Jerusalem. The Biography

he was in Emperor Diocletian’s entourage. Now keen to celebrate his success at Nicaea and project the sacred glory of his empire, he decided to restore the city and create what Eusebius (Bishop of Caesarea and the emperor’s biographer) called ‘The New Jerusalem built over against the one so famous of old’. Constantine commissioned a church that befitted Jerusalem as the cradle of the Good News. But the work was accelerated by the emperor’s murderous domestic troubles.
    CONSTANTINE THE GREAT: THE FAMILY KILLINGS
     
    Soon after Constantine’s victory, his wife Fausta denounced his eldest son (by an earlier marriage) Crispus Caesar for a sexual offence. Did she play on Constantine’s new Christian chastity by claiming that Crispus had tried to seduce her or that he was a rapist? Was it actually an affair turned sour? Crispus would not have been the first young man to have an affair with his stepmother nor the last to want one, but perhaps the emperor was already jealous of Crispus’ military successes. Certainly Fausta had every reason to dislike this obstacle to the rise of her own sons.
    Whatever the truth, Constantine, outraged by his son’s immorality, ordered his execution. The emperor’s Christian advisers were disgusted and the most important woman in his life, his mother, now intervened. Helena had been a Bithnian barmaid and possibly never married his father, but she was an early convert to Christianity and was now the Augusta – empress – in her own right.
    Helena convinced Constantine that he had been manipulated. Perhaps she revealed that Fausta had actually tried to seduce Crispus, not vice versa. Redeeming one unforgivable murder with another, Constantine ordered the execution of his wife, Fausta, for adultery: she was either scalded to death in boiling water or suffocated in an overheated steamroom, a particularly unChristian solution to a highly unChristiandilemma. But Jerusalem would benefit from this double murder, * scarcely mentioned by the embarrassed Christian eulogists.
    Soon afterwards, Helena, securing carte blanche to embellish Christ’s city, set off for Jerusalem. † Her glory would be Constantine’s penance. 1
    HELENA: THE FIRST ARCHAEOLOGIST
     
    Helena, septuagenarian empress, whose coins show her sharp face and her braided coiffuer and tiara, arrived in Aelia ‘with all the energy of youth’, and generous funds, to become Jerusalem’s most monumental builder and miraculously successful archaeologist.
    Constantine knew that the place of Jesus’ Crucifixion and burial lay beneath Hadrian’s Temple with its statue of that ‘impure demon called Aphrodite, a dark shrine of lifeless idols’, as Eusebius put it. He had ordered Bishop Macarius to purify the place, demolish the pagan temple, excavate the original tomb within and build there a basilica that would be ‘the finest in the world’ with ‘the most beautiful structures, columns and marbles, the most precious and serviceable, ornamented in gold’.
    Helena determined to find the actual tomb. The pagan temple had to be smashed, the paving stones lifted, the earth removed and the holy place located. The empress’s quest must have created an excited and lucrative search in small Aelia. A Jew, perhaps one of the remaining Christian Jews, produced documents that led to the discovery of the cave that was declared to be Jesus’ tomb. Helena also sought the site of the Crucifixion and even the Cross itself.
    No archaeologist has ever approached her success. She discovered three wooden crosses, a wooden plaque that read ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of Jews’, and the actual nails. But which cross was the right one? The empress and bishop are said to have borne these pieces of wood to the bedside of a dying woman. When the third was placed beside her, the invalid ‘suddenly opened her eyes, regained her strength and sprang well from her bed’. Helena ‘sent part to her son Constantine together with the nails’, which the emperor had set into the bridle of his horse. From now on, all Christendom craved the holy relics that usually originatedin Jerusalem, and this Life-Giving Tree begat a forest of splinters of the True Cross, which started to replace the earlier Chi-Rho as the symbol of Christianity.
    Helena’s discovery of the Cross was possibly a later invention, but she certainly changed the city for ever. She built churches of the Ascension and of the Eleona on the Mount of Olives. Her third church, that of