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SCALA / ART RESOURCE, NY

THE TRUE CROSS. According to the early church fathers, Empress Helena on her pilgrimage to the Holy Land discovered the cross and nails used in Jesus’s crucifixion, as captured in this detail from a larger 14th-century wall painting from the Basilica of the Holy Cross in Florence (Helena oversees the discovery on the far left). These alleged tools of human salvation quickly became prized religious relics of the new Christian empire. However, the New Testament Gospels are silent about how exactly Jesus was fixed to the cross. Even written sources prior to the First Jewish Revolt (66–74 CE) provide few specifics on how crucifixion was typically performed, as both Greek and Hebrew texts use ambiguous words, translated as “hang” and “suspend,” which could imply that little more than ropes were used.