QUOTE : In order to make any progress we must broaden our question and ask where the point of departure of the New Testament interpretation of the Cross lies. One must first realize that to the disciples the Cross of Jesus seemed at first like the end, the wreck of his enterprise. They had thought that they had found in him the king who could never more be overthrown and had unexpectedly become the companions of an executed criminal. The Resurrection, it is true, gave them the certainty that Jesus was nevertheless king, but the point of the Cross they had to learn slowly. The means of understanding was offered to them in Scripture, that is, the Old Testament, with whose images and concepts they strove to explain what had happened. So they adduced its liturgical texts and precepts, too, in the conviction that everything meant there was fulfilled in Jesus; indeed, that, vice versa, one could now understand properly for the first time from him what things in the Old Testament were really all about. In this way we find that in the New Testament the Cross is explained by, among other things, ideas taken from Old Testament cult theology. The