Editing Labarum (section)

==Vision of Constantine==
[[Image:As-Constantine-XR RIC vII 019.jpg|thumb|300px|A [[follis]] of Constantine ({{Circa|337}}) showing a depiction of his labarum spearing a serpent on the reverse; the inscription reads ''SPES PVBLICA''<ref>J. Arnold, ''The Footprints of Michael the Archangel'' (2013), [https://books.google.com/books?id=LezRAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA53 p. 53].</ref>]]
On the evening of October 27, 312 AD, with his army preparing for the [[Battle of the Milvian Bridge]], the emperor [[Constantine I]] claimed to have had a vision<ref name=EB1911/> which led him to believe he was fighting under the protection of the [[God in Christianity|Christian God]].

[[Lactantius]] states that in the night before the battle Constantine was commanded in a dream to "delineate the heavenly sign on the shields of his soldiers". Obeying this command, "he marked on their shields the letter X, with a perpendicular line drawn through it and turned round thus at the top, being the cipher of Christ". Having had their shields marked in this fashion, Constantine's troops readied themselves for battle.<ref>Lactantius, [http://orderofcenturions.org/documents/lactantius.html ''On the Deaths of the Persecutors'', chapter 44.5].</ref>

From Eusebius, two accounts of a battle survive. The first, shorter one in the ''[[Church History (Eusebius)|Ecclesiastical History]]'' leaves no doubt that God helped Constantine but does not mention any vision. In his later ''Life of Constantine'', Eusebius gives a detailed account of a vision and stresses that he had heard the story from the emperor himself.<ref>Harries, p. 110 - text and footnotes</ref>  According to this version, Constantine with his army was marching somewhere (Eusebius does not specify the actual location of the event, but it clearly is not in the camp at Rome) when he looked up to the sun and saw a cross of light above it, and with it the Greek words ''Ἐν Τούτῳ Νίκα''. The traditionally employed Latin translation of the Greek is ''[[in hoc signo vinces]]''&mdash; literally "In this sign, you will conquer." However, a direct translation from the original Greek text of Eusebius into English gives the phrase "By this, conquer!"<ref>Stephenson, p. 183. Quoting Eusebius, "About the time of the midday sun, when the sky was just turning, [Constantine] said he saw with his own eyes, up in the sky and resting over the sun, a cross-shaped trophy formed from light, and a text attached to it which said, 'By this conquer'" (Eusebius, ''Life of Constantine'', trans. Averil Cameron and S. G. Hall (Oxford, 1999), I.28-32)</ref><ref>Harries, p. 109-111</ref>

At first he was unsure of the meaning of the apparition, but the following night he had a dream in which Christ explained to him that he should use the sign against his enemies. Eusebius then continues to describe the labarum, the military standard used by Constantine in his later wars against [[Licinius]], showing the [[Chi Rho]] sign.<ref>Gerberding and Moran Cruz, 55; cf. Eusebius, ''Life of Constantine''.</ref>

Those two accounts have been merged in popular notion into Constantine seeing the Chi-Rho sign on the evening before the battle. Both authors agree that the sign was not readily understandable as denoting Christ, which corresponds with the fact that there is no certain evidence of the use of the letters chi and rho as a Christian sign before Constantine. Its first appearance is on a Constantinian silver coin from c. 317, which proves that Constantine did use the sign at that time.<ref>Smith, 104.</ref>  He made extensive use of the Chi-Rho and the labarum later in the conflict with Licinius.

The vision has been interpreted in a solar context (e.g., as a [[sun dog]] phenomenon), which would have been reshaped to fit with the Christian beliefs of the later Constantine.<ref>Weiss, P. (2003) ''The Vision of Constantine'', Journal of Roman Archaeology, Vol. 16, pp. 240-245</ref>

An alternate explanation of the intersecting celestial symbol has been advanced by George Latura, which claims that Plato's visible god in ''Timaeus'' is in fact the intersection of the [[Milky Way]] and the [[zodiacal light]], a rare apparition important to pagan beliefs that Christian bishops reinvented as a Christian symbol.<ref>Latura, G. "Plato’s Visible God: The Cosmic Soul Reflected in the Heavens." '''Religions''' 2012, 3, 880-886. http://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/3/3/880</ref>