The True Cross: Splinters of a Legend

Sometime in the 380s, a pilgrim from the western edge of the Roman world, a woman named Egeria, stood in Jerusalem on Good Friday and watched a ritual she described in a letter to the women of her community. The bishop sat at a table on Golgotha. A silver-gilt casket was opened, and pieces of wood were laid out. One by one the faithful came forward, bent down, touched the wood with their forehead and eyes, and kissed it. Deacons stood around the table and watched closely, because someone had once, Egeria reports, bitten off a piece and carried it away. This is one of the earliest eyewitness descriptions of the relic venerated as the True Cross.

How the story is told

• The discovery legend. By the end of the fourth century, Christians told how Helena, mother of the emperor Constantine, found the Cross in Jerusalem around 326–328. It lay beneath a pagan temple built over Golgotha by Hadrian. Bishop Ambrose of Milan tells the story in his funeral oration for the emperor Theodosius (395). Eusebius, a contemporary of Constantine and Helena, describes Helena's pilgrimage and Constantine's Church of the Holy Sepulchre but does not mention the finding of the Cross. That silence is often noted.
• Variant legends. In other versions a Jew named Judas (later Judas Cyriacus) reveals where the Cross is, or the true cross is told apart from the two thieves' crosses by a healing miracle. These are legends.
• Veneration in Jerusalem is well documented from the 380s (Egeria). The feast of the Exaltation of the Cross (14 September) grew from the dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

A relic that multiplied

• Distribution. Fragments were sent across the Christian world: to Rome (Santa Croce in Gerusalemme), Constantinople, and later to many medieval churches. The Persian king Khosrow II captured the Jerusalem relic in 614, and the emperor Heraclius restored it in 630.
• Calvin's jibe (1543). In his Treatise on Relics, John Calvin wrote that if every fragment were gathered together, they would make "a good shipload", though one man had carried the cross.
• Rohault de Fleury's count (1870). The French architect Charles Rohault de Fleury catalogued and measured the known fragments. He calculated that together they made up only a small fraction of the estimated volume of a Roman cross. That answers Calvin's arithmetic. It does not establish that any fragment is genuine.

Symbology

The cross as the central Christian sign. The cross became Christianity's defining symbol from the fourth century on, after Constantine. Relic, image and gesture (the sign of the cross) reinforce one another.

The staurotheke. Reliquaries of the True Cross, often in the form of a double-barred cross, were made as theological objects. The famous Byzantine Limburg Staurotheke is one: gold, enamel and gems arranged as a map of heaven around the wood.

The legend as art. The Legend of the True Cross traces the wood from Adam's grave to Helena's discovery. It became a great fresco cycle, most famously Piero della Francesca's at Arezzo (c. 1452–1466), and joins Eden, Solomon and Calvary in one symbolic history.

Connections

Patristic Christianity (ch22), Byzantium (ch60), the Reformation (ch31), and the other Passion relics in the Vault: the Holy Lance (V05), the Crown of Thorns (V06) and the Shroud (V04).

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/true-cross.html