A Pre-Constantinian Obsession With A Lowercase Letter?

The ever insightful and consistently clever Mike Aquilina zings the post-enlightenment tendency to accuse Christianity of being something invented by the emperor Constantine, especially in light of the findings of some recent archaeological digs:

All this, of course, runs counter to what I learned in school, and probably to what most people learn in school today. It has, for generations, been commonplace to say that there were no crosses before Constantine. The standard current textbook in Christian archeology states flatly that there was “no place in the third century for a crucified Christ, or a symbol of divine death.”

If cruciform figures appeared in digs, they were dismissed as random scratches, mere geometric ornamentation, or later “contaminations” in early strata. The argument followed a circular logic:

1. We know there were no crosses before 300 because we’ve never found any.

2. When we seem to find crosses, we know they’re late or not really crosses, because of course there WERE no crosses before 300.

3. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I've encountered similar opposition among the goose-stepping legions of the historical-critical regime in regards to prophecy and dating biblical texts. Their logic might run:

1. Everybody knows that nobody but Orwell and Huxley can foretell events.

2. Anyone who pre-dates the Age of Reason who appears to have foretold an event (particularly in a religious text) had to have recorded that foretelling after the fact of its occurence in a retroactive futuregazing poetic style.

3. If we do find a text that could be construed as predating an event that it foretells, we have to assume that it was not talking about the event that came after it that fits that description, but an event that came before it that might share a characteristic or two with the event that happened after the writing was written, because history repeats itself in very specific ways.

Ah, the wisdom of the age.