Greek Roots · letter 19 of 24
The mark, a letter shaped like a cross, and the last word from one.
Phoenician · c. 1000–800 BC
Phoenician taw: a mark: a cross or an X.
Archaic Greek · c. 750–500 BC
The cross slid its bar to the top and became T.
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 clean t, with no puff of breath after it, that is theta's job.
Written t in scholarly books.
Its number
300
it is letter 19, the gap is the lost letters, which kept their numbers
Its name means
mark, cross (from taw)
in Phoenician, not in Greek
Borrowed from
Phoenician taw
Well established
Tau's Phoenician ancestor was literally a cross-shaped mark, and Christian writers noticed early. In Ezekiel 9 a mark, the Hebrew word is taw, is set on the foreheads of those who are spared, and in the script of Ezekiel's day that mark was drawn as an X or a cross.
The New Testament itself never makes that connection. It is the church fathers who do, and the Hebrew hall lays out the taw material in full. What Greek adds is one word: tetelestai.
John records one word from the cross: tetelestai. It is a perfect tense, completed, and standing completed. Not “I am finished” but “it has been brought to its end.”
The same verb turns up on ordinary papyrus receipts of the period, where it means a debt discharged, paid in full. That is not a secret code hidden in the text; it is simply what the word meant in daily life, and knowing it puts the sentence in the right register.
Telos is not merely the stopping point; it is the point aimed at. So when Paul says Christ is the telos of the law, translators have to choose between “end” and “goal,” and the Greek will carry either, which is exactly why the verse is argued over.
τελέω
teleō — to finish, complete
The verb behind tetelestai, “it is finished.”
Open the word→
τέλος
telos — end, goal
The point aimed at, not just the point reached.
Open the word→
τύπος
typos — mark, pattern, type
The dent a blow leaves. Thomas wants to see the typos of the nails; Paul says Adam was a typos of Christ.
Open the word→
Around the turn of the second century, the Epistle of Barnabas reads Abraham's 318 trained servants (Genesis 14:14) as a hidden sign. Written in Greek numerals, 318 is ΤΙΗ: tau for 300, and iota-eta for 18, the first two letters of IHΣΟΥΣ. So Barnabas sees Jesus in the iota and eta, and the cross in the tau.
This is the single best proof that Christians were doing letter-arithmetic on Scripture very early. It is also a strained reading, and both things are true at once: the 318 sits in a Hebrew narrative and only becomes ΤΙΗ once somebody writes it out in Greek numerals, which Abraham's chronicler did not do.
Read this way by: Epistle of Barnabas 9:7-9 (c. AD 70-135), Apostolic Fathers
Barnabas and the 318 servants
The number 318 is given in a Hebrew text using Hebrew counting. Turning it into Greek letters is a step Barnabas takes, not a step the text takes, and the same procedure applied to other numbers produces results nobody would defend. The passage is excellent evidence about what second-century Christians did, and poor evidence about what Genesis meant.
