Eusebius on the True Cross

Abstract

According to a beloved and now generally disbelieved story, the Cross upon which Jesus suffered was discovered some three hundred years after the event by the saintly Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, Rome's first Christian emperor. For centuries, this story enjoyed the greatest vogue, blossoming into a full-blown Legend of the Cross which traced its genealogy all the way back to the Garden of Eden. With the waning of the Middle Ages, however, came new criteria for evidence, and with them a scholarly predisposition to dismiss the discovery, as well as the legend, as pure bunkum. Put together all the pieces of the True Cross, it became common to say, and one could float a fine freighter.