THE QUEST FOR THE TRUE CROSS

An examination, sure to provoke controversy, of Christianity’s most powerful symbol.

Does wood from the cross on which Christ was crucified exist in the world today? Many parishioners of Rome’s Santa Croce in Gerusalemme church would say yes. In its recesses, write Swiss papyrologist Thiede and English journalist d’Ancona (Eyewitness to Jesus, 1996), is housed a 25.3-by-14-centimeter section of the titulus, or headboard, that, three of the four Gospels aver, bore mocking words in three languages stating “This is the king of the Jews.” Examining the board without the benefit of dendrochronological and palynological tests, which they urge be undertaken, and arguing instead from linguistic and scriptural evidence, Thiede and d’Ancona assert their belief that the Santa Croce titulus dates from the time of Christ even though other scholars have held it to be a forgery. Their argument, they acknowledge, is in no way definitive, but it at least restores the fragment of wood “to its rightful place in the spectrum of historical probability”—a worthy enough goal given the importance that Christian scholarship places on history and chronology. Of more interest to general readers of biblical and religious history is the authors’ survey of the legend of the cross, bits and pieces of which were traded and fought over even in antiquity, and much of which, it is said, disappeared when the Frankish army that carried the cross as a talisman lost it in battle against the Sultan Saladin. Traditional scholarship holds that the cross itself became a symbol of Christianity only after the Roman emperor Constantine adopted it as his standard, but Thiede and d’Ancona counter, convincingly, that this view is based on questionable evidence and that Constantine (and his mother Helena) simply rediscovered a symbol already widely used by early Christians.

Revisionist history, albeit inconclusive, that’s interesting, well-made, and should attract much attention.