"Best wishes J.C."
Posted on 08/02/2013 8:47:28 AM PDT by Daffynition
Archaeologists digging around an ancient church in Turkey say they’ve made a startling discovery and unearthed a piece of the cross that used to crucify Jesus.
The diggers found a stone chest this week and inside were several relics believed to be tied to the crucifixion. Among them was a piece of the actual cross upon which Jesus was nailed, one historian with Turkey’s Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts said in the Hurriyet Daily News.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Well I suppose you have to label it before you deny it, denounce it and burn it. And for sure they will.
It says they found “several relics believed to be tied to the crucifixion.” So what else did they find, besides the piece of the cross, I wonder?
Reputed pieces of the true cross were very common in the middle ages. No telling how many ships could have been build from them all.
It is said that during the Middle Ages so many “pieces of The Cross” were sold around Europe, that you could build a number of very large boats with all of them.
Grave robbers would break up skeletons into “holy relics.”
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.
This Holy Feast (which begins the Dormition Fast on the New Calendar) was yesterday!
The Feast was connected with the City of Constantinople, so the Wood they found has at least some chance of being genuine!
It it is genuine, it does not belong in Muhammadan hands, or in the hands of analysts. It belongs to the Church, and should be venerated, not analyzed.
Perhaps the object will validate itself by a miracle, which will discomfit the Turk and put it in the hands of the Orthodox Church.
Such things have happened in the past! Lord have mercy!!!!
Actually, I doubt that it can be true. I remember that the pieces of the real cross were sold during the fifties over WXEG 50,000 watt radio from Monterrey, Mexico, along with an autographed photo of Jesus, suitable for framing.
I’m not for Missouri, But SHOW ME!
Why the Orthodox Church?
One would think that if we were meant to worship the wood of the cross, Scripture would have mentioned the disciples saving it.
Keep in mind, crucifiction was not uncommon and to the Roman’s, Jesus was just a common criminal, like the other two thieves that day. I doubt they gave each criminal a brand new cross. Wood was kind of hard to come by in Israel and it took a lot of work to cut and rip the wood, chip out the cross pieces and assemble it. Crosses were re-used. It was Roman Government property and not free for the taking.
The Romans certainly weren’t going to keep it for the collectors value. The Roman Guard was too busy trying to keep up the charade that someone stole the body and overcame a dozen Roman soldiers. They were trying to stay un-executed.
Based on that, in my humble opinion, this is all a bunch of baloney. We should worship the true God of the Bible and not some old piece of driftwood.
"Best wishes J.C."
It's possible that the Centurion traditionally known as 'Longinus' - he who said 'truly this was a/the Son of God" - had custody of the Cross after the crucifixion. All we know of the man was that he was in awe of Christ. He could spirited the Cross away in whole or in part.
Or perhaps Pilate had it left it at the crossroads outside of Jerusalem so that everyone would get the benefit of the anti-Sanhedrin message he had had written on the titulus.
You don't know. I don't know. We certainly can't say that there cannot be any pieces of the Cross around today based on this lack of knowledge.
Also: relics are generally not worthy of worship. They are instead venerated and held in high regard.
The exception comes with relics such as the Shroud. I imagine that these would emphatically be worthy of worship because Christ's blood is on them.
Hope this was helpful.
No big deal; there was a forest full of that wood bought and sold in the middle ages.
A ‘forest’ which was rigorously measured in the 19th century.
The total volume of known cross splinters amounts to 0.004 cubic meters.
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
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