Introduction

The Historical Study Concerning the Precious Cross (Greek Ἱστορικὴ μελέτη περὶ τοῦ Τιμίου Σταυροῦ) is a twenty-chapter historical-theological monograph published in Athens in 1914 by Saint Nektarios of Aegina, then Metropolitan of Pentapolis. It is one of the latest works of his writing career; he died at the convent he founded on Aegina six years later, in November 1920.[1]

The work was composed at the request of Theokletos I, Metropolitan of Athens and President of the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece. Saint Nektarios states this commission in the opening paragraph of his own preface “To the Reader”: he wrote the study, he says, “to refute the erroneous opinions and beliefs of those who, having been led astray, possess intellect yet complete ignorance of the historical manifestation of the precious Cross.” The work first appeared in serialized form in the periodical Ἱερὸς Σύνδεσμος (“The Sacred Bond”), the official organ of an association of the same name; the 1914 book is its expanded, revised second issuance.[2]

The work is structured as a continuous historical argument with an extended patristic dossier in support of each major claim. Its target is identified in chapter eight as “certain modern scholars” who “seek to deny every truth handed down to the Church”—specifically, the claim that the cult of the precious Cross post-dated the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in the early fourth century. Against this Saint Nektarios marshals testimonies from Tertullian (De corona militis), Saint Ignatius the God-bearer, Saint John Chrysostom, Saint John of Damascus, the seventy-third canon of the Council in Trullo, and the historians Eusebius, Sozomen, Theodoret, Socrates Scholasticus, Evagrius, and Philostorgius. The argument moves from the apostolic antiquity of the sign of the Cross (chapters 2–4), through the visions of the Cross to Constantine and at Jerusalem (5–7), the discovery of the True Cross by Saint Helena (8–10), the miracle at Apamea and the dynamic power of the wood (11–12), the liturgical year of Cross-veneration (13–15), the dimensions of the True Cross (16), and a long treatise on the Cross’s continuing power, drawing especially on Saint Athanasius’s Life of Antony and Saint Gregory Nazianzen’s First Invective Against Julian, to a closing meditation on why the Christian must venerate the Cross (17–20).

In the manner of nineteenth-century Greek scholarly editions, Saint Nektarios cites his patristic sources by Migne Patrologia volume and column number, by the volume and page of the Athens reprints, and by traditional book and chapter abbreviations of the major historians (Eusebius, HE; the Vita Constantini). These parenthetical citations are preserved verbatim in the translation. Direct Scripture quotations appear marked off by typographic quotation marks. Footnotes labelled “Translator’s note” are editorial clarifications added by the translator; a small number of these flag passages where the 1914 printing is too damaged for confident textual recovery. Chapter headings, where Saint Nektarios provides them, are translated literally; the handful of unnumbered sub-sections are presented in the order he gives them.