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Inscriptions, Christian.

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Encyclopedias
McClintock and Strong's Bible Encyclopedia
• Inscriptions, Christian.
The Catholic Encyclopedia
• Early Christian Inscriptions

There are but few Christian inscriptions that remain extant from an early date, but these few yet suffice to convey to us a pretty accurate idea of the history of the early Christian Church, and of the customs and belief of the first followers of the Lord Jesus Christ. "They express," says Maitland, in his justly celebrated and now quite rare work on The Church in the Catacombs (Lond. 1846, 8vo, p. 13), "the feelings of a body of Christians whose leaders alone are known to us in history. The fathers of the Church live in their voluminous works; the lower orders are only represented by these simple records, from which, with scarcely an exception, sorrow and complaint are banished; the boast of suffering, or an appeal to the revengeful passions, is nowhere to be found. One expresses faith, another hope, a third charity. The genius of primitive Christianity, ‘ to believe, to love, and to suffer,' has never been better illustrated. These ‘ sermons in stones' are addressed to the heart, and not to the head, to the feelings rather than to the taste; and possess additional value from being the work of the purest and most influential portion of the ‘ catholic and apostolic Church' then in existence." In the early years of the Christian Church the inscriptions were, with few exceptions, confined to the memory of deceased persons and to sacred objects.

1. The custom of tombstone inscriptions was borrowed by the early Christians from the Romans and Grecians; they simplified them, however, very much, and indicated the Christian knowledge, life, and rank of the deceased partly by significant symbols, partly by written signs, words, and expressions. These symbols, as they are found in Italy, France, and the countries on the Rhine, pertain partly to the designation of the Redeemer by means of pictorial representations, partly to the life after death, hope for the same through Christ and the cross. The name of Christ, their Lord and Master, is, as would be expected of his followers, everywhere the most prominent, and is "repeated in an endless variety of forms, and the actions of his life are figured in every degree of rudeness of execution." But remarkable it certainly is, that in the inscriptions contained in the Lapidarian Gallery, selected and arranged under papal superintendence, containing one of the largest, if not the largest collection of Christian inscriptions, there are no prayers for the dead (unless the forms "May you live," "May God refresh you," be so construed); no addresses to the Virgin Mary, nor to the apostles or earlier saints; and, with the exception of "eternal sleep," "eternal home," etc., no expressions contrary to the plain sense of Scripture. Neither is the second person of the Trinity viewed in the Jewish light of a temporal Messiah, nor is he degraded to the Socinian estimate of a mere example, but he is ever represented as invested with all the honors of a Redeemer. On this subject there is no reserve, no heathenish suppression of the distinguishing feature of the Christian religion as professed by the evangelical sects. On stones innumerable appears the good Shepherd, bearing on his shoulders the recovered sheep, by which many an illiterate believer expressed his sense of personal salvation. One, according to his epitaph, "sleeps in Christ;" another is buried with a prayer that "she may live in the Lord Jesus."

But most of all, the cross in its simplest form is employed to testify the faith of the deceased; and whatever ignorance may have prevailed regarding the letter of Holy Writ, or the more mysterious doctrines contained in it, there seems to have been no want of apprehension of that sacrifice' whereby alone we obtain remission of our sins, and are made partakers of the kingdom of heaven" (Maitland, Church in the Catacombs, p. 14,15). One of the principal signs used in referring to Christ is a monogram of the initial letters of the Greek name Χριστός . Most generally it is found to be composed of X and p, the latter placed in the heart of the former. Strange to say, we preserve in our own language a vestige of this figure in writing Xmas and Xtian, which can only be explained by supposing the first letter to stand for the Greek X.

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