[agere_contra]

In 1870, a Frenchman named de Fleury went round the world and counted all the known pieces of the cross. He measured their size and published his findings in a book: Mémoire sur les Instruments de la Passion.

De Fleury rigorously measured all the known pieces and concluded that if all the surviving relics of the True Cross were somehow reassembled they would add up to about 0.004 cubic meters of wood.

The actual Cross would have been about 0.178 cubic meters in volume. So the known relics come to about 1/50 of the correct volume.

[muir_redwoods]

Measuring existing relics in 1870 in no way accounts for all the pieces bought and sold over the centuries; many such pieces could have been destroyed, lost, discarded as fakes etc. over the years