Church by Charlemagne. They have nothing to do with the actual teachings of Jesus. The original Christians did not proselytize by the sword. The first crucifix with a dying Jesus on it is from some time around 800 B.C. Prior to that time, the cross was not a symbol of blood and conquest.
Here is an interesting article on this subject:
The Eucharist in ancient churches was celebrated as the feast of life, not as the reenactment of a death. As the leaders prepared, the people greeted one another in peace and reconciliation by clasping hands, embracing, or kissing. Then the great offertory processional began. Members brought gifts to support the church and offered foods for the Eucharist meal. Bread was universally served, but so were other fruits of the harvest. Bishop Hippolytus of Rome (170–236) explained, “In offering fruits, roses and lilies, the believer was celebrating the goodness of God who had given them to him. He read the names of God in the fruits of the earth, and God read the homage of love in the heart of the offerer.” Some churches included olive oil, olives, fresh milk, cheese curds dressed with honey, grilled fish, salt, water, or wine as well. Red meat was universally banned, reflecting a Christian desire to avoid associations with Roman animal sacrifices. When the Eucharist liturgies referred to sacrifice, they called it “bloodless,” which meant that prayer was their holy sacrifice.
. . . .
Tragically, in Christianity’s second millennium the Crucifixion expelled paradise from earth. After searching in vain for images of Jesus’s dead body in the ancient churches of the Mediterranean, we found the corpse of Jesus in northern Europe, in a side chapel of the enormous Gothic cathedral in Cologne, Germany. There, among the mottled light and shadows, hangs the Gero Cross, the earliest surviving crucifix, sculpted from oak in Saxony around 965.
. . . .
What brought about these changes? Why did Christians turn from a vision of paradise in this life to a focus on the Crucifixion and final judgment? How did images of terror, torture, and the desolation of the earth come to permeate the religious imagination of Western Christianity?
A thousand years after Jesus, the brutal logic of empire twisted the celebration of his life into a perpetual reenactment of his death. The Gero Cross was carved by descendents of the Saxons, baptized against their will by the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne during a three-decade campaign of terror. Charlemagne’s armies slaughtered all who resisted, destroyed shrines representing the Saxons’ tree of life, and deported 10,000 Saxons from their land. Pressed by violence into Christian obedience, the Saxons produced art that bore the marks of their baptism in blood.
http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/107992.shtml
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