The Golden Age, “How the Cross Superstition Originated”
“The Scriptures state that Jesus was nailed to a [x]ylon (tree) or sta[u]ros (mistranslated “cross”), not to a T-shaped cross.”
A short item in the magazine’s pages of news and comment, arguing from Homer’s use of the Greek word and from the reign of Constantine that the cross is a pagan symbol and that Jesus died on an upright stake.
Scan of original (opens in new tab)
Provenance and verification note for The Golden Age, How the Cross Superstition Originated
Confidence note. The issue’s scan text was downloaded and read on 19 September 2026 and re-read for audit the same day. The page is confirmed twice: the issue’s own contents page lists ‘How Cross Superstition Originated 72’, and the organisation’s index gives the same citation (‘g36 11/4 72’) under the 1936 entry ‘Jesus did not die on cross’. Only the machine-read text layer was read; the page images were not inspected.
Scan provenance. Scan of the issue hosted on the Internet Archive as a reader-uploaded item; the words were read from the item’s optical-character-recognition text layer, not from a publisher’s file. The scan renders the two Greek words as ‘aylon’ and ‘stawros’; the square brackets in the quotation mark the letters restored to the standard transliterations xylon and stauros. Copyright in the original text is held by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania.
Corroborated by. src-chg-p-kr-2014-ch10-refining, src-chg-p-idx-beliefs-clarified-1930-1985
Notes. The organisation’s own index cites this page as the place where the teaching that Jesus did not die on a cross was published.
Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-chg-p-ga-1936-1104-cross