Where the Sign of the Cross Came From
I stumbled on the original post about a week ago when I was looking for something else[happy dance] and got the name of the book. 60 seconds later it was in my Amazon cart and shortly thereafter headed to my house. I had to READ almost the whole book to find the quote I was looking for….but I’ve got it. I am putting it here for two reasons. First, I think it’s a really cool story. Second, I want to be able to find it again.
Most Evangelicals remember how Philip met an Ethiopian eunuch on the road to Gaza.The eunuch believed and was baptized, and the two went their separate ways (Acts 8:26-39). The eunuch went to what is now Sudan. Histoically reliable tradition tells us that there was only one other early missionary contact with this part of Africa–the apostle Matthew went there as a missionary.Because of the difficulty of traveling in that part of the world, there was no more outside Christian contact for about three hundred years. As Warren H. Carroll recounts in his history, when Christian missionaries again made the trip, they found that much of Christianity had been lost. One thing that struck the missionaries however, was the the Africans knew how to make the sign of the cross. Given their isolation, there are only two reasonable explanations: either, during the short time they interacted, Philip taught the eunuch to cross himself and the eunuch passed the practice on; or Matthew himself taught the Africans directly. Either way, the practice of making the sign of the cross can be traced directly back to the apostles themselves.
Of course, it might be said that the Bible never teaches us to make the sign of the cross. True. The practice actually appears to predate the writing of the New Testament. It was never written about because it was never questioned. The early Christians believed in a harmony between physical and spiritual worship. ~~from Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic by David B. Currie (page 151)
