Tertullian, unfortunately, gives us little insight into the codicology of the manuscript of Marcion's Gospel that he had at hand. Recent research in preparation for a new book (authored together with Allen Brent,
Demi-monde of Late Antiquity: The social and historical phenomenon of ambiguity in Early Christian Art) has revealed that we can, indeed, find some traces not only of what Marcion's theology and liturgy looked like, but also palaeographically, how his text was written. It seems, if I am not mistaken, that he was the first who introduced
nomina sacra and also the
staurogram into the writing of his Gospel, hence produced, what is being seen, the earliest Christian visual art.
Recently Larry Hurtado
went through the evidence of
The Earliest
Christian Artifacts (2008) and looked specifically at papyrological
evidence to discover that the earliest forms of Christian visual
representations were four
nomina sacra (
Theos,
Kyrios,
Christos, and
Iēsous) and abbreviations of Jesus and
Christ.
The question has been
raised whether or not this has to be regarded as a ‘Christian innovation’
(Hurtado) or a borrowing from Judaism (Kurt Treu, Robert Kraft), although the
boundaries are blurred when Hurtado himself admits that it derives from
‘Jewish-Christian circles’.
While the tachygraphic
shortcut for Christ,
Chi (Χ) and
Rho (Ρ) had precursors in Greco-Roman
times, carrying the sign of the cross (Χ), the
Iota (Ι) and
Eta (Η) for
Jesus is otherwise unattested and may not only ‘be a Christian innovation’, but
a Jewish form of gematria as attested in the
Epistle of Barnabas and
Clement of Alexandria. They both refer to the numerical value of
Iota (Ι) and
Eta (Η) which is 1 and 8, and see in it a a reference to
Genesis 14:14 where the 318 servants in
some of the Greek copies were written as
Tau,
Iota,
Eta (Τ
Ι Η).
Barnabas and Clement ‘see in this letter compendium a foreshadowing
of Jesus and his cross, Τ (= 300) = his cross, and ΙΗ (= 18) = Jesus’ name’,
which equates to the Hebrew word of ‘life’ (
חי) at the value of 18.
In addition, we also find
the combination of
Iota (Ι) and
Chi (Χ), another combination of Jesus
and the cross. Hurtado concludes: ‘Along with the
nomina sacra, the first uses of these devices, which take us back
to the late second century and quite possibly earlier, represent the earliest
extant expression of what we may term a Christian “visual culture”’,
and, we can add, they all
focus on Jesus and his cross. No surprise, then, that Hurtado adds to the
nomina sacra and the shortcuts of the
name of Jesus Christ the so-called
Staurogram
a combination of two other Greek letters,
Tau
(Τ) and
Rho (Ρ) which are no
longer shortcuts for Jesus Christ, but with the superimposing of the Greek
letter
Rho upon the
Tau, it becomes visually and contentwise
directly representative of the cross. The
Staurogram
is also present in very early Christian manuscripts, Papyrus Bodmer II or P
66
with portions of
John, dated to the
end of the 2
nd c., and similar in Papyrus Bodmer XIV or P
75
with portions of
Luke and
John, as can be seen here (at the end of the fourth line):
‘Contrary to some widely
influential assumptions’, the
Staurogram
is earlier than the
Chi-Rho, ‘not as
a freestanding symbol and general reference to Christ but in manuscripts dated
as early as around 175-225 CE, where it functions as part of the abbreviation
of the Greek words for “cross”
and ‘crucify’, written
(abbreviated) as
nomina sacra … [and]
a visiual reference to Jesus’ crucifixion’.
We have confirmation in early Christian writings how the
Staurogram was understood and even an indication by whom it was
introduced. As I will show in a forthcoming paper on Marcion's early Roman liturgy, exclusively in his work
Against Marcion Tertullian explains that Marcion had used in his
baptismal rite the cross as the sign on the forehead, but, as he wants to show,
that this should not be seen as an innovation and distinction from Judaism,
but as something, already foretold by the prophet
Ezekiel (9:4) and Tertullian adds:
For this same letter TAV of the Greeks, which is our T, has the
appearance of the cross, which he [Ezekiel]
foresaw we should have on our foreheads in the true and catholic Jerusalem.
Knowing the signification of the
Tau (Τ), what, however, was the meaning of the superimposed
Rho? Ephrem of Syria gives us a clue as
he explains the
R (Rho) of the cross in harmony with an
old pagan interpretation as the sign of salvation, luck and help: ‘The R over
the cross means
βοή
θι
α (help),
which conforms to the value of 100.’
The Greek character
R carries the value of 100 because that
is the sum of the values of the characters that spell
βοή
θι
α, an example of
antique
isopsephy:
β ο ή θ ι α
2 + 70
+ 8 + 9 +
10 + 1
= 100 = R
Already Franz-Joseph
Dölger had pointed out this reference in Ephrem and Hurtado agrees –
the
Staurogram seems to mean ‘salvation
is in the cross’ or ‘the cross is our help’.
That we have nobody else
in the second century referring to this interpretation and adopting it, but
only Ephrem in Syria in the 4
th c. could be an indication that this
might have been a Marcionite notion which the copyists did not adopt, while
they accepted the sign as ‘a kind of pictogram, the image of a man’s head upon
a cross’,
a
staurogram or ‘a visual reference to the crucified Jesus’.
