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Updated: June 29, 2025
That there was a pre-Christian cross, and that it was, like ours, a Symbol of Life, is generally admitted. The authorities upon such subjects, however, unfortunately differ as to the reason why the Cross came to be selected by the ancients as the Symbol of Life. And not one of their suggestions seems to go to the root of the matter.
The author's voice, naturally low and musical, acquired new tones as he recited it, giving to it the qualities of an incantation; and round us, as though fashioned out of shadows, was the large, dimly lighted drawing-room, which the old novelist had incrusted with impossible heraldries, culminating in escutcheons of pre-Christian Welsh kings.
Hermas apparently has carried over the name of this Jewish angel, and used it to designate the archangel of the Christians, who are for him, of course, the true Israel. The position of supremacy in the angel world, assigned by pre-Christian righteous men to Michael, is really held by the Son of God.
Such are the well-known image in the chapel at Loretto, and images and paintings besides in the churches at Genoa, Pisa, Padua, Munich and other places. It is difficult not to regard these as very old Pagan or pre-Christian relics which lingered on into Christian times and were baptized anew as indeed we know many relics and images actually were into the service of the Church.
As John the Baptist was an Asiatic and to some extent a pre-Christian Asiatic, we can here, without wandering very far from the matter in hand, pause to consider the question why we Christians represent John the Baptist, who had nothing to do with a cross, as holding a cross; if it be not that while Jesus was supposed to represent the Sun in its annual ascension, John was supposed to represent the Sun in its annual declension?
He disproves, out of their own mouths, the allegations of several writers who have made this exploded assertion about 'godless tribes. He says: 'The thoughts and principles of modern Christianity are attached to intellectual clues which run back through far pre-Christian ages to the very origin of human civilisation, perhaps even of human existence. So far we abound in Mr. Tylor's sense.
In the pre-Christian Judaism it is probable that there was a Catechism or short manual of instruction called in Greek the Didache, in which the Golden Rule in Hillel's negative form and the Decalogue occupied a front place. Thus we find, too, modern American Jews formulating Articles of Faith as a Proselyte Confession.
Paul requires to be rescued from the inadequate and distorting interpretations his thought has received in the course of its history. He brought this conception of the eternal Christ into Christianity from pre-Christian thought, saw it ideally revealed in Jesus, and then bade mankind respond to it and realise it to be the true explanation of our own being.
Ecclesiastic historians have a notorious habit of viewing pre-Christian times for the single biased purpose of only stating the aspects of that civilization which they deemed inferior to that exerted by Christianity. Researches have established fairly well the position of women in the Egyptian community of 4000 years ago.
The word anastauroo was never used by the old Greek writers as meaning other than to impale upon or with a single piece of timber. The word sustauroo does not occur in pre-Christian writings, and only five times in the Bible against the forty-four times of the word next to be dealt with.
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