Historical evidence shows that the early Christians did not use crosses in their worship. Says the New Catholic Encyclopedia: “The representation of Christ’s redemptive death on Golgotha does not occur in the symbolic art of the first Christian centuries. The early Christians, influenced by the Old Testament prohibition of graven images, were reluctant to depict even the instrument of the Lord’s Passion.” Obviously they never bowed before or kissed crosses.

To the Jews and the Romans the manner in which Jesus died was humiliating and shameful. He was executed like a criminal of the lowest sort, like the wrongdoers impaled alongside him. (Luke 23:32) His death therefore misrepresented him in the worst way possible. To Christians the instrument of execution itself would therefore have been something very repulsive. Venerating it would have meant glorifying the wrong deed committed on it​—the murder of Jesus Christ.

Thus in a very subtle way, through the influence of a sun-worshiping ruler, the non-Christian cross came to be accepted by professed Christians. After being led to adopt the cross as a sacred symbol, professed Christians began depicting the body of one crucified thereon. The first evidence of such representations dates from the fifth century C.E.

In earlier centuries these developments would have been denounced by Christians as idolatry. In the second century C.E., for example, Minucius Felix wrote: “Crosses, moreover, we neither worship nor wish for. You, indeed, who consecrate gods of wood, adore wooden crosses perhaps as parts of your gods.”

There is still another factor that made it impossible for early Christians to associate the cross with the instrument on which Jesus was put to death. No Biblical evidence even intimates that Jesus died on a cross.