The Greek term xulon (G3586), meaning "tree," is one of two New Testament words used to describe the instrument of Christ's death, the other being stauros, meaning "stake." Xulon appears in passages such as Acts 5:30, where Peter declares that the God of the fathers raised up Jesus, "whom you murdered by hanging on a tree," and in I Peter 2:24, a passage read on Passover evening. This word choice stands in contrast to the later ecclesiastical tradition of the two-beamed cross, a shape whose origin traces not to Scripture but to ancient Chaldea, where it served as a symbol of the god Tammuz, represented by the mystic tau or the letter T, the initial of his name. This pagan symbol predates Christ by at least 1,500 years and appears in virtually every ancient religion except Judaism and Islam. The contrast between xulon and the later cross symbol matters because it exposes how a pagan emblem was absorbed into professing Christianity centuries after the apostolic era. Robert Young's concordance, for instance, correctly renders stauros as "stake," yet his translation of the New Testament inconsistently renders all twenty-eight occurrences as "cross." Vine's Expository Dictionary confirms that stauros properly denotes an upright pole or stake, distinct from the two-beamed ecclesiastical cross, and explains that by the mid-third century AD, apostate church leaders admitted pagans into the church without true regeneration, allowing them to retain their symbols—hence the tau, with its crossbar lowered, was adopted to represent Christ's death. This history is further tied to Emperor Constantine, whose supposed vision led not to the adoption of a cross but of the Greek letter chi, the initial for Christ, as confirmed by commemorative coins and eyewitness accounts. The cross itself was not formally introduced into the Catholic Church until 431 AD, placed on steeples in 586 AD, and fully sanctified as the crucifix only by the sixth century. The deeper point drawn from this word study is not a debate over the precise instrument of execution—whether tree, stake, or cross—but the danger of venerating any physical object, as forbidden in Exodus 20:4-5. The bronze serpent of Numbers 21, later destroyed by King Hezekiah in II Kings 18:4 because Israel had begun burning incense to it, illustrates the same human tendency to shift devotion from God to a tangible symbol. Since xulon testifies that Christ died on a tree while later tradition substituted a pagan cross, no biblical or linguistic connection exists between the Son of God and the sun god Tammuz, and no symbol—however meaningful it may seem—can rightly serve as an object of honor or worship.