The second part should embrace the fourth Christian age, when the glory of the Cross of Christ shone like the sun, when the original Cross of the Lord appeared, when the very heaven proclaimed to people about its universal glory, and when all Christians – kings and subjects, masters and slaves, old men and children, men and women – began to make and depict crosses everywhere, so that almost the entire universe was filled with crosses. The third part will embrace the time from the fifth to the eleventh centuries, i.e., until the time when monuments of the cross and images of it can already be found among our Russian antiquities. Finally, the fourth period lasts from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, or almost to the time of Patriarch Nikon, whose contemporaries, in the opinion of the so-called Old Believers, introduced the two-part cross, and retained the true cross, i.e., the eight-pointed one.

In the first three Christian centuries the Holy Church was under the heavy yoke of persecution, strengthening and flourishing internally, it was at the same time suppressed in its outward appearance: in worship and in the rites of faith. Therefore, under the narrow external circumstances, the external church life could not fully develop: Christians had to perform their church services either at night, or only before dawn, in certain houses, sometimes in dungeons. Constantly hiding from the persecution of the pagans, they, naturally, had everything only with them, and therefore, by the way, the cross of Christ – the object of Christian veneration – in its material form was not used as often as it was later, three centuries later. The Cross of the Lord was in the ground, and there was almost no place on earth for other crosses, as a Christian shrine: they were still the subject of persecution by the pagans along with the followers of the Crucified One. For this reason, almost all the monuments of the cross and its images have survived from the first three centuries only in the Roman dungeons, where Christians for the most part were forced to take refuge from persecution.

B. On the Crosses Preserved from the First Three Centuries of Christianity

In this section we will speak 1) about the cross, which the most ancient tradition ascribes to St. Nicodemus, the secret disciple of Jesus Christ, and 2) about the images of the cross in the Roman dungeons, or catacombs.

I. On the Cross Attributed to St. Nicodemus

The famous chronicler Baronius tells us about the cross attributed to St. Nicodemus under the year 1099, and a photograph of this cross is presented in the Latin work of Cornelius Curtius, called "De Clavis Dominicis". Let us write down Baronius' account here in the form in which it is found in the book of his Chronicles (vol. XI, p. 757): "Let us turn our discourse again to the East," he says, "in order to tell of what happened after the conquest of Jerusalem, and among other things, of how the venerable depiction of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, our Redeemer, became known, Who was represented by the ancient painter in royal form (schemate regio) in His likeness. It was made (as the ancient tradition testifies, firmly preserved to posterity) by the efforts of Nicodemus, the nocturnal disciple of Christ; from Jerusalem he was brought by a very pious man, named Stephen, a Lucanian by birth, who, by pious motive, together with others in the year 1098, undertook a journey to the Holy Land; he received this image from a certain Gregory the Syrian and brought it to Lucca (in Turkey), where it is reverently preserved to this day; There is also a history of everything that happened to this image, written in antiquity. Why is the Saviour depicted on the cross in royal attire, and not naked?.. To abolish the temptation of the cross and to show the glory of Christ in a greater light." In conclusion, Baronius says of him: "Let the venerable sacred image of Christ the King, hanging on the cross, stand for the denunciation of the most unfortunate iconoclasts, as a permanent monument to the newly nascent Church, handed down to posterity." We can add: and to denounce our unfortunate brethren, the so-called Old Believers, who blaspheme the four-pointed cross because it is four-pointed and not eight-pointed.

Here is the very image of this cross:68