also, 'Three Hundred'. He signifies, therefore, Jesus by two letters, and the cross by one." (τίς οὖν ἡ δοθεῖσα αὐτῷ γνῶσις; μάθετε, ὅτι τοὺς δεκαοκτὼ πρώτους, καὶ διάστημα ποιήσας λέγει τριακοσίους. τὸ δεκαοκτὼ ι’ δέκα, η’ ὀκτώ· ἔχεις Ἰησοῦν. ὅτι δὲ ὁ σταυρὸς ἐν τῷ ταῦ ἤμελλεν ἔχειν τὴν χάριν, λέγει καὶ τοὺς τριακοσίους. δηλοῖ οὖν τὸν μὲν Ἰησοῦν ἐν τοῖς δυσὶν γράμμασιν, καὶ ἐν τῷ ἑνὶ τὸν σταυρόν). This allegorical interpretation, reading the writer's familiarity with the execution crosses and the numeral system of his time back into the situation of centuries earlier, evidently very different from modern Biblical criticism, is considered to be a classic example of midrashic interpretation of Scripture then in use among Jews and Early Christians. Clement of Alexandria (c. 150 – c. 215) gives the same interpretation of the number τιη’ (318), referring to the cross of Christ with the expression "the Lord's sign": "They say, then, that the character representing 300 is, as to shape, the type of the Lord’s sign, and that the Iota and the Eta indicate the Saviour’s name" (φασὶν οὖν εἶναι τοῦ μὲν κυριακοῦ σημείου τύπον κατὰ τὸ σχῆμα τὸ τριακοσιοστὸν στοιχεῖον, τὸ δὲ ἰῶτα καὶ τὸ ἦτα τοὔνομα σημαίνειν τὸ σωτήριον). In the same chapter of his book, and again on the basis of the shape of the letter τ, Clement says the 300-cubit length of Noah's ark was seen as a foreshadowing of the cross of Christ: "there are some who say that three hundred cubits are the symbol of the Lord’s sign" (εἰσὶ δ' οἳ τοὺς τριακοσίους πήχεις σύμβολον τοῦ κυριακοῦ σημείου λέγουσι). William Barclay notes that, because the letter T is shaped exactly like the crux commissa and because the Greek letter T represented the number 300, "wherever the fathers came across the number 300 in the Old Testament they took it to be a mystical prefiguring of the cross of Christ". Tertullian (c. 155 – c. 240), writing in Latin, remarks that the Greek letter τ and the Latin letter T have the same shape as the execution cross: "Ipsa est enim littera Graecorum Tau, nostra autem T, species crucis". Non-Christians too of the time when in the Roman Empire criminals were executed by crucifixion, considered identical the shape of the execution cross (σταυρός in Greek) and that of the letter tau. In the Trial of the Court of the Vowels of Lucian (125