Credible because possible
Jane Gardam
THE QUEST FOR THE TRUE CROSS by Peter Thiede and Matthew d'Ancona Weidenfeld, £18.99, pp. 320
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The publication last month of the great Jewish scholar Vermes' weighty but also rather matey study of Christ in the First Centuu— AD effectively removed some of the poetry and colour from the Gospels. Here on its heels is something for Christian comfort, a book by two other formidable Bible scholars who, like Flanders and Swan in the song, have put it all back. Five years ago Peter Thiede and Matthew d'Ancona, Professor of New Tes- tament history at the University of Basle and Prize Fellow of All Souls, working from the earliest known fragment of Matthew's gospel, claimed, in The Jesus PaPYrus, to have restored the early date and well-loved eye-witness vignettes in the gospels which the Vermes school rejects. This, their second book, was conceived in Jerusalem during the making of a film about the holy Christian places. They decided to investigate the almost-legend of thedisve of the True Cross about 325 ip bycoStry Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine. At the heart of the book is the Titulus „,Cruck, is', the slip of ancient walnut wood c'itch has been kept for centuries in Santa „,,r?ce in Gerusalemme near Rome and there St Helena is said to have brought Jerusalem leaving another fragment in the that has now disappeared, as has be Cross itself. The Titulus is supposed to v! the headboard fixed to the upright of ,ue Cross above Christ's head, the INRI of have Pilate, the 'What I have written I nave written', in its three languages. In he - th me it was venerated for centuries as was Ce Jerusalem fragment. We hear from the "ters of Erigea, a very early pilgrim there, Thee it Was kept under heavy guard as once, The kissing it, someone bit a piece off. th e Roman fragment vanished too and then, centuries on, in 1492, was rediscov- ered in the ceiling of the Santa Croce conks in a small lead box. The Cistercian ita-au's who look after it today, along with ov's and thorns and beams of very dubious an`fn, are half-hearted about the Titulus " there has been no attempt yet to anal- yse the wood and risk the hysteria that fol- lowed the dating of the Turin shroud. Thiede and d'Ancona don't say that they have proved the Titulus to be genuine, only that they have proved that it might be. They challenge the understandable but now almost obsessive view that all relics are fakes.
The Roman fragment looks battered and very frail and the few scant letters crude and hurried, as well they might be if they were knocked out between Christ's sen- tencing and swift march to the Cross. The sign-writer, probably Jewish, writes his Latin and Greek backwards, like Hebrew. There are traces of white paint. These grim notice-boards were called 'alba', from which comes our word 'album'. There are stains of Roman blood-red or black paint deep in the grooves of the letters. It could quite conceivably be as old as the Crucifix- ion, for wood of about that time has been found preserved as soldiers' memo-pads buried near the Roman Wall in England preserved in a tip of mud and urine, not unlike the conditions of the Jerusalem cis- tern where the Cross is said to have been found. But what is more extraordinary than the age of the Titulus is how it found its way to Rome, and here St Helena, star of this book, takes the stage as she does in Evelyn Waugh's novel, Helena, which he considered to be the best novel he ever wrote.
Waugh believed that Helena was born in England, near Colchester, the daughter of jovial old King Coel. A handsome, out- spoken princess mad about horses, she married a Roman soldier stationed at York, camp-followed him across Europe and gave birth to the mighty Christian emperor, Constantine. Alas, Waugh's girl out of Country Life Thiede and D'Ancona say did not exist. Helena was probably humbly born in the Middle East in a pub where there were stables. She may have been a prostitute. But whoever she was it seems to be historical fact that soon after her conversion to Christianity she set off in her late seventies on a huge journey across the Middle East that was to take two years, to find the Cross of Christ.
In Jerusalem she tore down the buildings that covered the holy places and began excavation. She posted off to Rome the flight of steps Christ climbed on His way to meet Pilate, though not before she herself had climbed them on her knees as even Luther was to do centuries later in their new country. Her adventure seems to have been partly carnival, partly the distribution of alms, and it led up to the archaeological coup of all time. Whether she travelled as passionate pilgrim or penitent asking for- giveness for her disgusting, murderous rela- tions or as an astute politician who knew the value of a totem, we don't know. Gib- bon was to wipe her off any serious scene by saying that she 'united the credulity of age with the warm feelings of a recent con- version'. But whatever her motive, these authors believe she was the force behind the most powerful symbol the world has ever known.
Not that she invented pilgrimage or the Chi-Rho cypher of the Cross. One wonders whether she noticed the small, very early graffito in Christ's tomb of a little fishing boat (why no photograph?) and the words of long-dead Christians, 'Lord we have arrived'? And what about the very recent discovery in Bethsaida, St Peter and St Andrew's home town, of a broken wine jug decorated with the Cross that must be older than AD 70. It is odd how much nearer we feel to the country which Christ in His short life never left (pace Blake's `Jerusalem') than to the flailing interna- tionalism of Constantine, two centuries later. This is a totally absorbing book.
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