20 Familiar Christian Symbols With Unexpected Backstories

To many people today, the eye-in-a-triangle looks Egyptian or Masonic, but the concept started with 16th-century Christian artists in Europe who used the triangle to represent the Holy Trinity and the eye for God’s all-seeing knowledge. In 1593, writer Cesare Ripa codified the design as Divine Providence in his book Iconologia. The Freemasons didn’t adopt it until 1797, more than 200 years after Christian artists first created the symbol. The link to Egypt was never part of the story.

Peter, one of the apostles of Jesus Christ, was said to be the first bishop of Rome and was martyred there during the reign of the Roman emperor Nero around 64 CE. According to the early Christian scholar Origen, Peter requested to be crucified upside down because he considered himself unworthy to be put to death in the same manner as Jesus. For about 1,700 years, the inverted cross was an official papal symbol, engraved in churches and on the papal chair. It was not until centuries later that entertainment media used the same image as a symbol for anti-Christian evil.

According to legend, St. Patrick, the 5th-century missionary who converted Ireland to Christianity, held a three-leafed shamrock up at the Hill of Tara and used it to explain the Holy Trinity to the pagan masses who surrounded him. The problem is that Patrick himself doesn’t mention it in his own writings, nor do any of his early biographers. It wasn’t mentioned in print until 1726, when a botanist in Dublin paired the plant with Patrick in a book on Irish flora.

In England and France, medieval churches are covered with leafy faces with vines bursting out of their mouths, and modern pop culture claims they are clandestine survivals of a once widespread pagan nature god. Most art historians believe that many of these carvings relate to a Christian story in which Adam’s son, Seth, plants seeds under his deceased father’s tongue, resulting in new life. The name Green Man was not used until 1939, when a British folklorist came up with it in a scholarly article.

During times of persecution in 2nd-century Rome, the Greek word for fish (ichthys) became a secret symbol for Christians. The letters were an acronym for Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior. About 200 CE, theologian Clement of Alexandria wrote that the fish was a safe image to put on a signet ring. According to tradition, two strangers could test each other to see if they were Christian by drawing one arc of the fish in the dirt and waiting for the other person to complete the drawing. While the idea of drawing a fish is intriguing, the theory behind the acronym is solid.

Although the phoenix, a mythical bird that supposedly rises anew from its own ashes, isn’t mentioned in the Bible, Christian bishop Clement of Rome appealed to it around 96 CE, using the myth as evidence that bodily resurrection was a natural process rather than a strange one. The theologian Tertullian echoed his sentiment over a century later in North Africa.

In 312, before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge outside Rome, the Roman emperor Constantine I told his soldiers to inscribe the Chi-Rho, the intersecting Greek letters X and P that make up the first two letters of “Christ,” on their shields. According to early Christian historians Lactantius and Eusebius, Constantine had a vision in which he was promised victory if he adopted Christ’s symbol. Constantine’s victory gave the Chi-Rho its status as the first Christian symbol with the support of the Roman government.

By the 1420s, IHS, the initials of the name Jesus in Greek, had become the subject of passionate preaching from the Italian Franciscan friar Bernardino of Siena. Bernardino would hold aloft tablets painted with IHS in the middle of a sunburst, telling feuding families in cities like Siena and Florence to remove their bloody family crests from their buildings and replace them with the holy name of Jesus over their doorways. When he was tried before the Inquisition in Rome in 1427 for allegedly promoting idolatry, he was acquitted by Pope Martin V.

There’s a weird picture from the Middle Ages showing a mother pelican pecking open her chest to feed her offspring with her blood. It was displayed in churches as an allegory of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. The story originates in a 2nd-century natural history written by Alexandrian scholars. They had observed actual pelicans pressing their beaks against their crimson breast plumage while regurgitating fish for their chicks, and made a faulty deduction that the birds were injuring themselves. Centuries later, theologian Thomas Aquinas incorporated the image into the verses of church hymns and referred to Christ as the “loving divine pelican.”

During the first three centuries of Christianity, saints and even Christ himself were depicted without any light emanating from their heads. The halo began in Greek and Roman art as a blazing crown that adorned the heads of sun deities such as Apollo. It was adopted to depict Roman emperors as god-like individuals of great importance. Once Constantine legalized Christianity in 312 CE, Roman artists began to bestow the same glory on Christ and his apostles. A signifier of the emperor’s authority had become a signifier of sanctity.

The Agnus Dei, which depicts a lamb with a cross-staff and banner, derives its name from the “Lamb of God” in the Bible. In 692 CE, Byzantine emperor Justinian II convened a church council in Constantinople that forbade depicting Christ in the form of a lamb. But Pope Sergius I, a Syrian-born pope residing in Rome, ignored the ban and included the Agnus Dei chant in the Roman Mass. He also commissioned depictions of lambs. By then, Rome was openly disregarding instructions from Constantinople.

The 2nd century saw Christians in Rome’s Domitilla and St. Callixtus catacombs carving anchors into the walls. Art historians term this a disguised cross. The crossbar and shaft make a cross shape without alerting the Roman officials persecuting the Christians. It also was a reference to a Bible passage that calls Christian hope “an anchor for the soul.” The theologian Clement of Alexandria mentioned the anchor alongside the fish as an approved design for rings around 200 CE.

In 2nd- and 3rd-century Rome, catacomb artists depicted Jesus as a youthful, beardless shepherd with a sheep draped over his shoulders. The pose wasn’t new: Greek sculptors had used nearly the same figure, the kriophoros or “ram-bearer,” for statues of the god Hermes centuries earlier. When Christians began to adapt these artistic motifs, they took the shape rather than the god, using the kriophoros figure to depict biblical scenes such as the parable of the lost sheep in a way that wouldn’t provoke the wrath of Roman authorities.

The Italians of the 6th to 10th centuries used the standard round halo only for figures already in heaven, namely God, angels, and saints. Living popes, bishops, or donors were framed by a square shape, blue or gold, that surrounded the head and shoulders. An example is Pope Paschal I in one of the Roman basilicas, c. 820 CE. Its four corners symbolized the temporal world, allowing artists to depict contemporary benefactors without prematurely canonizing them.

In 3rd-century Rome, catacomb painters depicted peacocks on the walls of burial chapels as a symbol of resurrection, since it was believed that the birds’ flesh did not decay after death. This belief was held by ancient authors such as Aristotle and Pliny the Elder, and Augustine of Hippo, a North African theologian, decided to examine the matter for himself. He kept a slice of cooked peacock breast in Carthage for over a year and found it had merely dried out, not rotted, using the result as evidence for divine incorruptibility.

Although the diagonal “X” cross on Scotland’s flag commemorates Andrew the Apostle, early sources for his martyrdom in Patras, Greece, describe a simple upright cross like that of Jesus. It was not until medieval tradition, composed between the 10th and 14th centuries, that hagiographers say Andrew asked for an X-shaped cross because he deemed himself unworthy to be crucified in the same form as Jesus. A collection of the lives of the saints, produced in the 13th century, played a major role in spreading the story of the X-cross throughout Europe.

This three-lobed knot, known as the triquetra, appears on coins and stone carvings throughout pre-Christian Northern Europe. Monks in Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England drew it into their illuminated manuscripts, notably the Book of Kells, in the 8th century CE as a symbol of the Trinity, three persons in one undivided God. The theory that Druids used it to worship a Triple Goddess is based only on the romantic speculations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors.

Back in the 16th century, Catholic missionaries discovered a flowering vine in South America that bore a resemblance to some of the implements associated with the Crucifixion, and began using it to explain the story of the death of Christ to indigenous people. The ten petals and sepals represented the ten faithful apostles. The 72 filaments represented the crown of thorns. Five stamens represented the five wounds of Christ, and three stigmas represented the three nails. An Italian scholar formalized the comparison in a 1609 book and gave the plant its lasting name, Passiflora.

In Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals, representations of Christ on his throne in glory are frequently found within an almond-shaped frame known as a mandorla, produced by the intersection of two identical circles, which signifies the meeting of heaven and earth. In 1525, the German painter Albrecht Dürer studied its geometry, referring to it in German as “fish bladder.” 19th-century art historians translated this into the Latin word we still use today, vesica piscis.

Sometime from 175 to 200 CE, Christian copyists in Roman Egypt began superimposing the Greek letter Rho over the Greek letter Tau as an abbreviation of the word “cross” in New Testament manuscripts. According to scholar Larry Hurtado, the loop of the Rho placed above the crossbar of the Tau represents a head on a cross. Therefore, this small scribal abbreviation is, by Hurtado’s interpretation, the earliest known representation of the crucifixion, centuries before the public display of crucifixes.

This content was created with the help of AI.