04/01/2024
Michael DiGregorio
In my early association of my relationship with the TRUE and living God Jehovah, I made a deep and comprehensive study on Babylon and it's rituals that the later Christians adopted and now worship under Pagan rituals and symbols.......: "Stauros" interpreted as simple stake only
Crucifixion on a crux simplex ad affixionem: drawing in a 1629 reprint of De cruce of Justus Lipsius (1547–1606)
In his 1871 study of the history of the cross, Episcopal preacher Henry Dana Ward accepted as the only form of the gibbet on which Jesus died "a pale, a strong stake, a wooden post".[15]
Crucifixion of Jesus, by Justus Lipsius: De cruce (1595), p. 47
Anglican theologian E. W. Bullinger, in The Companion Bible (which was completed and published in 1922,[16] nine years after his 1913 death), was emphatic in his belief that stauros never meant two pieces of timber placed across one another at any angle, "but always of one piece alone ... There is nothing [of the word stauros] in the Greek of the N.T. even to imply two pieces of timber." Bullinger wrote that in the catacombs of Rome Christ was never represented there as "hanging on a cross" and that the cross was a pagan symbol of life (the ankh) in Egyptian churches that was borrowed by the Christians. He cited a letter from English Dean John William Burgon, who questioned whether a cross occurred on any Christian monument of the first four centuries and wrote: "The 'invention' of it in pre-Christian times, and the 'invention' of its use in later times, are truths of which we need to be reminded in the present day. The evidence is thus complete, that the Lord was put to death upon an upright stake, and not on two pieces of timber placed in any manner."[17]
With regard to the "primary" or "original" meaning of the Greek word σταυρός, William Edwy Vine (1873–1949) wrote in his Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, published in 1940: "stauros denotes, primarily, 'an upright pale or stake'. On such malefactors were nailed for ex*****on. Both the noun and the verb stauroo, 'to fasten to a stake or pale', are originally to be distinguished from the ecclesiastical form of a two beamed cross". He said the shape of the ecclesiastical form of a two-beamed cross "had its origin in ancient Chaldea, and was used as the symbol of the god Tammuz (being the shape of the mystic Tau, the initial of his name) in Chaldea and nearby lands, including Egypt". He added that third-century churches, which by then had departed from certain doctrines of the Christian faith, accepted pagans into the faith in order to increase their prestige and allowed them to retain their pagan signs and symbols. "Hence the Tau or T, in its most frequent form, with the cross-piece lowered, was adopted to stand for the 'cross' of Christ."[18] This association of the cross symbol with Tammuz had already been made by Abram Herbert Lewis in his 1892 book Paganism Surviving in Christianity.[19]
