Images of Jesus’s Crucifixion did not appear in churches until the tenth century.

[JDPriestly]

Here are excerpts from the article:

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Tragically, in Christianity’s second millennium the Crucifixion expelled paradise from earth. After searching in vain for images of Jesus’s dead body in the ancient churches of the Mediterranean, we found the corpse of Jesus in northern Europe, in a side chapel of the enormous Gothic cathedral in Cologne, Germany. There, among the mottled light and shadows, hangs the Gero Cross, the earliest surviving crucifix, sculpted from oak in Saxony around 965.
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A thousand years after Jesus, the brutal logic of empire twisted the celebration of his life into a perpetual reenactment of his death. The Gero Cross was carved by descendents of the Saxons, baptized against their will by the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne during a three-decade campaign of terror. Charlemagne’s armies slaughtered all who resisted, destroyed shrines representing the Saxons’ tree of life, and deported 10,000 Saxons from their land. Pressed by violence into Christian obedience, the Saxons produced art that bore the marks of their baptism in blood.

Charlemagne also im­posed a Roman Eucharistic rite on Europe, replacing an earlier rite that celebrated the creation of human beings in the image of God with one that spoke of Christ as “pure victim, a holy victim, an unspotted victim.” In 830, the Carolingian theologian Paschasius Radbertus laid out an unprecedented interpretation: the consecrated elements were the material, historical body of Christ, and the bread and cup made the crucified blood and flesh of the Lord present. Theologians in Saxony countered with the traditional doctrine: the glorified, resurrected body—not the crucified body—was present in the ritual. Archbishop Hincmar (806–882) further elaborated Paschasius’s ideas, suggesting that the Mass was a reenactment of Christ’s execution.

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The ninth century’s new focus on the crucified Christ coincided with a shift in the Christian prohibition against the shedding of human blood. For centuries, the church had taught that participation in warfare was evil, that killing broke the fifth commandment, and that soldiers were to perform penance to cleanse their souls from the stain of blood. At the dawn of the Holy Roman Empire, Christianity began to lose its grip on the sinfulness of killing. A new age began—one in which the execution of Jesus would become a sacrifice to be repeated, first on the Eucharistic altar and then in the ravages of a full-blown holy war.

http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/107992.shtml