah. It may remain a pagan symbol but Christ’s death ON IT…just made that prior pagan symbol something all together different in meaning.
And that’s why there is SO MUCH of unbelievers and occultists and satanist who HATE and DENY and BLASPHEMY the CROSS OF CHRIST where His BLOOD was SHED for OUR SINS.
It never changes the fact that the cross is Pagan. That stays the same. But stauros may be the correct translation but there were TWO stauros in terms of stakes of which put together formed a CROSS.
But you say, then why do I see these guys from occult bands and goth bands and gothics wearing crosses! Because those are GOTH or PAGANIZED crosses. Like the Hitler or Egyptian Cross. They’ll wear those. Most likely they are altered in some way. Decorated or twisted or contorted or colourized with glitter or diamonds or SOMEthing. One heavy metal singer wears a HUGE gold cross with diamonds and rings as well, a staff and gold and he wears a long coat of gold and calls himself Messiah. So, why is HE wearing the cross? To mock Christ.
