The Quest for the True Cross

Carsten Pieter Thiede is well known for his "discovery" of the earliest known fragment of the Gospel of Matthew in the Bodleian Library. Now he's found a piece of the true cross in a church in Rome, the Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. He tells Rachael Kohn why he's sure it’s authentic.

Rachael Kohn: In mediaeval times fragments of the true cross were the most sought-after relics in Christendom, but most were fakes. Today, one scholar believes he’s found the real thing.

Carsten Pieter Thiede is a papyrologist, and he’s known for his claim to have found the earliest fragment of the Gospel of Matthew in the Bodleian Library. Now he believes he’s discovered a piece of the true cross in a church in Rome, where it’s been kept for the past 1700 years. But this is no ordinary piece of wood from the cross, as Carsten Thiede explains.

Carsten Thiede: The cross as such, there’s two bars or beams, the vertical and the horizontal one, when you look at the actual crucifixion of Jesus or any Roman crucifixion for that matter, what the person to be crucified would have carried to the site of the crucifixion was not the complete cross, it was just the horizontal beam, the horizontal bar.

The vertical one was always in situ, it was at the site. It would have been used and re-used and re-used again, many, many times, over many years. So for that bar, or for one of those two beams or bars, you would not really have any chance of authenticating any of those simply because they are all too small and they could be authentic, but you don’t really know.

The difference, and that was what we were trying to establish, comes into the game when you have something with text on it, with an inscription, which you could gauge from the type of writing and the contents. And that means the headboard, or as the technical term has it, the Titulus, the inscription on the cross of Jesus, that, if it still existed, or a fragment of it, could be authenticated.

That’s exactly what we found, what we established still existed, today in a church in Rome in Italy, which originally, that’s the fascinating thing about it, was the palace of Empress Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great, who is the very person, Helena, who according to tradition, found the cross and headboard in Jerusalem in 328.

Rachael Kohn: And isn’t that attested by various paintings that have commemorated this famous pilgrimage?

Carsten Thiede: The pilgrimage of Helena is recorded in all sorts of contemporary documents, or near-contemporary documents. So we have details about her pilgrimage, and indeed the sites she rediscovered or established, where she built the first church as such in Bethlehem, or indeed in Jerusalem.

Paintings, or those we still have in museums, in galleries in churches, are of course much later, so they’re mediaeval, and you can’t really know, with one or two exceptions. There’s one by Michelangelo, if those people who painted them knew two fragments in the Middle Ages or had access to the inscription for example, you just don’t know that. So we can’t rely on mediaeval paintings in our quest for the true cross.

Rachael Kohn: Now how did Helena come to acquire this Titulus, the inscription at the head of the cross?

Carsten Thiede: Well she went to Jerusalem on her pilgrimage to the Holy Land and from the New Testament everyone knew, even in those days the Gospels had all been published, had been accessible before for 300 years by the time of her pilgrimage, so she made inquiries. She asked the local, the Christian community where is that site, because it wasn’t visible any more, the site of Golgotha and the empty tomb.

Another Emperor, Hadrian, in 135, had actually built a temple dedicated to the Roman goddess Venus above the two sides, the twin sides of Golgotha, and the empty tomb, so all Helena had to do when she was told about this was to pull down the temple, which she did, and underneath she found indeed the hillock of Golgotha and tombs, one of them, according to tradition, was the tomb of Jesus. So that’s how she established the site.

Rachael Kohn: She was in her late 70s or 80s then; how long did she stay in Jerusalem to have this temple pulled down and excavated?

Carsten Thiede: Well she probably stayed for about a year. She stayed for quite some time.

Rachael Kohn: And there under that former temple, she found the cross, and I gather a couple of other crosses too?

Carsten Thiede: Yes, she excavated or had others to excavate on her behalf, underneath the rubble, which was there once the temple had been destroyed, Hadrian’s temple, and so some of her people, her diggers, her fellow archaeologists, found bars, beams of wood of crosses and indeed the inscription, at least one of the inscriptions.

You see what happened was when someone was crucified, the horizontal beam and the inscription, which was not just an inscription for Jesus, anyone who was crucified by the Romans in those days had at least a papyrus or a piece of wood attached to his neck or attached to the cross detailing the reason why that person was crucified. That was Roman law so people would see even from a distance why that person had been crucified. The Titulus is the Latin technical term for it.

So once a person had been crucified, the relatives or friends could take everything that belonged to the crucified person away, including of course the corpse to bury him or her. And so the only one that was found interestingly, by Helena’s archaeologist, was the headboard, the Titulus of the cross of Jesus, with the inscription still intact.

But there were three crosses. Now at that stage, legend takes over. How did they find out which of the crosses was the one of Jesus? And so they took all those crosses to a sick person in her bed and when she touched the real one, she was healed, and so according to this tradition, they knew that this was the cross of Jesus. I must emphasis this is just a legend attached, if you like to the authentic historical record of the rediscovery.

Rachael Kohn: Well the Titulus itself, its inscription, Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews, now that’s what you would expect, certainly from the Gospel accounts. So how do you know that this inscription precedes the Gospel accounts?

Carsten Thiede: Well if you read what it says on the piece of wood that has survived, which is about one-third of the complete inscription, you realise that it’s not word identical with any of the four gospel accounts.

All four gospels mention the inscription, the longest version is the one in John, who also says that he was an eye-witness of the crucifixion, that’s what it actually says in his gospel. So the text on the headboard, which we rediscovered, is not word identical, it does not match any of the four gospel versions. That means of course it can’t be a forgery.

Carsten Thiede: Well it says if you translate it in English, it says ‘Jesus the Nazarinus King of the Jews’. We only have the Greek version of course in the gospels, although John says that it was in three languages. Actually Luke in the better manuscript says the same thing, that the languages were Hebrew and Greek, and followed by Latin as the legal language of the Roman Empire. So the prefect, Pontius Pilate sealed and signed the death warrant in Latin. So we know that. And we have the Greek in the gospels. But in the gospels it actually says 'Jesus the Nazarenus', not the 'Nazarinus'. It’s a tiny detail in the Greek; you won’t notice this in any English translation but it’s there in the Greek, which means of course that anyone who knew the gospels, particularly the one of John, would have copied one of the existing gospel versions which is, as I said, not the case on the PC file in Rome, therefore it can’t be a forgery. A forger copies and existing model so as not to cause suspicion, if you like.

Rachael Kohn: Is there any other extant inscription which makes you think that this one that you’ve got is authentic, and from that time?

Carsten Thiede: Yes there is indeed. First of all we have wood, and wood with texts from that period. There is evidence on wood just south of Hadrian’s Wall in northern England, just south of the Scottish border, which also has survived beautifully in the right conditions for almost 2,000 years. We also have inscriptions on stone from that period which confirm that the particular characteristics of the text and the variants in the text on the surviving piece of wood are early First Century. So that’s the contemporary evidence to show us that it belongs to that period, simply because of the writing and the kind of writing and the type of writing on wood.

Rachael Kohn: Well Carsten, I guess most people would wonder why you simply don’t subject this piece of wood to carbon dating.

Carsten Thiede: What we have done first of all is we have not only analysed as any palaeographer or epigrapher, that is any expert in ancient writings on wood and stone and so forth would do, we’ve analysed the style of writing.

There is one example which prior to the question of radio carbon dating and so forth, gives us circumstantial evidence for Pontius Pilate actually having been behind that very piece of wood, and that’s the Latin line. The Latin line on the piece of wood, it says Nazarinus for Nazareth or of Nazareth, with an ‘i’, whereas we in all our churches where the ‘INRI’ is spelt out, on paintings for example of the crucifixion, the letters are, or the words are ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ and ‘King of the News’ and Nazarenus is spelled with an ‘e’, Nazarenus with an ‘e’ rather than Nazarinus.

Now that’s a later Latin, that’s Vulgate Latin, which is correct for the 4th and 5th centuries, but a Roman bureaucrat like Pontius Pilate of course would have known that the correct Latin ending is Nazarinus with an ‘i’. So we have Nazarinus on the piece of wood, it pre-dates any Latin version of John’s gospel and therefore again can’t be a forgery. It must be long to the period of Pilate and people who knew how to write classical Latin.

We have therefore an authentic document in correct Latin, the bureaucratic correct Latin which points to that period. So you could go on, it’s a long list of things you do. Dendrochronology, dating the type of wood for example, looking for pollen in what’s the kind of circumstantial evidence from that source. The one thing you don’t do finally to answer your question is using radio carbon analysis. And the reason for that is simple.

Any document like that, or that type, and that includes also papyri, papyrus, manuscripts from antiquity, has of course been handled, touched, exhibited, used, over centuries, in this case over two millennia, and that means there’s so much external evidence that has influenced the material that you can’t calibrate it any more. If you analyse anything by radio carbon dating, you have to have external data to calibrate those influences. You can’t do that otherwise you get wrong dates, you get mediaeval dates, or you get even later dates.

Rachael Kohn: Well where is the Titulus now? Does it remain in the church of Santa Croce on the outskirts of Rome?

Carsten Thiede: Well it has been in that church since 328 really, when Helena returned from the Holy Land she put her fragment, one third of it, she left one third in Jerusalem and gave another one to her son, Constantine, Constantine the Great, who at that stage was in Byzantium where Constantinople, modern Istanbul,is and so she kept it there in her private room, which later became a chapel, and is today’s church, it’s always been there. Hardly ever on display until several decades ago, because it was really not an official relic, it was a private possession of Helena and her successors, the mediaeval monastery.

But it’s now on public display, well it’s not actually at the moment, because it’s being restored after all our methods of analysis applied to it, it’s now properly restored, but it’s there, and people will be able to see it. Anyone who goes to Rome and goes to that church, Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, which is its full name, will be able to see it. It’s on display.

Carsten Thiede: Ah well, yes, the security of course has been tightened since we published our analysis in the book. It’s very safe, it really is. I can guarantee that.

Rachael Kohn: Just one last question I mean one would think cynically that this would certainly serve Constantine’s purpose to establish himself as the head of Christendom; couldn’t this just have been a very handy device?

Carsten Thiede: Absolutely. That’s always a very justified question, if anyone, a ruler, had vested, hidden interests in such a matter, therefore the starting point is could it have been a forgery, could anyone have had that laid for Helena or for Constantine. The simple answer to that question is No, that must be ruled out 100%. By the time of Helena’s discovery in Jerusalem, Constantine had long been established as a safe ruler and emperor of the empire, so there was no danger really, or no need for him to use an object like that to establish himself among Christians, like for example the Council of Nicaea had taken place and Nicaea was in 325. The discovery of the Titulus was in 328.

Rachael Kohn: Carsten Pieter Thiede’s book is The Quest for the True Cross and it’s been made into a documentary to be shown on SBS, Easter Monday at 8.30 pm.

Next week we’ll have a look at the Catholic Mass and why it’s about to change. That’s The Ark, with me, Rachael Kohn.

Publications: The Quest for the True Cross
Author: Carsten Peter Thiede & Matthew D'Ancona
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000

Guests on this program:
Carsten Peter Thiede is Professor of New Testament History in Basel, Switzerland, and teaches at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel. He is also a historian and papyrologist and on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority in Jerusalem, he directs damage detection research on the Dead Sea Scrolls. His previous book, written with Matthew d'Ancona, is The Jesus Papyrus.

Further information:
Quest for the True Cross documentary A documentary based on the book will be screened in Australia on SBS TV, Sunday April 11 at 8.30pm.

My speculation was that the "Titulus Crucis" was placed in the tomb of Jesus when his body was interned and of course left there after the tomb went empty. The tomb was never used again. Hadrian built over the area thus preserving this relic.

What of the actual cross "timbers"? I think Carsten Thiede is correct in that those timbers found in Helena's excavation were probably the later construction's cross beams that looked like crucification crosses or to my thinking the crucification scaffolding that was knocked down and built over by Hadrian's builders. Being wooden crucification scaffolding, they probably were not the exact same wood beams used during Jesus' crucification - being replaced as a form of maintenance at the execution sight as the original crucification scaffold beams deteriorated through use and exposure to the elements.

And I should add - that is how I think Helena's excavators determined which was Jesus' actual tomb. The "Titulus Crucis" was found in the tomb.

Carsten Pieter Thiede is a papyrologist, and he’s known for his claim to have found the earliest fragment of the Gospel of Matthew in the Bodleian Library.

It wasn't the Bodleian Library. It was the library of Magdalen College.

Sloppy, sloppy.

He "discovered" the true Cross in a Rome Church that already claimed it was the true Cross?

"Next week we'll have a look at the Catholic Mass and why it's about to change."

I wonder what they mean by that? Ordo Simplex?

This is interesting. I heard talk of this relic back in the 1979-1980 era. I heard a Eygptian archaologist who was in Rome say that he was very impressed by its significance. He had a lot of experience with looking at ancient texts and papyrus. Yet, he said, the religious authorities responsible for the relic did not seem to want it examined or put on display.

Later, the author David Sox, included mention of this relic in his book, Relics and Shrines.

And I should add - that is how I think Helena's excavators determined which was Jesus' actual tomb. The "Titulus Crucis" was found in the tomb.

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