Why did the texts get written first in Greek and later Latin? After all, the Romans were always in control, not Greeks.
And why would the icons always be officially the Cross as we know it?
Tertullian was from North Africa, Carthage specifically, in what is modern day Tunisia. He spoke and wrote in Latin. Greek was the predominant language of the eastern half of the Roman Empire and also served as the lingua franca of the empire, both East and West. Latin was the imperial language, the language of the Senate, of Roman law, etc. Latin was spoken in the western half of the Empire, but Greek was also used for widespread communication.
The New Testament was written in Greek, specifically the common Greek known as Koine, because that was a language almost everyone could communicate in throughout the Empire. Christians predominantly wrote in Greek, even in the West, for that reason. Tertullian is the first known Christian writer who wrote in Latin, though there were many Latin writers who came after him, especially in late Antiquity (such as Ambrose, Augustine, and Jerome). Many originally Greek writings were later translated into Latin, just as Scripture was translated into Latin from Greek (the Old Latin manuscripts, as well as the later Vulgate of Jerome). As the Roman Empire's power waned in late Antiquity and the early Medieval period, the use of Greek tended to be restricted to the Eastern Roman Empire (what we would come to call the Byzantine Empire), and local Christian writers began to write chiefly in their own native and local tongue and dialects: Latin in the West, Syriac and Coptic in the East. Just as Armenian Christians wrote in Armenian, Ethiopian Christians wrote in Ge'ez and later Amharic; or even how many Christians in the middle east use Arabic after the Arabization of the region. But during the height of Roman hegemony over the Mediterranean, Greek was the language of trade, commerce, diplomacy, and inter-cultural communication. That's why Greek was the favorite writing of the time, not just for Christians, but people in general.
And as I said, when Christians began depicting Jesus' crucifixion, the shape of the cross was already firmly established in Christian thought and tradition. They already were convinced that Jesus was crucified on a T/t-shaped cross, because that's how Christian writers described it, and its the most reasonable inference to make given the historical and biblical material.
The reason why some modern groups insist that Jesus was crucified on an upright stake alone (a crux simplex) rather than one with a crossbeam as traditionally depicted is because of an anti-Catholic bias that was at its height in the 19th century (and early 20th century) when those groups came into existence (such as the Jehovah's Witnesses). It was part of a larger cultural anti-Catholicism that existed both in the United States and the United Kingdom at the time in what were predominantly Protestant cultures. It was this environment which also produced Alexander Hislop's mess of a work known as The Two Babylons which largely contains ideas Hislop pulled straight from his hindquarters without any basis in fact whatsoever, as well xenophobic movements such as
Nativism in the United States. This cultural anti-Catholicism became embedded in many of the Neo-Protestant sects and movements that originated in the time period, which was also often coupled with romantic notions of Christian
Primitivism and Restorationism. Hence the birth of movements and groups such as Mormonism, Adventism, Christadelphianism, the Stone-Campbell Movement, and the Jehovah's Witnesses; not to mention more "mainstream" Primitivist movements within established Protestant movements, such as
Landmarkism.
-CryptoLutheran
