Product Description

Following the success of The Jesus Papyrus (a Sunday Times bestseller), in which the authors authenticated three fragments of St Matthew's Gospel kept in an Oxford college from the eyewitness period, Carsten Thiede and Matthew d'Ancona turn their attention to a fragment of inscribed wood, stored in a church in Rome for many hundreds of years, which they believe is part of the title board or Titulus from the cross on which Jesus died. Their claim flies in the face of the view held by many modern historians who dismiss the very notion of any part of the Cross's survival as superstitious and fanciful. However Thiede and d'Ancona have amassed evidence that this fragment is not only genuine, but that it was brought to Rome by Queen Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, who, according to legend, found the cross in Jerusalem in AD326 on the site where the Church of the Holy Sepulcre now stands. Thiede and d'Ancona base their claim on the writing that survives on the Roman Titulus. Deciphering this wording is where Thiede's specialism as a papyrologist comes in. He has also been involved in archaeological investigations at the site of the Church and will be the first to reveal the findings. D'Ancona, as the writer of the book, proposes to use Queen Helena's own quest as the starting point for the book, to show that much of what has previously been read as legend is actually fact.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #316820 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

About the Author
CARSTEN PETER THIEDE, German papyrologist, who ran the Institute of German Studies in London, produced documentaries for BBC TV and is now director of the Institute for Basic Epistemological Research at Paderborn, Germany. MATTHEW D'ANCONA, formerly a senior editor on The Times, is now deputy editor of the Sunday Telegraph.

Customer Reviews

A refreshing challenge to New Testament scholarship
For more than a century, on the basis of analysis of the known texts, New Testament scholars have sought to demonstrate the unreliability of these texts as evidence for what they claim, and to establish them as the work of communities several decades after the events they describe.

This remarkable book shows the potential of modern scientific and archaeological studies, to demolish the speculations of these scholars, who have made claims only on the basis of their own suppositions about the texts, not only in relation to the New Testament itself, but also to the surviving physical evidence for the earliest Christian sites and relics.

It is of course deeply embarrassing for those who have purported to use "scientific" methods in order to discredit the biblical texts, to see the results of genuine scientific studies and the collapse of their school of literary criticism.

This makes the book doubly enjoyable: not only to discover more about the early history of the Church as it emerges from the exciting archaeological discoveries which have taken place in the Holy Land; but to see how archaeology is now providing substantial evidence in support of the New Testament as the work of living witnesses to the events they describe.

If the fragment called the Titulus, still preserved in Rome, really is a part of the notice pinned by Pontius Pilate above the head of Jesus on the cross, and not, as has been almost universally assumed, just another bogus relic, then the implications are truly staggering. This book indicates that the possibility that it is genuine certainly can not be ruled out - and may one day even yield scientific proof of its age.

A scholarly, interesting and fascinating book
This is the second book I have read by these authors. Having read many of the books to which they refer, I too came to the conclusion that the early gospel writers and saints were not liars but told the truth. Anyone reading this work, however sceptical on the validity of relics, will hear the creakings as closed minds open. The writing was easy to follow, and the writers treat their readers as intellectual equals. In some passages, particularly at the end, the writing becomes lyrical and the force of their message sings out - a really good book!

Stunning
This book is totaly amazing, i am lost for words. There is so much i can say. Me and all my friends were converted. Buy this for a brilliant read.