A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

The bishop clearly attracted the Emperor’s attention by some skilled self-promotion at the great Council of Nicaea in 325. He returned home armed with instructions to start an expensive programme of church-building, the preparations for which revealed a sensational double find beneath the stately imperial Capitoline temple built by Hadrian (see p. 107). What emerged was the exact site of Christ’s crucifixion and the tomb in which the Saviour had been laid. It is possible that there had been a continuous Christian tradition as to the whereabouts of these sites and that therefore there was not much revealing to be done.16 Less plausibly, it was not long before the Jerusalem Church was announcing that the actual wood of the Cross had also been rediscovered, and within a quarter-century another enterprising Bishop of Jerusalem, named Cyril, was linking that discovery to an undoubted historic event: a state visit to the Holy City in 327 by Constantine’s mother, the dowager Empress Helena.