David Capes
Let’s talk a little bit about the symbol itself. There’s lots of pictures in your book. The other day, I was driving, and an air conditioning truck went by with a fish on the side of the truck. That has become a symbol in our time to say, this is a Christian business. You’re putting yourself out there. Other people might put a cross on something. How does the ichthus symbol, which is the Greek word for “fish” work?
Danny Hays
I think it’s a fascinating little acronym that the Christians realized they could use very early. If you take the title “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior,” and you write it out in Greek, you have Iesous Christos, Theou Huios, Soter. If you write that out in Greek and take the first letter of each of those words, then you end up with the Greek word ichthus ΙΧΘΥΣ. That means ̔fish. ̔
People in those days were enamored with abbreviations. We have evidence of that. The Christians then started using the term “fish” as a reference to Jesus. As an acronym. There’s a lot of theology packed in that; Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior. The core of Christian theology is packed into ichthus symbols. They love the fish, and you see people starting to use it in their writings as a reference to Jesus Christ. The symbol, the ichthus, was well known. It was out of that that we started to see this eight-spoke wheel.
David Capes
I think you said that it’s like these letters are stacked upon each other. There’s a center point obviously, where they’re all come together in the center of the circle. But then some make this wheel a six-spoke wheel as well.
Danny Hays
Yes, Christians had a number of abbreviations and symbols that they liked, and so you start seeing both those symbols show up inside circles. Often, they put them inside victory wreaths. They are a statement of victory. And then inside that wreath or circle, you might see a letter chi and a letter rho. A chi looks like an X. A rho looks like the letter P. And so here you have a chi-rho symbol. It’s the abbreviation for “Christ”and became one of the more popular symbols in early Christianity. Constantine popularized it (fourth century AD).
So, you see that Chi Rho as a six-spoke wheel, but you’ve got a little loop on that vertical wheel that turns it into a rho. It looks like our English letter P. That’s one that you see. It’s very common. The one that’s just six spokes is Iota chi. It’s the letter Iota, the first letter from Jesus, and then chi, the first letter from Christ. So, it means Jesus Christ. A six-spoke wheel is Jesus Christ, Iota, chi. The circle sometimes just encloses it, but often they’ll put that inside a wreath, which is the victory wreath, the statement of the victory, the Nike “victory” of Jesus Christ.
David Capes
The Roman world was full of abbreviations. They are not necessarily Christian. They could be pagan, they could be all sorts of things. But there are abbreviations everywhere. And this reminds me of today. When we write an email, we say LOL, laugh out loud, LMK, let me know. Those kinds of things. And everyone just knows what these things mean. I don’t have to explain to somebody that LOL means “laugh out loud,” or whatever the symbol is, but it was and is a very common way of communicating.
Danny Hays
Yes, and particularly in public inscriptions. You visit these ancient cities and even if you know Greek, or Latin, it’s difficult to read inscriptions on statues or other objects because it’s almost totally abbreviations. That was the world. Abbreviations in symbolic world were very common. And then the Christians picked that up, and they used a lot of symbols and abbreviations quite frequently. We see that Nomina Sacra as well in manuscripts from very early. I know you’re familiar with that.
David Capes
Larry Hurtado and I we’re good friends. And he and I talked a lot about the Nomina Sacra and the significance of those divine names.
Danny Hays
And so, you see there, first and last letter of the name, linear line across the top to abbreviate it. So the Christians were using things like that already. It’s not surprising then to find them using an elaborate spoked wheel to stand for “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior.“
David Capes
Did you find any symbols that people just throw up their hands and say nobody knows what this means. Are there other Christian symbols out there, possibly in these places, that we have not yet discovered?
Danny Hays
There’s some where there’s no consensus. You see all kinds of boxes. A regular box that I’m calling a cross. I argue in the book that if you have a four-square box, this is a cross with a box around it. But then you see a rectangle with six and sometimes eight. At some point, those are game boards. So there are some that we’re not sure of. Is that four-square box a Christian symbol of a cross? I think it is. It shows up next to other crosses and circles. You have a cross inside a circle. And then there’s all kinds of elaborations. Even on the eight-spoke wheel, you see little decorative loops around the outside. Sometimes I think that’s still an eight-spoke wheel, but it’s hard to argue that with certainty.
Then we know they abbreviated a lot in texts. Sometimes, they have abbreviated to the point that we don’t know what it means. There’s one of these eight-spoke wheels on the synagogue floor in Sardis. There’s a letter in each of the pie-shaped segments of the wheel. There’s a lot of discussion about it. We know what the first couple of letters are. It’s the Greek word for dedicated to or prayer of or blessing, but we have no idea what the rest of it is. It’s probably an abbreviation of somebody’s name or something similar. There’s been all kinds of speculation. There’s some really cool stuff.
David, there’s one that is symbol made with the letters. They took the Greek letters for Peter Petros, and they combine the letters into monograms. Christians are also doing these monograms. They just combined letters in different ways, and they have combined the letters from Petros, and they end up with this key. It looks like a key. The letter E is used to create and the arm. And so it’s a pretty clever little monogram they have created for the letter “Petros” [to whom Jesus gave the key to the Kingdom]. We came across one of those, I think, in Aphrodisias, but there’s other ones like that in Rome.
David Capes
It’s a fascinating world.. And we should say the period you’re looking at is roughly 100 AD down to about 600 AD. Some monumental changes take place in the world during that period. And part of it is that the pagan world is now being Christianized, Christianization of this pagan society. And it’s as if Christianity is moving in and moving from this outsider perspective to being the insider perspective.
Danny Hays
And it’s pretty dramatic. Like you said, the pagan society with pagan temples. In the ancient cities all across the Mediterranean world, there were these pagan temples. They were interconnected with the economic and political life of the city, and they were everywhere. And you had pagan statues at the fountains and in intersections. That’s what the cities were like in the 100’s, 200’s hundreds, starting into the 4th century or the 300’s. The cities were dominated by it. Then Christianity began creeping in but they were first on the outside.
We find only a little archeological evidence of them early on, because they were outsiders. Then, starting in the 4th century, there was this empire-wide, horrendous persecution of the Christians. It was the worst in history. The Christians were severely persecuted, and any buildings they had were destroyed, and scriptures were burned, people were killed. Constantine brings this to an end in 313 and then shifts the whole story because he throws his Imperial weight behind Christianity. He comes to power and decrees Christianity is legal in 313.
Within 100 years, every pagan temple is gone. They’re all closed. Either they’re not functional, they’ve been destroyed, they’ve been reused, or they’ve been converted into churches, for sure, within 150 years. But within that first 100 years, all across the Mediterranean world, there was a dramatic transformation of not only the religious landscape as Christianity came in, but the archeological and political landscape. Those temples that were interconnected with the life of the city were completely swept away. And this ichthus wheel was part of that transition as that was taking place. That is the context, I think, in which Christians were using these.
David Capes
Yes. It’s a fascinating book called “The Ichthus Christogram and Other Early Christian Symbols.” The author, J. Daniel Hays. Dr. Danny Hays, thanks for being with us today, here on “The Stone Chapel Podcast.”
Danny Hays
It’s great to be with you, David.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
