How did the cross, from being such a loathsome taboo that it could scarcely be mentioned, change into an image thought suitable viewing for all ages in public art galleries? There is no doubt about its early despicable reputation. A hundred years before the birth of Jesus, Cicero declared that ‘the very word cross should be far removed not only from the person of a Roman citizen but from his thoughts’.
It was the cross that gave rise to the word excruciating. It makes me feel rather queasy to envisage the slow death by suffocation of the crucified man, left without the strength to draw breath, so I was glad that Robin M. Jensen trotted fairly briskly through the forensic evidence, which includes a first-century heel bone with a nail through it.
One might think that early depictions of the crucifixion of Jesus would be realistic, since the reality was still familiar. Only later would visual metaphors be developed. The opposite is the case. In the first centuries, it is true, his followers did not depict Christ on the cross, even though the crucifixion was put at the heart of their earliest writings.
The first surviving manuscript pictures of the crucifixion date from the sixth century and commonly, as in the Rabbula Gospels (named after their scribe, who wrote in Syriac), Jesus is shown dressed from shoulder to toe in a sleeveless purple robe with two vertical gold stripes. This was called in Latin the colobium. The British monarch is invested in a robe of that name after the coronation anointing. The coronation colobium is of plain linen; the purple, gold-striped colobium of pictorial crucifixes from the sixth to the tenth centuries is imperial and hieratic.
The cue for the idea of Christ on the cross being, not a tortured criminal, but a royal priestly figure, long predated the adoption by Constantine of the cross as an emblem that guaranteed victory in his march on Rome in 312.
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