The anchor can also be seen as a sort of fishhook with the approaching fish representing converts for whom the Apostles were “fishing,” while the superimposed symbol for Christ served as the bait on the hook, what the convert symbolically eats, the flesh of Christ that nourishes the spirit’s hunger. This first Christian symbol, therefore, seems to represent the act of evangelism more vividly than the Cross itself, illustrating missionaries as “fishers of men.”
Centuries later, the Renaissance printer from Venice, Aldus Manutius, would adopt this symbol as his own device, reputedly after observing it on an ancient coin of the Emperor Titus:
Today, this is also the logo for Doubleday Books:
According to the entry for “Anchor” in The Catholic Encyclopedia:
During the second and third centuries the anchor occurs frequently in the epitaphs of the catacombs, and particularly in the most ancient parts of the cemeteries of Sts. Priscilla, Domitilla, Calixtus, and the Coemetarium majus. About seventy examples of it have been found in the cemetery of Priscilla alone, prior to the 4th Century. In the oldest of these (2nd Century) the anchor is found associated with such expressions as pax tecum, pax tibi, in pace, thus expressing the firm hope of the authors of these inscriptions that their friends have been admitted to Heaven. (Emphasis added.) (59)
So, there are no fewer than 70 examples of the anchor from just one of the ancient Christian catacombs. And these symbols inhabit the oldest parts of those sites. In contrast, we have scant few examples of the Cross, as the same entry from the Catholic Encyclopedia confirms:
The rare appearance of a cross in the Christian monuments of the first four centuries is a well-known peculiarity; not more than a score of examples belong to this period. Yet, though the cross is of infrequent occurrence in its familiar form, certain monuments appear to represent it in a manner intelligible to a Christian but not to an outsider. The anchor was the symbol best adapted for this purpose, and the one most frequently employed. (Emphasis added.) (60)
Curiously, the anchor was by far the more common way to depict the Cross than the Cross itself during the first four centuries after Christ.
Despite its nearly universal use among the earliest Christians, the dolphin-and-anchor symbol was phased out in favor of the Cross after Christianity was instated as the Roman religion by Constantine. From the middle of the 3rd Century, the anchor’s use as a Christian symbol is found only rarely in monuments. By the early 4th Century, it virtually disappears. (61)
In Hagia Sophia in Istanbul (formerly Constantinople), which was constructed as a Christian basilica in the 6th Century, we still see panels adorned with dolphins and a trident that are strikingly similar to those we saw earlier in the oldest catacombs and in Flavian monuments:
Dolphin-and-trident motif, Hagia Sophia, 527 CE
The Catholic Encyclopedia refers to these dolphin-and-trident symbols thus: “To the same category of [dolphin-and-anchor] symbols, probably, belongs the group of representations of the dolphin and trident.” (62) The same may be said of the Flavian use of both dolphin-and-anchor and dolphin-and-trident symbols.
Of course, we can already begin to see compelling reasons for these earliest Christian symbols to be discontinued under Constantine.
The dolphin-and-anchor or dolphin-and-trident motifs obviously have distinctly pagan roots and parallels, even according to some of the earliest Church fathers, to the exclusion of Jewish sources. This alone may have been reason enough for phasing them out in favor of a symbol that was unique to Christianity after Christianity had become the state religion of Rome.
And yet this in turn only begs the question: Why would the earliest Christians represent themselves with pagan and imperial symbolism in the first place—Christians who were even closer to their imperial source?
Emphasizing their alleged persecution in Roman times, Christians often venerate their saints for being unable to worship the Romans’ pagan deities. A true Christian could never sacrifice animals or even offer incense for the safety or well-being of the emperor, even on pain of martyrdom. Paganism was such anathema to early Christians, we are told, that they refused to eat food that had been sacrificed to any emperor or pagan god. It was this commitment to strictly exclusive monotheism that is said to have pitted the early Christians against Roman society and caused their alleged persecution.
By this understanding it is difficult to see why Christians would adopt a symbol directly imported not from Judaism or their own creative imaginations but straight from imperial pagan propaganda currently in circulation on Roman coins. Moreover, the fact that they chose the symbol of not just any Roman emperor but the very emperor who fulfilled Jesus’s prophecy about his Second Coming is impossible to reconcile with the traditional understanding of Church history.
Since these pagan symbols predate the use of the Cross, the traditional explanations for Christians using them make little sense. As we have already observed, the reasoning that they were adopted as substitutes or disguises for the Cross presupposes that pagans were aware of the Cross as a Christian symbol and might have reacted negatively to it. But, as we have seen, the Cross was not used before the anchor or the fish as a Christian seal. Something that had not yet existed would not need to be disguised as something else. And the policy of the Roman government was not negative toward Christians. There was no need to hide anything.
We shall now see evidence that, rather than being a ruse to cover their tracks from purported Roman oppressors, using these pagan symbols had the opposite motive. It is highly probable that Christians chose them not to hide their opposition to Roman authority but to advertise their affiliation with it, instead.
It’s time to take a deeper look at this symbol that the Flavians and Christians shared and where it came from.
II.
Religion and Propaganda
As we have seen, the symbol below was used by both a Roman emperor and early Christians. However, this is not from a Christian catacomb but is a 2nd Century BCE mosaic floor of the House of the Trident on Delos, the sun-drenched island sacred to the sun god Apollo and alleged to be his birthplace:
Symbol of the god Apollo at Delos, 2nd Century BCE
So we can see that hundreds of years earlier, the dolphin-and-anchor symbol used by Christians and Titus had been used as a symbol of Apollo by the Greeks who ruled the kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean.
This symbol was originally devised for Apollo because, according to a famous story from Homer, the sun god was once transformed into a dolphin, making the animal sacred to him.
King Seleucus I (c. 358-281 BCE), Alexander the Great’s general who founded the Seleucid dynasty of Middle Eastern potentates, declared himself to be the son of the god Apollo. He adopted his divine father’s symbol on inscriptions, like this one: