01 — The Cross in Scripture

The Church reads the whole of Scripture toward the Cross and the empty tomb. This section sets out the Old Testament figures the tradition has always read as pointing to the tree of Golgotha, and then the New Testament witness itself: four Passion narratives in four distinct keys, and an apostolic preaching rich in images for what the Cross does and reticent about how it does it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Two things are established here that the rest of the collection depends on. The first is the typological method, which is not a Christian imposition on the Hebrew Scriptures but the reading the New Testament itself performs and the Church’s hymnography assumes. The second is the New Testament’s own reserve: it supplies sacrifice, ransom, propitiation, curse-bearing, victory, reconciliation, and participation, side by side and without synthesis, and it never states a mechanism. That reserve is the reason the Church has defined no theory of the atonement, and it is the ground of the objection stated in Section 07 to the systematization of any one image.

Two celebrated items commonly cited in this connection are pinned rather than repeated: the phrase “from the tree” at Psalm 95:10 LXX, which is a second-century Christian expansion rather than a suppressed original reading, and Wisdom 14:7, which is genuine Scripture in the wider Orthodox canon but whose cross-reference is patristic application rather than plain sense.

Navigation

File Contents
The Old Testament Figures and the Tree The two trees; the ark, the rod, Marah, and the axe-head; the outstretched hands of Moses; the binding of Isaac; the Passover lamb; the bronze serpent and St Gregory the Theologian’s dissent from the natural reading of John 3:14; Deuteronomy 21:23 and Isaiah 53; two attestation notes
The Passion Narratives and the Apostolic Preaching Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John in their four keys; the sermons of Acts and their invariable “you crucified, God raised”; the Pauline images; Hebrews, 1 Peter, 1 John; and what follows from the New Testament’s silence about mechanism

See Also