The True Cross

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In the days of Constantine the Great, the cross on which Jesus died was “rediscovered” in Jerusalem. Tradition gives Constantine’s mother, Helena, full credit for the find. Today, visitors to Jerusalem are shown the very spot, in a cistern beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where the empress is said to have unearthed not only the true cross, but the nails that punctured Jesus’ hands and feet, the crosses of the two thieves who died beside Jesus, and the plaque, naming Jesus “King of the Jews,” that hung on his cross.

For her efforts, Helena was named a saint by the Roman Catholic and Eastern churches; in art, the cross became her symbol. In more recent times, she has been hailed as the first biblical archaeologist. But did Helena actually find the true cross? And if not, how did this legend, kept alive in Renaissance paintings and today’s popular press, arise?¹

Before evaluating the veracity of the legend of the true cross, we should review what many scholars agree we do know about Helena. Several historical sources provide us with some basic facts about Constantine’s mother. One of the most detailed is the Life of Constantine, written by the church father Eusebius of Caesarea in about 339 C.E.

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From Eusebius and other early writers, we know that Flavia Iulia Helena (her official name) was born in about 248/249 C.E.,² probably in the harbor town of Drepanum, in Bithynia (modern Turkey).³ After her death, her son Constantine renamed the town Helenopolis.

The mother of the Roman emperor was of humble social origins. The late-fourth-century bishop Ambrose of Milan identifies her as a stabularia, which might suggest that she worked as a servant in an inn. The pagan historian Zosimus (c. 500) calls her a harlot. The Christian author Philostorgius (c. 368–c. 439) seems to agree, describing her as “a common woman not different from strumpets.”

Helena and Constantine’s father (Constantius Chlorus) never married, but lived together in concubinage. Not that anybody would have minded. Concubinage was widely practiced since the days of Augustus (27 B.C.E.–14 C.E.), when couples of different social status were prevented from marrying legally (iustum matrimonium). Even Christian moralists like the church father Jerome (c. 345–420 C.E.) and the historian Orosius (early fifth century C.E.) found such relationships acceptable, as is indicated by their unabashed acknowledgment of Helena as Constantius’s concubina.

Constantine was born to Helena and Constantius in 272 or 273 C.E. In 289, Constantius left Helena to marry Theodora, daughter of Augustus Maximian, who ruled over the Western Roman empire while Diocletian ruled in the East. (In the late third century, Emperor Diocletian [r. 284–305], had created the tetrarchy, which divided power among four rulers; two in the East, two in the West. The senior emperors, Diocletian and Maximian, held the title Augustus; they were assisted by two Caesars, Galerius and Constantius, who were next in line for the throne.) For Constantius, it was a political marriage, resulting in his own accession to the throne as Augustus in the West in 305 C.E.

When Constantius died suddenly a year later, Constantine was proclaimed emperor by the troops of his father and he seized control in the West. Around this time, Helena apparently joined Constantine’s court, which stayed regularly in Trier (in modern Germany) and Rome.⁴ A ceiling fresco (above) from the early-fourth-century imperial palace in Trier is believed to depict her.⁵

Constantine’s claim to the throne was contested by Maximian’s own son Maxentius, who also declared himself Augustus in the West. In 312 C.E., at the famous Battle of the Milvian Bridge, just outside Rome, Constantine defeated the army of Maxentius and thus firmly established himself as ruler in the West. Eusebius claims that on the eve of the battle, Constantine dreamed that if he carried the sign of the cross into the battle he would win. When Constantine succeeded, he attributed the victory to the Christian God.

Rome became Constantine’s capital, and Helena moved to the Eternal City soon after. In 324 C.E., Constantine defeated 027Augustus Licinius, then ruler of the Eastern empire, and became sole ruler of the united Roman empire. In 330 C.E., he transferred his capital from Rome to Byzantium, which he renamed Constantinople.

The period of Constantine’s rise to power witnessed a shift in Roman policy toward Christians. Under Diocletian (284–305 C.E.), Christians had been savagely persecuted. Churches were destroyed, books were burnt, and Christians were imprisoned, tortured and killed. In 313 C.E., a year after the Battle at the Milvian Bridge, Constantine proclaimed the Edict of Milan, which ended these persecutions and granted Christians freedom to worship.

Eusebius reports that Constantine’s mother converted to Christianity under her son’s influence. Eusebius notes that Constantine made her such a devoted servant of God that it seemed as if she had from childhood been taught by the Redeemer himself.⁶ If Eusebius is right, and Constantine was responsible for Helena’s conversion, it must have occurred after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, when Constantine first displayed sympathy towards Christians and Christianity. Whether or not Constantine is responsible for her conversion, we do have evidence of her early faith: Sometime after she became a Christian, Helena transformed part of the Palatium Sessorianum, her palace in Rome, into a chapel or church called the basilica Heleniana, now known as Santa Croce in Gerusalemme (see photo of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in this article).⁷

The most memorable event of Helena’s Christian life was her journey to Palestine and other Eastern provinces from 326 to 328 C.E., when she was in her late 70s. Eusebius describes the trip as a pilgrimage.⁸ Quoting Psalm 131:7 (from the Greek Septuagint: “Let 028us worship at the place where his feet have stood” [in English Psalm 132:7, “Let us worship at his footstool”]), Eusebius writes that Helena wished to pray at the places where Jesus’ feet had touched the ground. Eusebius describes at length Helena’s piety, her humility, her good deeds, her generosity and her charity.

Despite what Eusebius says, personal piety was not the only motive behind Helena’s trip. After Constantine became sole emperor in 324, he began actively promoting Christianity in the East. He built 029churches—primarily in Palestine—and curbed pagan cults by not allowing pagans to set up cult statues or consult oracles, and by forbidding pagan state dignitaries to sacrifice while on duty. Within a few years, the religious atmosphere in the East changed dramatically. Practically for the first time ever, Christians in Palestine and the East experienced religious freedom, while pagans learned what it meant to have their worship restricted. Helena may well have been sent East (it is clear from Eusebius that she visited the Eastern provinces in general as well as Palestine) to help spread Christianity and to suppress unrest and pagan worship.

Whatever the motive for the trip, Helena gained fame as a devout pilgrim. According to Eusebius, in Palestine Helena consecrated two churches built on sites associated with Jesus: the Eleona Church, adjacent to the alleged spot of the Ascension of Jesus on the Mount of Olives (Eleona comes from the Greek for “olive”), and the Church of the Nativity, in Bethlehem.⁹ Eusebius never mentions the act that brought Helena her greatest celebrity, however: the discovery of the true cross. As we shall see, he had good reason not to.

A handful of later sources do describe Helena discovering the true cross. In 395 A.D., about seventy years after Helena made her journey east, Bishop Ambrose of Milan (in a funerary oration for Emperor Theodosius) related how Helena searched in Jerusalem for the cross. According to Ambrose, Helena found three crosses, that of Jesus and those of the two thieves who were crucified on either side of him.¹⁰ Helena suspected the middle cross to be Jesus’, but feared that the crosses might have changed places over time. Only when she found the titulus—the plaque reading Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum (Jesus the Nazarene King of the Jews) that the Gospels tell us Pontius Pilate attached to the cross (John 19:19)—did she know that she had identified the right one.

Ambrose’s Latin account of the discovery of the cross is our earliest version of the story and it was long thought to be the most original version. We now know of a slightly earlier Greek text, recorded in a Church History written in 390 by Gelasius, bishop of Caesarea, at the request of his powerful uncle Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem from about 350 to 387, as is suggested by the preface.¹¹ The text not only brings us closer to the men who first recorded Helena’s legend, it also suggests why they may have been inspired to create the tale out of whole cloth.

Gelasius’s original Greek text is lost, but it has been partly reconstructed on the basis of texts of later church historians. Moreover, we have an early-fifth-century Latin translation¹² that gives a good sense of the original Helena legend, as textual and historical analysis makes clear. In this version, here summarized, Helena identifies the true cross through its miraculous powers:

The pious Helena was advised by divinely sent visions to go to Jerusalem to search for the Cross. She made an enquiry among the inhabitants of the city to find the place where it was buried. The spot was hard to find since persecutors of the Christian faith had built a sanctuary for Venus over it, and the place was therefore forgotten. When the spot was pointed out to her by a heavenly sign, she tore down the sanctuary and found three crosses lying in disorder. Despite the fact that the titulus was also there, she did not know which Cross was the one of Christ. With the help of Macarius, bishop of Jerusalem, the True Cross was identified. One by one while praying to God he brought down the crosses into contact with a mortally ill woman. When touched by the Cross of Christ the woman suddenly opened her eyes and got up, all her strength restored. After the Cross had been identified in this way, Helena built a church over the place where she had discovered the Cross. Part of the Cross she sent to Constantine but she also left a part in Jerusalem. Also the nails which had attached Christ’s body to the Cross, she sent to her son. From some of these he had a horse’s bridle made, for use in battle, while he used others to add strength to a helmet, equally with view to using it in battle.

The same essential story is repeated in several fifth-century sources.¹³ The most popular medieval version is the so-called Judas Kyriakos legend (known from Syriac manuscripts, dating to about 500 C.E.), in which a Jew named Judas looks for and finds the cross for Helena, and consequently converts to Christianity.¹⁴ In the 13th century, Jacobus de Voragine borrowed heavily from the Judas Kyriakos legend when he described the discovery of the true cross in his Golden Legend, a once wildly popular collection of apocryphal tales and saints’ lives. The Judas Kyriakos legend as retold by de Voragine is frequently illustrated in late medieval and Renaissance art (see “The Chapel of the True Cross”).

The earliest version of the legend, quoted above from Gelasius, includes several historical details that make the story seem authentic:

First, Macarius (312–334 C.E.) was bishop of Jerusalem when Helena was there.

Second, from the mid-second to early-third century, a pagan temple did stand on Golgotha, the site where Jesus died and was buried. The traditional (and, most scholars today believe, historical) site of Golgotha is a rocky outcropping where the Church of the Holy Sepulchre now stands. Archaeologists have revealed that from about the seventh to the first century B.C.E., the 650- by 475-foot area known as Golgotha was a 030quarry for building materials.¹⁵ In the early Roman period, however, the quarry was covered with soil and the area was cultivated, which explains why John 19:41 mentions a garden at the site of the crucifixion and burial: “At the place where he had been crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, not yet used for burial; there … they laid Jesus.” According to Eusebius, in about 135 C.E., emperor Hadrian built a temple to Venus at Golgotha to prevent Christians from worshiping there.¹⁶ Archaeologists have uncovered remains of Hadrian’s temple.

Third, archaeology and numerous historical sources confirm that in the fourth century, a church was built on the site of this pagan temple: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which, after many renovations, still stands in the Christian Quarter of the walled Old City of Jerusalem.^a

Fourth, according to several early- to mid-fourth-century sources, the church held relics of the true cross (see for example, the pilgrim Egeria’s description of the annual veneration of the relics in the first sidebar to this article).

But none of the earliest sources, including Eusebius in the 330s, associates Helena with the discovery of the cross or the construction of the Holy Sepulchre. Constantine, in letters describing the construction of the church, doesn’t. The Bordeaux pilgrim who visited Jerusalem in 333 describes the building of the Holy Sepulchre very succinctly but does not mention Helena or the discovery of the cross. Gregory of Nyssa (died c. 385), St. Jerome (c. 340–420), John Chrysostom (c. 347–407) and the pilgrim Egeria (380s) all mention the relics of the cross in the Holy Sepulchre—but none credits Helena with their discovery.

Even Bishop Cyril of Jerusalem—who would later (in the 380s C.E.) commission his nephew to write the Church History that included the legend of Helena’s discovery of the cross—does not mention Helena in his earliest writings about the cross. Around the year 350, Cyril—whose seat was the Holy Sepulchre—mentions the presence of the lignum crucis (wood of the cross) in his church;¹⁷ according to Cyril, fragments of the cross had been distributed throughout the empire, and a great devotion to the cross had developed. A year later, Cyril writes 031that the cross was found in the days of Constantine the Great. But he says nothing about Helena.¹⁸

Eusebius’s Life of Constantine provides a detailed account of the construction of the Holy Sepulchre. According to Eusebius, shortly before Helena arrived in Palestine, Constantine started building churches commemorating Jesus’ life and Passion: These included the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the Eleona Church—and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Before work could begin on the Holy Sepulchre, Constantine had to raze Hadrian’s pagan temple on Golgotha. Eusebius records not only that Constantine demolished the pagan sanctuary but that the site on which it stood was “excavated to a great depth and the pavement [was] carried away with the rubble a long distance outside, because it was stained with demonic bloodshed [that is, it had been used for pagan sacrifice].”¹⁹ When layer after layer was excavated, Eusebius writes, “the testimony of the Savior’s resurrection [that is, Jesus’ empty tomb], was against all expectation revealed, and “the cave, the holy of holies, took on the appearance of a representation of the Savior’s return to life.”²⁰ Constantine instructed the authorities in the Eastern provinces to build a magnificent church—superior to all others—on the site.

But that’s not all they found. Eusebius also quotes a letter Constantine wrote to Bishop Macarius of Jerusalem, in which Constantine tells the bishop that his excavations on the site of the church had uncovered “the token of that holiest passion,” which had long been hidden under the ground and which had now been found.²¹ The “holiest passion” is Jesus’ death by crucifixion. The “token” of that passion can only be the cross.

A plausible sequence of events is that the construction of the basilica was undertaken because Jesus’ tomb was thought to have been covered by Hadrian’s temple of Venus. During the excavation work, the 033cross—or at least a chunk of wood believed to be the cross—was found.²² The discovery inspired Constantine to write to Macarius and tell him to spare no expense in the construction and decoration of the church that would mark the spot.²³ The church intended to mark Jesus’ tomb came to be “as much the church of the Cross as it was of the Holy Sepulchre,” as one scholar has suggested.²⁴ Helena was not involved at all. Indeed, she probably hadn’t even arrived in Jerusalem when the work began.

So why is it that some seventy years later a fully developed story about Helena’s discovery of the cross was included in the Church History of Gelasius of Caesarea?

The presence of the true cross helped establish Jerusalem as a predominant Christian city and pilgrimage destination. It is hard to imagine today why this was necessary, but in the late fourth century Jerusalem was just emerging as a major center of Christianity. The port city of Caesarea had long been the more important city. Caesarea was the seat of the Roman governor and the administrative center of Palestine, and, in the official church hierarchy, the bishop of Jerusalem was subordinate to the metropolitan bishop of Caesarea. In the second half of the fourth century, Bishop Cyril of Jerusalem was locked in a power struggle with the bishop of Caesarea.

The conflict was further complicated by the fact that the bishops of Jerusalem and Caesarea were on opposite sides of a major fourth-century debate over the nature of God the Father and God the Son. The Jerusalem bishops adhered to the orthodox view, decided on at the Council of Nicaea (325 C.E.), that God the Father and Son were “of the same substance” (homoousion) and thus equal. The bishops of Caesarea favored Arianism, a religious belief, deemed heretical, which stated that God the Son was of a different substance and thus in some way inferior to God the Father.

The presence in Jerusalem of holy sites such as Golgotha and the tomb of Christ was instrumental to Cyril’s attempts to gain a position of power over Caesarea. But, most important of all was the presence of the relics of the cross. For Cyril, the cross was the Christian symbol par excellence, and its relics provided a direct, immediate and unbroken link with Christ. As Cyril mentioned repeatedly, the cross represented the glory of the church. It was a source of illumination and redemption, a source of life, not death; it was a crown of glory, not dishonor. It was a symbol that united the faithful. As Cyril wrote, “Every deed of Christ is a cause of glorying in the Church, but her greatest glory of all is the cross of Christ.” According to Cyril, the presence of the relics of the holy wood proved Jerusalem’s importance. Their presence also justified for Cyril the primacy of his city in the ecclesiastical province of Palestine.

In Cyril’s time, the connection between the cross and Jerusalem was both strengthened and widely promoted. The discovery was celebrated each year in Jerusalem. The pilgrim Egeria, who visited Jerusalem from 381 to 384 C.E., describes the ceremony surrounding the annual display of the relics in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.²⁵

The connection between Jerusalem and the cross seemed to receive divine sanction when, in the fourth century, there were two sightings of a celestial cross in the skies over Jerusalem. One took place in 363 C.E., during the reign of Emperor Julian the Apostate, who had rejected Christianity in favor of paganism but who maintained respect for the Jews and made plans to rebuild the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. The project failed, as described (fantastically) by the church father Gregory of Nazianzus: An earthquake and storms forced the Jewish workers to leave the site, fire burst out from the Temple foundations killing and wounding many Jews, and in the skies above Jerusalem, a luminous cross appeared^b—which was interpreted by Gregory as a warning from God.²⁶

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A second appearance of a celestial cross took place in 351 C.E. We know of this appearance from the writings of Cyril, who described it in his Letter to Constantius, Constantine’s son and the Roman emperor at the time. Cyril writes that the cross filled the sky over Jerusalem for most of one day, inspiring all the city’s inhabitants, Christian and non-Christian alike, to flock to the church and affirm their faith in Christ.

In this letter, Cyril attempts to promote the special relation not only between Jerusalem and the symbol of the cross, but also between the Jerusalem church and the imperial family. Flattering the emperor by calling him pious and benevolent, Cyril suggests that God caused this miraculous, celestial appearance of the cross in Jerusalem in order to show that he approved of Constantius’s reign. Indeed, Cyril suggests that God prefers Constantius to his father, Constantine. According to Cyril, Constantine’s piety was rewarded with the discovery, in his day, of the true cross in the ground; but Constantius received the even greater glory of seeing the cross in the heavens.

In a world in which the emperor had great power over the church, it was extremely important for a bishop to have imperial support. Jerusalem bishops had enjoyed that support in the days of Constantine. In this letter, Cyril was trying to regain it.

The legend of Helena’s discovery of the cross served the same purpose as Cyril’s Letter to Constantius; it uses the appearance of the cross in Jerusalem to strengthen the ties between Jerusalem and the imperial house. In the legend, Helena, as representative of the imperial house and the only member of it to have visited Jerusalem around the time the cross was allegedly found, works closely with Macarius, bishop of Jerusalem at the time, in finding and identifying the cross. The ties between Jerusalem and the imperial house are further strengthened when, in the end, Helena leaves part of the cross in Jerusalem and sends another piece to her son, Constantine.

Could it be that Cyril himself invented the legend of Helena and the cross in order to cement the relationship between the bishop of Jerusalem and the imperial house?

If so, Cyril succeeded in his efforts. He was allowed to appoint his own nephew Gelasius, over whom he clearly had the upper hand, as bishop of Caesarea. Jerusalem became the center of the church in Palestine. It is not without significance that it was this same nephew who first wrote down the legend and made it part of his Church History. It was an implicit acknowledgment of the powerful position of Jerusalem and his own subordination to his uncle.

Whether or not Cyril is the author of our legend, the fact remains that we have no reliable historical evidence linking Helena to the discovery of the cross. Indeed, she never even lived to hear the story that would make her so famous. Within a year or two after her journey to the East, and several decades before her name came to be associated with the cross, Helena died, in the presence of her son Constantine.²⁷ She was buried in a mausoleum near her palace in Rome.²⁸ The porphyry sarcophagus that once contained her remains is now in the Vatican Museum and her relics are kept in S. Maria d’Aracoeli in Rome.

A splintered fragment of the cross Helena was said to have found eventually made its way to Rome; it was interred in her palace chapel, which was renamed Santa Croce di Gerusalemme (Holy Cross of Jerusalem), the name it still bears (see the second sidebar to this article).

Helena’s discovery of the cross—a story 061that was probably concocted for political reasons by an astute Jerusalem bishop—had been sanctified. Helena’s name was linked indelibly with the cross she never found.²⁹

In the days of Constantine the Great, the cross on which Jesus died was “rediscovered” in Jerusalem. Tradition gives Constantine’s mother, Helena, full credit for the find. Today, visitors to Jerusalem are shown the very spot, in a cistern beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where the empress is said to have unearthed not only the true cross, but the nails that punctured Jesus’ hands and feet, the crosses of the two thieves who died beside Jesus, and the plaque, naming Jesus “King of the Jews,” that hung on his cross. For her efforts, Helena was named a […]