Responding to Jehovah's Witnesses

This argument is not really about the shape of the wood. The lexical point — stauros as upright pole versus crossbeam — is handled in the torture-stake response. This argument answers the four heavier moves rs makes: the pagan-origin genealogy, the phallic-worship accusation, the images prohibition, and the emotional "would you cherish the instrument" move.

1. Start with the Hislop retraction, because it is the one move the JW has not heard and it is devastating. Almost every rs citation — Vine, Tyack, Garnier, Cutner, the nineteenth-century Britannica — traces back, directly or indirectly, to Alexander Hislop's 1853 book The Two Babylons. Hislop was a Free Church of Scotland minister who argued that Roman Catholic practice was crypto-Babylonian mystery religion, built on a triangle of Nimrod, Semiramis, and Tammuz. The book sold widely. In 1966 the American evangelist Ralph Woodrow published Babylon Mystery Religion, a popular repackaging of Hislop that sold over 250,000 copies in Pentecostal and Adventist circles. Then, in the 1990s, a California history teacher named Scott Klemm sent Woodrow the primary sources Hislop had claimed to cite. Woodrow went back and checked. He discovered Hislop had fabricated quotations, misattributed Assyrian material, and conflated Nimrod and Semiramis across a fifteen-hundred-year gap. In 1997 Woodrow pulled his own best-selling book from print and published The Babylon Connection? — a formal retraction. Woodrow's own words: "One can go to any library, check any history book about ancient Babylon — none of these things will be found. They are not historically accurate." The Watchtower is still citing the genealogy its own most prominent Evangelical popularizer publicly recanted twenty-nine years ago.
2. Walk through the archaeological timeline. The cross appears in Christian use well over a century before Constantine. The Epistle of Barnabas (early second century, around AD 130) treats the number 318 as tau-iota-eta — the tau standing for the cross of Christ. Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho 91 (around AD 160) explicitly describes the cross as two beams. Tertullian, writing around AD 204 in North Africa, records the sign of the cross as an already-routine gesture Christians made at meals, before sleep, when dressing. Papyri P66 and P75 (around AD 175-225) — our earliest New Testament manuscripts — abbreviate stauros with a tau-rho ligature that visually draws a human figure on a T-shaped cross. The Alexamenos graffito (around AD 200, Palatine Hill, Rome) is a pagan mocking a Christian named Alexamenos for worshipping a donkey-headed figure on a crossbeam. This is the earliest surviving depiction of the crucifixion, drawn by a hostile pagan — so it records what outsiders knew Christians confessed. All of this predates Constantine (AD 312-325) by a century or more. The "the cross came in with Constantine" claim is historically dead.
3. Engage the images move with the temple reversal. Exodus 20:4–5 is a single commandment: "you shall not make for yourself an idol ... you shall not bow down to them or worship them." The conditional in verse 5 governs the making in verse 4 — the prohibition is on cultic worship-objects, not representational art as such. How do we know? Because the same God who gave Exodus 20:4 commanded Moses to make the golden cherubim on the ark of the covenant (Ex 25:18-22), ordered cherubim woven into the tabernacle curtains (Ex 26:1), and later inspired Solomon to fill the temple with carved lions, oxen, palm trees, and pomegranates (1 Kings 6-7). If Exodus 20:4 were a blanket ban on representational art, the tabernacle and the temple would themselves have been idolatrous. More pointedly, God commanded Moses in Numbers 21:8 to make a bronze serpent on a pole — and Jesus in John 3:14 explicitly compared that bronze serpent to his own crucifixion. God prescribed a representation of a cursed thing on a pole, then inspired his Son to interpret his own death by means of it.
4. Flip the cherish-the-instrument question using Paul. Read Galatians 6:14 from the JW's own New World Translation: "may I never boast, except in the torture stake of our Lord Jesus Christ." Read 1 Corinthians 1:18 in the NWT: "the speech about the torture stake is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is God's power." Read Colossians 2:14 in the NWT: God "nailed it to the torture stake" — our sin-debt, nailed to the very stake. Paul is not boasting in the shape. Paul is boasting in the death, and identifying the instrument with the accomplishment. The rhetorical move — "would you cherish the instrument of execution of a loved one?" — is exactly the move first-century hearers brought to Paul's preaching, and Paul's answer was that the offensiveness of the instrument is the point. The cross became a "stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles" (1 Cor 1:23) precisely because it was the cruellest death Rome could devise. The Reformed answer is Paul's answer: the instrument of execution became the instrument of reconciliation. To refuse to remember the cross is to refuse Paul's boast.
5. Close by separating the real question from the false one. "Brother, I am not asking you to put a crucifix on a wall. I am asking you why your NWT has Paul boasting in the torture stake, preaching the torture stake as God's power, and picturing our sin nailed to the torture stake — and yet the Watchtower tells you that remembering that stake is pagan. Paul and the Watchtower are not on the same page. One of them has to be wrong. It is not Paul."

Those citations are almost all a century or more old, and they trace back through a single chain: Alexander Hislop's 1853 book The Two Babylons. Vine cites Hislop indirectly. Cutner's 1940 Short History of Sex-Worship is a Rationalist Press Association freethought pamphlet with no standing in modern Egyptology. Tyack (1900) and Garnier (1904) are late-Victorian comparative- religion works of a kind Assyriology retired a century ago. The whole genealogy has one source, and that source was publicly retracted in 1997 by Ralph Woodrow, the biggest Evangelical popularizer of Hislop's argument, in a book called The Babylon Connection? Woodrow found that Hislop had fabricated his Assyrian citations. Modern scholarship — Bruce Longenecker's The Cross Before Constantine (Fortress 2015), Larry Hurtado's work on the staurograms, and Steven Hijmans's research on Sol Invictus — converges on the opposite conclusion: the cross appears in Christian use from at least the early second century, long before any alleged pagan corruption. The Watchtower is quoting 1900-era sources as if twentieth-century scholarship never happened. And notice one more thing: even the rs citation of Douglas's New Bible Dictionary is truncated — the rest of that same paragraph says a crossbeam "is held by tradition to be the shape of the cross on which our Lord died ... strengthened by the references in the four Gospels to the title nailed to the cross of Christ over his head." The Watchtower cut the quotation mid-sentence.

Normally, no — and that is exactly why Paul's boast is so striking. Read Galatians 6:14 in your own New World Translation: "may I never boast, except in the torture stake of our Lord Jesus Christ." Paul boasts in the stake. Read 1 Corinthians 1:18 in your NWT: "the speech about the torture stake is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is God's power." Paul calls preaching about the stake God's power. Read Colossians 2:14 in your NWT: "by blotting out the handwritten document ... and he has taken it out of the way by nailing it to the torture stake." Our sin-debt was nailed to the very stake you would like me to forget. Paul is not telling me the stake is beautiful. Paul is telling me the stake is where God cancelled my debt. The rhetorical question rs asks — "would you cherish the instrument of execution of a loved one?" — is the same question first-century Greeks and Jews threw at Paul. Paul's answer was 1 Corinthians 1:23: "we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles." Paul did not dodge the offensiveness of the stake. He said the offensiveness was the point. So the real question is not "would you cherish an execution device." The real question is, "do you agree with Paul that this one execution device is where God's love met God's justice?" If you do, we agree about the cross. If you do not, that is the gospel fault line — not the shape of the wood.

Read verse 5. It is one commandment, not two: "you shall not make for yourself an idol ... you shall not bow down to them or worship them." The condition in verse 5 governs the making in verse 4 — the prohibition is on images made for cultic worship. We know this is the right reading because the same God who gave Exodus 20:4 commanded Moses in Exodus 25:18–22 to make golden cherubim on the ark of the covenant, in Exodus 26:1 to weave cherubim into the tabernacle curtains, and in 1 Kings 6-7 inspired Solomon to fill the temple with carved lions, oxen, palm trees, and pomegranates. If Exodus 20:4 were a blanket ban on representational art, the tabernacle and the temple would have been the most idolatrous buildings on earth. More pointedly still, in Numbers 21:8 God commanded Moses to make a bronze serpent and mount it on a pole, and in John 3:14 Jesus himself used that bronze serpent as the pattern for his own crucifixion: "just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up." God prescribed a representation of a cursed thing on a pole, and then inspired his Son to interpret his own death by means of it. The ban is on worshipping images, not on representing them. And here is the uncomfortable corollary: the Watchtower has printed tens of thousands of illustrations of Jesus on a torture stake in its own literature. If making a depiction of the instrument violates Exodus 20:4, the Watchtower's magazines are idolatrous by its own rule.

That citation is a narrow claim about crucifixes — depictions of Christ's body on the cross — which are genuinely rare before the fifth century, for the simple reason that Christians were under periodic persecution and hid their symbols. But the cross shape itself is everywhere in pre-Constantinian Christianity. The Epistle of Barnabas (around AD 130) reads the number 318 as tau-iota-eta, the tau standing for the cross. Justin Martyr, writing around AD 160, describes the cross as two beams and sees a cruciform pattern throughout creation. Tertullian (around AD 204) records the sign of the cross as already-routine daily Christian practice. Papyri P66 and P75, our earliest New Testament manuscripts, abbreviate stauros with a tau-rho ligature that literally draws a man on a T-shaped cross (Larry Hurtado, The Staurogram in Early Christian Manuscripts). The Alexamenos graffito (around AD 200, Palatine Hill, Rome) is a pagan mocking a Christian for worshipping a crucified figure on a crossbeam — the earliest surviving depiction of the crucifixion, drawn not by a reverent Christian but by a hostile pagan recording what Christians were known to confess. Bruce Longenecker's Baylor-published monograph The Cross Before Constantine (Fortress 2015) documents material evidence of cross-shaped Christian artefacts from across the Mediterranean basin decades before Constantine. The Watchtower's "no early Christians used the cross" claim is refuted by the primary sources.

It is not debatable among scholars — including the ones who are hostile to Christianity. Bart Ehrman, an agnostic NT critic, calls the crucifixion "one of the most secure facts" about Jesus and uses "cross" without qualification. John Dominic Crossan, co-founder of the Jesus Seminar, describes victims carrying the crossbar (patibulum) to the site. Reza Aslan, a Muslim scholar who denies the atonement, uses "cross" throughout his book Zealot (2013) and discusses the titulus nailed above Jesus' head — which presupposes a crossbeam. Martin Hengel's standard academic reference Crucifixion in the Ancient World (Fortress 1977) documents that Roman crucifixion used a crux compacta (two-piece composite). Tacitus, a pagan Roman senator who called Christianity a "deadly superstition," wrote that Christians were "nailed to crosses" (crucibus adfixi). Lucian of Samosata, a pagan satirist who mocked Christians as gullible, referred to their "crucified sage." The Alexamenos graffito (around AD 200), scratched by a hostile pagan to mock a Christian, depicts a figure on a T-shaped cross with arms extended on a crossbeam. Seven independent sources — spanning agnostics, Muslims, pagan Romans, and hostile graffiti artists — all assume or depict a cross with a crossbeam. None adopt the Watchtower position. If the cross were an invention, these hostile witnesses had every motive to expose it. Their silence is evidence.

The phallic reading of Ezekiel 8:17 comes from H. Cutner's 1940 A Short History of Sex-Worship, a British freethought pamphlet from the Rationalist Press Association — the same 1930s school that produced Gerald Massey's Egyptology, which mainstream scholarship retired long ago. The Hebrew word Ezekiel uses, zemorah, means "branch" or "vine-shoot" and is used elsewhere in the Old Testament without any sexual overtones (Numbers 13:23, Isaiah 17:10, Ezekiel 15:2). Your own NWT footnote at Ezekiel 8:17 flags that the original reading was "my nose," not "their nose" — a scribal correction called the Emendations of the Sopherim — which indicates this was a Hebrew idiom for insulting Jehovah, not a phallic rite. Daniel Block's Ezekiel commentary (NICOT, Eerdmans 1997) surveys the options and concludes the verse is either a sun-worship gesture (consistent with verse 16, where the worshippers are facing east toward the rising sun) or a rude provocation idiom — neither connected to the cross. Cutner's phallic-cross genealogy is Hislop restated with different flavouring, and it has no standing in modern Semitics or Egyptology.

Read Galatians 6:14, 1 Corinthians 1:18, and Colossians 2:14 in your own New World Translation. Count how many times Paul mentions the stake without condemning it. Then look up the Epistle of Barnabas (around AD 130), Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho 91 (around AD 160), and Tertullian's De Corona 3 (around AD 204). Ask yourself: did the cross arrive with Constantine in the fourth century, or was it already unmissable in the church a century and a half earlier? Then look up Ralph Woodrow's 1997 book The Babylon Connection?. Ralph Woodrow was the biggest Evangelical defender of the exact pagan-origin argument the Watchtower uses. Ask yourself why he publicly retracted the entire case after checking Hislop against primary sources.