The Phœnician origin of Britons, Scots & Anglo-Saxons : discovered by Phœnician & Sumerian inscriptions in Britain, by preroman Briton coins & a mass of new history : with over one hundred illustrations and maps, стр. 338

302 PHGINICIAN ORIGIN OF BRITONS & SCOTS

Bishop Ulfilas, whose translation for his kinsmen of the New Testament Gospels into Gothic remains one of the earliest versions of the gospels in any language. The Goths naturally transferred to their new form of religion, Christianity, which had so much in common with their old ancestral monotheistic faith, the most sacred symbol of that ancestral faith, The True Cross, which we have seen was freely figured as such, not only by the Sumerian Babylonian and Hittite or Catti Sun-worshippers, but also by their kinsmen, the Catti Goths of Britain on their coins of the pre-Christian period.

But the True Cross of Victory thus introduced by the Goths into Christianity as a symbol of Christ was not used as a substitute for the Crucifix until many centuries later. It was, for several centuries, used merely as the simple Cross, as the Solar symbol of Victory by itself, without any body fixed on it; and even when, in the eighth century, Christ was figured on it, even then it was not the Crucified Christ. “ Not until the eighth century is Christ represented on the Cross to the public eye; but even then it is a Christ free, with eyes open, with arms unbound; living, not dead ; majestic, not abject ; with no mortal agony on His divine eternal features.’’! It thus was not used as a crucifix, but still as the Sun-Cross of Victory, placed behind Him as a halo of glory, as in the fashion of the old Sumer-Babylonian and Medo-Persian Sun-worshippers in representing the Sun-god in human form. For the Christian artists had not yet dared to associate this pure and glorious symbol of the Living Sun-god with blood or Death.*

Not until the tenth century was Christ represented to the public eye on The True Cross as a Crucifix, and impaled thereon, blood-splashed, in agony and death,* in the form

1F.C.A., 40T.

= But see next footnote; and on ‘‘ reverent dread’’ of representing Christ on the Cross in the seventh century see F.A.C., 400.

2F.C.A., 402. But as early as 586 a.p. a Syrian monk in Mesopotamia in an illustrated convent manual of the Gospels, now in the Florence Library, painted the Dead Christ on the Cross as a crucifix, though it remained unique and not known to the public. The belief held by some that a crucifix in form of the Latin Cross, carved on a cornelian and another on ivory date as early as the fifth century (Garrucci, Diss. rch., 27) is nat accepted by Parrar as authentic.