On the brink of the battle which would make him ruler of the Roman Empire, the Emperor Constantine looked into the sky and saw the Christian symbol. He decided to fight in the name of Christ and won. He then made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire.

People telling this story today routinely say that Constantine saw the cross in the sky, but he did not. At that time the cross was not the Christian symbol. What Constantine saw was letters representing Christ's name. That was one early Christian symbol. Another, also representing letters, was the sign of the fish.

In fact, the cross only became an accepted Christian symbol in the latter part of the fourth century, after the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of Rome.

Maybe this was not a coincidence. One of the first things a newly Christian Roman Empire would do would be to outlaw crucifixion.

If that is true, then the cross was adopted by the first generation that had not actually SEEN a crucifixion.

It may be that seeing a real crucifixion would keep a person from reminding himself that Christ died that way. It was a hideous, ugly death, nothing like the idealized portraits we see.

The creed I was raised on declared my belief in "the resurrection of the body." The Bible refers to the body as the temple of the soul. So for centuries, no matter how desperately medical science might have needed to dissect actual bodies, no one in a Christian country was allowed to do it.

If you look at the depiction of Death in many medieval manuscripts, you will see the results of this ban on dissection. Death was represented as a skeleton, and the skeletons were totally wrong when it came to the hipbones. Neither artists nor doctors had seen real human hipbones, so the picture they had of them were the ones doctors went by.

Can you imagine what effect this crazy idea of the hipbones had on the delivery of babies?

Dissecting human bodies was outlawed throughout most of Christendom until the late nineteenth century. But in the last half of the nineteenth century, all the screaming Bible-thumpers suddenly forgot they had ever opposed human dissection.

The timing was no accident. Medicine made giant leaps forward in the late nineteenth century, and people began to hope that their diseases would be cured by the new science.

Christians began to use the cross as their symbol, but only after they no longer saw that horrible instrument in use. Christians stopped using the Bible to ban dissection when the benefits of medical science became obvious.

In 1800, almost every preacher demanded the outlawing of human dissection. By 1900, almost every preacher advocated human dissection. But the Bible had not changed.