Titulus Crucis
Encyclopedia
Titulus Crucis is a piece of wood, claimed to be a relic of the True Cross
True Cross
The True Cross is the name for physical remnants which, by a Christian tradition, are believed to be from the cross upon which Jesus was crucified.According to post-Nicene historians, Socrates Scholasticus and others, the Empress Helena The True Cross is the name for physical remnants which, by a...

, kept in the church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme
Santa Croce in Gerusalemme
The Basilica of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem is a Roman Catholic parish church and minor basilica in Rome, Italy. It is one of the Seven Pilgrim Churches of Rome....

 in Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...

. Christian tradition
Sacred Tradition
Sacred Tradition or Holy Tradition is a theological term used in some Christian traditions, primarily in the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox traditions, to refer to the fundamental basis of church authority....

 claims that the relic is half of the cross's titulus
Titulus (inscription)
Titulus is a term used for the labels or captions naming figures or subjects in art, which were commonly added in classical and medieval art, and remain conventional in Eastern Orthodox icons...

(inscription) and a portion of the True Cross. It is generally either ignored by scholars or considered to be a medieval forgery.

The board is made of walnut
Walnut
Juglans is a plant genus of the family Juglandaceae, the seeds of which are known as walnuts. They are deciduous trees, 10–40 meters tall , with pinnate leaves 200–900 millimetres long , with 5–25 leaflets; the shoots have chambered pith, a character shared with the wingnuts , but not the hickories...

 wood, 25x14 cm in size, 2.6 cm thick and has a weight of 687 g. It is inscribed on one side with three lines, of which the first one is mostly destroyed. The second line is written in Greek letters and reversed script
Boustrophedon
Boustrophedon , is a type of bi-directional text, mostly seen in ancient manuscripts and other inscriptions. Every other line of writing is flipped or reversed, with reversed letters. Rather than going left-to-right as in modern English, or right-to-left as in Arabic and Hebrew, alternate lines in...

, the third in Latin letters, also with reversed script.

History

The Church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme was built about 325 AD by Saint Helena (the mother of Emperor Constantine the Great) after her pilgrimage to the Holy Land, during which she reportedly located the True Cross and many other relics which she gave to the new church. The Titulus Crucis is alleged to have been among these relics. Sometime before 1145 the relic was placed in a box which has the seal of a cardinal who became Pope in 1144 and apparently forgotten until February 1, 1492, when it was discovered by workmen restoring a mosaic
Mosaic
Mosaic is the art of creating images with an assemblage of small pieces of colored glass, stone, or other materials. It may be a technique of decorative art, an aspect of interior decoration, or of cultural and spiritual significance as in a cathedral...

, hidden behind a brick with the inscription Titulus Crucis.

Authenticity

In 2002, the University of Arizona conducted radiocarbon dating
Radiocarbon dating
Radiocarbon dating is a radiometric dating method that uses the naturally occurring radioisotope carbon-14 to estimate the age of carbon-bearing materials up to about 58,000 to 62,000 years. Raw, i.e. uncalibrated, radiocarbon ages are usually reported in radiocarbon years "Before Present" ,...

 tests on the artifact, and it was shown to have been made between 980 and 1146 AD. The carbon dating results were published in the peer-reviewed journal Radiocarbon. The Titulus Crucis recovered from the residence of Helena is therefore most likely a medieval artifact; some have proposed that it is a copy of the now-lost original.

At the time of Egeria's pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 383 a "title" was shown as one of the relics at Jerusalem : "A silver-gilt casket is brought in which is the holy wood of the Cross. The casket is opened and (the wood) is taken out, and both the wood of the Cross and the title are placed upon the table." The 6th century pilgrim Antoninus from Piacenza
Piacenza
Piacenza is a city and comune in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy. It is the capital of the province of Piacenza...

 describes a Titulus in Jerusalem and its inscription: it said «Hic est rex Iudeaorum» (Here is the king of the Jews), while the one kept in Rome shows «Iesus Nazarenvs Rex Iudeaorum» (Jesus the Nazarene king of the Jews).

Carsten Peter Thiede
Carsten Peter Thiede
Carsten Peter Thiede was a German archaeologist and New Testament scholar. He was also a member of PEN and a Knight of Justice in the Order of St John. Thiede often advanced theories that conflicted with the consensus of academic and theological scholarship...

 suggested that the Titulus Crucis is likely to be a genuine part of the Cross, written by a Jewish scribe. He cites that the order of the languages match what is historically plausible rather than the order shown in the canonical New Testament
New Testament
The New Testament is the second major division of the Christian biblical canon, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament....

 because had it been a counterfeit, the forgerer would surely have remained faithful to the biblical text. Joe Nickell
Joe Nickell
Joe Nickell is a prominent skeptical investigator of the paranormal. He also works as an historical document consultant and has helped expose such famous forgeries as the purported diary of Jack the Ripper. In 2002 he was one of a number of experts asked by scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr...

refers to this argument as "trying to psychoanalyze the dead." saying that "Forgers — particularly of another era — may do something cleverer or dumber or simply different from what we would expect."

External links

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