True Cross

The late fourth-century historians Gelasius of Caesarea and Tyrannius Rufinus wrote that while Helen was there, she discovered the hiding place of three crosses that were believed to have been used at the crucifixion of Jesus and the two thieves, Dismas and Gestas, who were executed with him.

[2] In the Latin-speaking traditions of Western Europe, the story of the pre-Christian origins of the True Cross was well established by the 13th century when, in 1260, it was recorded by Jacobus de Voragine, Bishop of Genoa, in the Golden Legend.

[4] In the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance, there was wide general acceptance of the account of the cross's history as presented by Voragine.

According to the sacred tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Church the True Cross was made from three different types of wood: cedar, pine and cypress.

(Compare with the Jewish concepts of the Ark of the Covenant or the Jerusalem Temple as being God's footstool,[7] and the prescribed Three Pilgrimage Festivals, in Hebrew aliya la-regel, lit.

[citation needed] The Life of Constantine by Eusebius of Caesarea (died 339) is the earliest and main historical source on the rediscovery of the Tomb of Jesus and the construction of the first church at the site, but does not mention anything concerning the True Cross.

Eusebius' work contains details about the demolition of the pagan temple and the erection of the church, but does not mention anywhere the finding of the True Cross.

The cross of Jesus was identified, with the aid of Bishop Macarius of Jerusalem, by its miraculous affecting of a cure for a mortally ill woman.

[12] In his Ecclesiastical History, nearly a century after Eusebius and forty years after Rufinus, Socrates Scholasticus (died c. 440) gives a description of the discovery later repeated by Sozomen and Theodoret.

Without further attribution, he also adds that it was said that the location of the Sepulchre was "disclosed by a Hebrew who dwelt in the East and who derived his information from some documents which had come to him by paternal inheritance"—although Sozomen himself disputes this account—so that a dead person was also revived by the touch of the Cross.

Theodoret (died c. 457) in his Ecclesiastical History Chapter xvii gives what would become the standard version of the finding of the True Cross: When the empress beheld the place where the Saviour suffered, she immediately ordered the idolatrous temple, which had been there erected, to be destroyed, and the very earth on which it stood to be removed.

He caused a lady of rank, who had been long suffering from disease, to be touched by each of the crosses, with earnest prayer, and thus discerned the virtue residing in that of the Saviour.

Another popular ancient version from the Syriac tradition replaced Helena with a fictitious first-century empress named Protonike, who is said to be the wife of emperor Claudius.

In the 8th century, the Feast of the Finding was transferred to 3 May and 14 September became the celebration of the "Exaltation of the Cross", the commemoration of a victory over the Persians by the Byzantine emperor Heraclius, as a result of which the relic was recovered and returned to Jerusalem.

The Sassanid Emperor Khosrau II ("Chosroes") removed the part of the cross held in Jerusalem as a trophy after he captured the city in 614.

[21] Some scholars disagree with this narrative, with Constantin Zuckerman going as far as to suggest that the True Cross was actually lost by the Persians and that the wood contained in the allegedly still sealed reliquary brought to Jerusalem by Heraclius in 629 was a fake.

In his analysis, the hoax was designed to serve the political purposes of both Heraclius and his former foe, recently turned ally and father-in-law, the Persian general and soon-king Shahrbaraz.

[23] Around 1009, the year in which Fatimid caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah ordered the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Christians in Jerusalem hid part of the cross and it remained hidden until the city was taken by the European soldiers of the First Crusade.

Arnulf Malecorne, the first Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, had the Greek Orthodox priests who were supposedly in possession of the Cross tortured in order to reveal its location.

During lauds on each Good Friday, the Latin relic was carried across the church to the chapel of Calvary on its south side, the supposed site of Jesus's crucifixion, and then venerated by the barefoot patriarch, the sepulchre's canons, and the assembled pilgrims until sext.

While some Christian rulers like Richard the Lionheart of England,[27] the Byzantine emperor Isaac II, and Queen Tamar of Georgia sought to ransom it from Saladin,[28] the cross was not returned.

[31] According to the 15th-century Book of Ṭeff Grains, the emperor Dawit I received four fragments of the True Cross around the year 1400 from Coptic Christians as thanks for his protection.

[32] The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church claims these relics are still held at either Egziabher Ab or Tekle Maryam, two monasteries near the former imperial cemetery on Amba Geshen.

An inscription of 359 found at Tixter, in the neighbourhood of Sétif in Mauretania (in today Algeria), was said to mention, in an enumeration of relics, a fragment of the True Cross, according to an entry in Roman Miscellanies, X, 441.

"In the small part is power of the whole cross", says an inscription in the Felix Basilica of Nola, built by bishop Paulinus at the beginning of 5th century.

By the end of the Middle Ages so many churches claimed to possess relics of the True Cross, that John Calvin is famously said to have remarked that there was enough wood in them to fill a ship: There is no abbey so poor as not to have a specimen.

"[41] It is possible that many alleged pieces of the True Cross are forgeries, created by travelling merchants in the Middle Ages, during which period a thriving trade in manufactured relics went on.

[42] Santo Toribio de Liébana in Spain is also said to hold the largest of these pieces and is one of the most visited Roman Catholic pilgrimage sites.

This piece was gifted by the Venetian Republic to the Ethiopian Empire in the medieval period and remained in the Atse Emperor's personal possession into the 18th century, even being lost in battle, before being buried atop Amba Geshen.

In Eastern Orthodox churches everywhere, a replica of the cross is brought out in procession during Matins of Great and Holy Friday for the people to venerate.