St Helen Finds the True Cross

TWENTY feet down, Judas’s spade suddenly rang on some solid object. He smoothed away the sand to uncover the remains of three wooden crosses. But which of them was the cross of Christ himself?*

In some perplexity, the company sat and sang hymns until the ninth hour. It was then that Judas noticed a funeral procession passing out of the city. He snatched up some pieces of the three crosses and laid them, one after the other, on the bier. Suddenly, the dead man - a young man, robbed of life too soon - awoke as if from sleep, and sat upright.

Beginning with the fragment that had brought the young man back from the dead, the true cross was now pieced together.

Nine years later, on September 13th, 335, a magnificent new church was consecrated at the site of the Holy Sepulchre, in place of Hadrian’s pagan temple; and near the place where Christ once died his Cross was raised again, a token of everlasting life.*

Based on ‘Elene’ by Cynewulf fl. ?800

Based on ‘Elene’, by Cynewulf (possibly the 8th century bishop Cynewulf of Lindisfarne).

* One assumes that the mocking board which read ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’ had been lost or detached.

* The feast of the Exaltation of the Cross is kept on September 14th (not the 13th) each year. The nun Egeria visited Palestine at the end of the fourth century, and described seeing the Cross brought out from its silver casket for display on Holy Cross Day. The subsequent history of the Cross relic is turbulent. In 614 the Persians captured Jerusalem and kidnapped the Cross, hoping to use it for political bargaining, but fourteen years later Roman Emperor Heraclius regained both the city and the relic. When the Arabs took Jerusalem in 638, the Cross was smuggled to safety, but split up so that the whole could never be lost or ransomed again. A fragment that Empress Helen had taken and locked up in the royal reliquary in Constantinople was apparently stolen by the Crusaders in 1204. This too was broken up. Some chips went to Rome, Russia, Mount Athos and other spiritual centres; these are quite well documented and altogether would make no more than a third of a Roman-era cross of execution. Across the West, however, so many frauds were distributed that Swiss Reformer John Calvin joked that they were enough to build another Noah’s Ark.

Variations: 1.increase the length of this precis to exactly 60 words. 2.reduce the length of this precis to exactly 50 words. 3.introduce one of the following words into the precis: although, because, if, must, or, until, whereas, who.

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