ABSTRACT
Eusebius describes an early Christian apologist who demonstrated his orthodoxy by defending the integrity of the Gospel, ‘to which nothing can be added, from which nothing can be taken away, by anyone who has determined to live by the Gospel itself’. Biblical exegesis in the form of patristic texts, summaries, florilegia and liturgy accompanied the transmission of Christianity to Britain and Ireland and remained fundamental to theology in the West in the pre-scholastic period. The same world view had influenced the early and widespread Christian identification of the cross with the structure of the cosmos. There are numerous Insular examples of the Early Christian convention of depicting the alpha and omega flanking the glorified Cross or the chi-rho. The two-line inscription the upper frame of the Durham Crucifixion has been described as garbled, but it may constitute a statement of the theological belief which makes possible the imitatio Christi advocated in the lateral inscriptions.
