Sator squares

I’m
learning that one of the interesting learnings about the early Christian church
is the new stuff about the spread of the gospel by the Roman military. Of course, we have known for a long time that
the Romans strictly would not tolerate a Christian in their army. And that 2nd century Christians
would not allow a soldier to convert while on active duty since soldiers
pledged absolute loyalty to the Roman gods and fought for “the greater glory of
Rome!”

Not so fast. The appeal of Christianity which believed in the resurrection and a triumphal life after death was enormous for a guy who laid his life on the line day after day. And then there is that little passage in Phillipians 1:13 “so that my imprisonment I the cause of Christ has become well known throughout the whole praetorian guard and to everyone else,” The praetorian guard was Caesar’s crack and loyal division who surrounded him with protection. What business was the gospel with such SS men? Was there some sort of secret bunch of followers?

Apparently archeologists have discovered what at first appeared as a game in Roman
camps. Almost solely in Roman military camps is found a 5X5 inscription at odd places—on walls, pillars, scratched into pavement, etc.
The inscription is

SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS

They call
it the Sator Square. You’ll notice that
it spells "sator" either forwards or backwards all around the edges and arepo is
just opera spelled backwards. Apparently
Romans loved angiograms and often scratched random letter arrangements with the
challenge to find words in the mélange.
But this particular 5X5 has meaning and every line is a word. Sator means ‘sower’. Arepo is evidently a name. Tenet means ‘holds’. Opera means ‘working’. Rotas means ‘wheel’ So “Sower Arepo (or Arepo the sower) holds the working wheels.” Well, so what? Is this like ‘the quick brown fox…”

Experts in
Roman games say that this 5X5 is different in that it is completely symmetric and
doesn’t hide words. So it seems not so much a game as an inscription meant to
look like a game.

And
wherever it is found and dated, a Christian community seems to magically appear
in the locale within 20 or 30 years. Sator squares followed by Christian churches is found in places as far removed as Hadrian’s Wall in Scotland to barracks in Spain to Egyptian training facilities.

Then
someone thought, hey, you know after the time of Augustus, the empire grew so
large that the Italian Roman army had to recruit all over the empire with the incentive
of gaining Roman citizenship if you served a full term of 20 years. (true Romans
had to serve 8 years). And these foreign guys knew Greek as the universal language and Latin but as second languages. Their spelling and grammar wasn’t too good. Who was the mysterious Arepo? There is no known Roman name like that.
But the Greek has a word, “alepo” which means “almighty” and
pronunciation is almost the same with ‘r’ and ‘l’ being quite similar as said
by ancient Greeks and Romans. Maybe
someone just substituted arepo for alepo since they needed an ‘r’ for symmetry. And so the phrase would be more meaningful, “The almighty sower holds the working of the wheels”. That is to say, God in heaven holds all within His plan.

Then they
found a stone with the Sator square on it and somebody had nearby carved into the shape of a cross that said (both ways),


PATERNOSTRES
and surrounded by a pair of AO'S
Same
letters as the Sator square, rearranged into a cross and “Pater Nostres” is “Our Father” the
beginning words of the Lord’s prayer.
And the leftover A’s and O’s?
Those in Greek would be the Alpha and Omega, signifying Christ. Clearly a Christian got hold of the Sator
square.

But then
they found the baker in Pompeii. The city
was destroyed in 70AD by the Vesuvius eruption and dumped a sudden toxic gas
cloud onto the city and covered it with many feet of volcanic ash. The funny thing about volcanic ash is that as
rainwater percolates through it, it tends to petrify anything organic,
replacing carbons with silicons in a perfect reducing environment. So the delicate fresco paintings were often
preserved, as were dead bodies. The
baker’s shop was obvious. There was a big oven and loaves of bread petrified on
the counters. And the fresco of the
owner and his wife were still proudly smiling over the shop. The owner was not Italian, but a former
foreign soldier, 25 year active, shown proudly clutching his citizenship papers
and named an Illyrian name. Stunningly
enough, he is a Christian. He had carved
a cross above the oven and at various places around the store. Outside, there were some older base
reliefs of those typical Roman porn which
had been plastered over with Christian symbols.
And then in the storage room was a Sator square, along with some
Christian writings around them, referring to the military.
Elsewhere we have found Sator Squares with Christian fish symbols written nearby.

So
apparently to some extent we still don’t know, the Roman army had a secret sect
of Christians who spread the faith far and wide. And the Sator Square seems to have been their clandestine symbol.