The number surprised him, so he made a generous allowance for fragments that were in private hands or otherwise had not come to his attention, as well as fragments that had been lost over the centuries or destroyed in war or during the vandalism of the Reformation. But the total volume of all the fragments he had measured came to only 240 cubic inches. Once he had estimated the weight of the cross, de Fleury calculated the size, or more accurately, volume, of the cross, which came to 10,900 cubic inches. Nonetheless, in his weakened condition after the scourging, even this modest weight was too much for Jesus, and so the Roman guards compelled Simon of Cyrene to help carry the cross. To estimate the weight of the cross Jesus bore, de Fleury drew upon studies of how much weight strong men in strenuous professions could carry: A robust porter, such as we see carrying the heavy baggage in old safari movies, could carry 200 pounds a distance of three miles in about an hour before needing a rest, while a brawny carpenter could carry 220 pounds of lumber on his shoulder 150 feet before stopping to unburden himself and rest.ĭe Fleury calculated that the cross probably weighed about 220 pounds, but considering that Jesus dragged it rather than lifted and carried it, the weight to Our Lord would have felt like 55 pounds. (In the late 20th century, historians found that criminals condemned to crucifixion only carried the cross beam - the upright beam was erected and waiting at the place of execution.) ![]() ![]() But in the last half of the 19th century, a French independent scholar named Charles Rohault de Fleury assigned himself the task of tracking down and measuring every surviving relic of the True Cross.ĭe Fleury, like almost all of his contemporaries, believed that Jesus carried the entire cross from Pontius Pilate’s palace to the summit of Calvary. ![]() Whenever the subject of bogus relics comes up, you can count on someone saying, “There are enough pieces of the True Cross to rebuild Noah’s Ark!” Whoever delivers that punch line probably does not know that he or she is echoing the 16th-century Dutch humanist Erasmus, who, in a satire on pilgrimages, wrote, “So they say of the cross of Our Lord, which is shown publicly and privately in so many places, that, if all the fragments were collected together, they would appear to form a fair cargo for a merchant ship.”Ĭlearly, this is a punch line with a pedigree, but is it accurate? That would appear to be a difficult, if not impossible, question to answer. Editor's Note: This was originally published in April 2011.
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