MannaFest

Greek Roots · letter 17 of 24

Rho

The head — and half of the monogram Constantine put on a standard.

How the shape crossed the sea

Phoenician · c. 1000–800 BC

Phoenician resh — a human head in profile.

Archaic Greek · c. 750–500 BC

The head became a loop on a stem — the shape Latin later gave a leg to make R.

The classical capital · the New Testament's own letters

Every New Testament manuscript was written in capitals like this one — no lower case, and no spaces between the words.

The Phoenician drawing is the same one the Hebrew hall uses for that letter — at this date the two scripts were one alphabet in two neighbouring hands. The archaic Greek form is simplified from published hand-copies of the early inscriptions, not a facsimile of any single stone: early Greek scribes varied wildly, and wrote right to left as readily as left to right.

Sounds like

A rolled r. At the start of a word it takes a rough breathing and is written rh — which is why English has “rhythm” and “rhetoric.”

Written r in scholarly books.

Its number

100

it is letter 17 — the gap is the lost letters, which kept their numbers

Its name means

head (from resh)

in Phoenician, not in Greek

Borrowed from

Phoenician resh

Well established

Rho is the second letter of Christos, and that is why it appears on a thousand church walls. Laid across a chi it makes the chi-rho, ☧ — the first two letters of Christ's title, folded into one sign.

The famous date is AD 312, when Constantine had his soldiers mark their shields before the battle at the Milvian Bridge. Two ancient writers describe it: Lactantius, who was alive at the time, and Eusebius, who says he heard the story from the emperor himself.

The honest footnote is that Constantine did not invent the mark. The chi-rho already existed in ordinary Greek writing as a scribe's abbreviation. What happened in 312 was that a working shorthand became an imperial banner.

Where the New Testament uses this letter

The root of Jesse, the root of David

Rhiza means root. Isaiah promises a shoot from the stump of Jesse and a root that will stand as a signal to the nations; Revelation picks the image up twice and puts it in Jesus' own mouth — “I am the root and the offspring of David.”

Both at once: the root that David came from, and the branch that came from David.

Words that begin here

ῥῆμα

rhēma — word, utterance

The thing said. Paired with logos, the message — but the two are not a fixed system.

Open the word→

ῥίζα

rhiza — root

The root of Jesse, the root of David, and the root of all kinds of evil.

Open the word→

ῥύομαι

rhyomai — to rescue, deliver

To snatch out of danger — the verb in “deliver us from evil.”

Open the word→

How readers have read this letter

✧The staurogram — a picture of the cross, a century before Constantinea reading

There is an older combination than the chi-rho, and it is stranger. In the earliest Gospel papyri we have — P45, P66, P75, copied somewhere around AD 175 to 225 — the words for “cross” and “crucify” are written with tau and rho combined, ⳨. The loop of the rho sits on the crossbar of the tau, and it looks very much like a head on a cross.

Many readers take it as the earliest surviving Christian picture of the crucifixion: not a symbol placed beside the text, but one written into it, inside a word.

Read this way by: A reading of the manuscript evidence associated with Larry W. Hurtado's work on early Christian scribal habits

◈Contested ground — where these readings are argued againstcontested

  • The staurogram — a picture of the cross, a century before Constantine

    That the tau-rho compendium appears in those papyri is straightforward manuscript fact. That it was intended as a picture of the crucified figure is an interpretation — the combination also existed as a plain abbreviation in non-Christian writing, and the scribes left no note telling us what they meant by it.