Me being a curmudgeon here… but even though the BBC is well noted for its high production value documentaries no program can escape the biases of its producers/writers.

Case in point: the recent BBC series The Dark Ages: An Age of Light, hosted by the amiable Waldemar Januszczak, who often takes an artistic look at history, or maybe that should be a look at art history, which just finished its run.

In the first episode Waldemar starts out with the end of the Roman empire, and as you can see from the snap shot on the BBC page he is holding up a Sator Square. Waldemar is in Pompeii holding up that square, and asserts the square is evidence that Christianity was already in Pompeii before 79AD.

Now, that claim may be true, but the square itself doesn’t prove it. For while later Christians incorporated the square into medieval religious buildings, it is unclear if some primal Christianity created the square or, as I think more likely, the square represents a Roman cult practice that later became incorporated into the later syncretic “Christianity”.

The proof offered by Waldemar is the same one you can read at the Wiki page, wherein one can rearrange the letters on the square to read two copies of “PATERNOSTER” with an “A” and “O” left over (implying they stand for the Greek alpha and omega), and furthermore that PATERNOSTER pair can be made into a cross shape by overlapping the “N”s.

Anyway, as I showed upstream here with the anagrams of the latest companion to Dr. Who, anagrams can be pulled out of just about anything. In this case the argument also calls for interpreting only two of the Roman letters as stand-in for Greek letters - special pleading!

And furthermore, to endow word games of Roman letters with magic is not a practice that falls under what anyone would ascribe as early (Palestinian) Christianity, if one expects the origins of Christianity to be a mix of Jewish sects.

It all goes to show about how careful one has to be about trying to find causality.

As a television show The Dark Ages: An Age of Light does it thing in trying to entertain and titillate the audience just enough to keep them watching for 4 hours, but once again we see the urge of producers to give easy answers to issues, issues that call for a deeper questioning to really learn about what is going on.