The Finding of the Cross and the Nails

When the business at Nicaea had been settled as described above, the priests went home. The emperor was overjoyed that unity of belief had been restored in the catholic church. Wishing to express, for himself, for his children and for the empire, the gratitude toward God that the bishops’ agreement stirred in him, he ordered a house of prayer to be built to God at Jerusalem, near the place called Calvary. At the same time his mother Helena went to the city to pray and to visit the holy places. Her zeal for Christianity made her eager to find the wood that had formed the cross, which is worthy of adoration. But it was no easy matter to discover either this relic or the Lord’s tomb. The pagans, who had persecuted the church in earlier times and had used every trick to wipe out Christianity when it was first preached, had hidden the spot under a great heap of earth, raising up what had been low ground, as it looks now. To hide it all the more thoroughly, they had enclosed the whole place of the resurrection and Mount Calvary inside a wall, decorated the entire area, and paved it with stone. They also built a temple to Aphrodite and set up a small statue, so that anyone who went there to worship Christ would seem to be bowing the knee to Aphrodite. In this way, as time went on, the true reason for worshiping at that place would be forgotten; and since Christians would not dare to go there freely or point it out to others, the temple and the statue would come to be thought of as belonging to the pagans alone. [a]

In the end, however, the place was discovered, and the fraud so zealously kept up there was exposed. Some say the facts were first made known by a Hebrew who lived in the East and got his information from documents he had inherited from his father. But it seems truer to suppose that God revealed it by signs and dreams, for I do not think human information is needed when God judges it best to make something known. When, at the emperor’s command, the place was dug out to a great depth, the cave from which our Lord rose from the dead was discovered. Not far from it three crosses were found, and also a separate piece of wood on which these words were written in white letters, in Hebrew, in Greek and in Latin: “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.” As the sacred book of the Gospels relates, these words were placed over Christ’s head by order of Pilate, the governor of Judea. But there was still the difficulty of telling the divine cross from the others. The inscription had been torn off it and thrown aside, and the cross itself had been thrown aside with the others, with nothing to tell them apart, when the bodies of the crucified were taken down. For according to the history, the soldiers found Jesus dead on the cross, took him down, and handed him over to be buried; while to hasten the death of the two thieves crucified on either side of him, they broke their legs, then took down the crosses and threw them out of the way. It was no concern of theirs to lay the crosses down in their original order, for it was growing late, and since the men were dead, they did not think it worth staying to see to the crosses.

So knowledge more divine than any man could supply was needed to tell the divine cross from the others, and this revelation was given in the following way. There was a woman of rank in Jerusalem who suffered from a most grievous and incurable disease. Macarius, the bishop of Jerusalem, went to her bedside together with the emperor’s mother and her attendants. After praying, Macarius made signs to those watching that the divine cross would be the one which, when it touched the sick woman, took away her disease. He brought each of the crosses to her in turn. When two of the crosses were laid on her, it seemed nothing but foolishness and mockery to her, for she was at the gates of death. But when the third cross was brought to her in the same way, she suddenly opened her eyes, regained her strength, and at once sprang from her bed, well. It is said that a dead person was brought back to life in the same way. Once the revered wood had been identified in this way, the greater part of it was placed in a silver case, in which it is still kept in Jerusalem. But the empress sent part of it to her son Constantine, together with the nails by which the body of Christ had been fastened to it. From these, it is said, the emperor had a headpiece and a bit made for his horse, in keeping with the prophecy of Zechariah, who was speaking of this time when he said, “What is on the bit of the horse will be holy to the Lord Almighty.” These things were known long before to the holy prophets and foretold by them, and at last, when God judged that they should be brought to light, they were confirmed by wonderful works. Nor does this seem so remarkable when one remembers that even among the pagans it was admitted that the Sibyl had foretold that it would be so: “O most blessed tree, on which our Lord was hung.” [d] Our most zealous opponents cannot deny this fact, and so it is plain that the wood of the cross, and the adoration it received, were made known beforehand. [e]

We have told these events exactly as they were handed down to us by very careful men, who received the account in succession from father to son; and others have recorded the same events in writing for those who come after.