The Church of the Holy Sepulchre Is Dedicated

Eusebius, the bishop of nearby Caesarea, tells the story as a contemporary. The place of the resurrection in Jerusalem, he says, had long before been buried under a mound of earth, paved over and crowned with a shrine of Venus. Constantine ordered the shrine pulled down and the soil carted away, and when the old ground level was reached a cave tomb appeared, “contrary to all expectation” (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3.25–28). The emperor wrote to the bishop, Macarius of Jerusalem, that a church finer than any other should be built there. The governors were to supply workmen, and Macarius was to report what columns and marble were needed and whether he wanted a panelled ceiling, which could be gilded (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3.29–32).

A pilgrim from Bordeaux who came in 333 saw the little hill of Golgotha, the tomb a stone’s throw from it, and a basilica “of wondrous beauty” built there by Constantine’s order (Bordeaux Itinerary Jerusalem, Golgotha and the basilica (pp. 23–24 of the translation)). Eusebius describes the finished complex: the tomb itself adorned with columns, an open court with colonnades, and to the east a tall basilica with a gilded ceiling, colonnades on either side and a hemisphere ringed by twelve columns (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3.33–40).

In 335 the emperor summoned the bishops who were meeting at Tyre to go on to Jerusalem for the dedication. Eusebius, who preached there, names bishops from Macedonia to Persia and sets the feast in the thirtieth year of Constantine’s reign (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 4.41–47). Socrates adds that the same gathering received Arius back into communion (Socrates, Church History 1.33).

Eusebius also reports that the emperor’s mother, Helena, visited Palestine in old age and founded churches at Bethlehem and on the Mount of Olives (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3.41–43). In these chapters he does not connect her with the tomb or mention a cross. About 350 Cyril, preaching in the new basilica, could say that pieces of the wood of the cross had filled the whole world (Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 4.10), and in the 380s the pilgrim Egeria was told that the church had been dedicated on the day the cross was found (Egeria, Itinerary 48–49). Neither passage names Helena. The story that she found it is told at the end of the century. Ambrose, in 395, has her dig at Golgotha, uncover three crosses and know Christ’s by its title (Ambrose, On the Death of Theodosius 43–47). Rufinus, a few years later, says that Bishop Macarius identified it when its touch healed a dying woman (Rufinus, Church History 10.7–8 (book 1, chapters 7–8 in Migne)).

The buildings fixed the place where Christians have since kept the memory of the death and resurrection of Jesus. In Egeria’s time the anniversary of the dedication was an eight-day feast that drew monks and lay people from Mesopotamia, Syria and Egypt (Egeria, Itinerary 48–49).