The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor (AM 5817) states that *Makarios (bishop of Jerusalem, ob. 335, S01428) received a revelation of the location of the Cross in Jerusalem. Chronicle compiled in the Byzantine Empire in the early 9th c., using extracts from earlier Greek texts.
E07995
Literary - Other narrative texts (including Histories)
Theophanes
Chronicle of Theophanes, AM 5817 [AD 324/5]
Τῷ δ᾿ αὐτῷ ἔτει Ἑλένην τὴν μακαρίαν μετὰ χρημάτων καὶ στρατευμάτων ἀπέστειλεν εἰς τὰ Ἱεροσόλυμα ὁ θεῖος Κωνσταντῖνος πρὸς τὸ ἀναζητῆσαι τὸν ζωοποιὸν τοῦ κυρίου σταυρόν. Μακάριος δέ, ὁ πατριάρχης Ἱεροσολύμων, συναντήσας τῇ βασιλίδι μετὰ τῆς δεούσης τιμῆς τὴν ζήτησιν τοῦ ποθουμένου ζωοποιοῦ ξύλου ἐποιεῖτο σὺν αὐτῇ μεθ᾿ ἡσυχἰας καὶ προσευχῶν σπουδαίων καὶ νηστείας. τούτων δὲ γενομέων, ἐφάνη συντόμως θεόθεν ὁ τόπος τῷ αὑτῷ Μακαρίῳ δειχθείς, ἐν ᾧ ἵδρυτο τῆς ἀκαθάρτου δαίμονος Ἀφροδίτης ὁ ναὸς καὶ τὸ ἄναλμα· ὅν τῇ βασιλικῇ αὐθεντίᾳ χρωμένη συντόμως καθεῖλεν ἡ θεόστεπτος Ἑλένη διὰ πλήθους τεχνιτῶν ἐκ βάθρων κατασκάψασα καὶ τὸν χοῦν ἀπορρίψασα, ὑπὸ Ἀδριανοῦ Αἰλίου πάλαι κτισθέντα πολυτελῶς. αὐτίκα δὲ τὸ ἅγιον μνῆμα καὶ ὁ τόπος τοῦ κρανίου ἀνεδείχθησαν, καὶ πρὸς ἀνατολὴν σύνεγγυς τούτων τρεῖς σταυροὶ κεχωσμένοι· ἐρευνἠσαντες δὲ εὗρον καὶ τοὺς ἥλους.
'In the same year the godlike Constantine sent the blessed Helena to Jerusalem with money and soldiers to seek the life-giving Cross of the Lord. Makarios, the patriarch of Jerusalem, having met the empress with due honour, made the search for the longed-for life-giving wood along with her, in tranquillity, with earnest prayers and fasting. When these things had been done, the site was quickly revealed to Markarios by God in the place where the temple and statue of the impure demon Aphrodite stood. The divinely crowned Helena, using her imperial authority, immediately arranged for a large number of workmen to destroy the temple, which had been lavishly built long ago by Aelius Hadrian, raze it to its foundations, and remove the [excavated] soil. Straight away the Holy Sepulchre and the place of the Skull were revealed, and close by, to the east, there were three buried crosses. After searching, they even found the nails.'
The narrative then relates how Makarios established which was the True Cross by bringing each of the crosses to a sick woman. When the shadow of the True Cross touched her, she was immediately healed. It goes on to describe how Helena built churches at Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Holy Land, and took relics of the Cross and its nails back to Constantine.
Text: de Boor 1883, 25-6.
Translation: Mango and Scott 1997, 41-2.
Revelation of hidden knowledge (past, present and future)
Protagonists in Cult and NarrativesMonarchs and their family
Women
Ecclesiastics - bishops
Source
Theophanes (759/60-818) came from a wealthy and politically prominent family from Constantinople. After marriage and a brief career as a secular official, he became a monk, living in the monastic communities centred around Mount Sigriane in Bithynia, and eventually abbot of the community known as Megas Agros. He acquired the epithet 'Confessor' (Homologetes) through his resistance to the renewal of Iconoclasm by the emperor Leo V (813-820), which led to Theophanes' imprisonment and then exile to the island of Samothrace, where he died. For full discussion of the evidence for Theophanes' life, see Mango and Scott 1997, xliv-lii, and, for a briefer summary, his entry ('Theophanes 18') in the Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire (http://www.pbe.kcl.ac.uk).The Chronicle of Theophanes covers the period from 284/5 to 812/813. It was a continuation of the Chronicle of George Synkellos (ob. c. 810) which ran from the creation of the world to 284. George had apparently intended to continue his chronicle down to his own time but died before he could do so; the extent to which Theophanes, in producing his chronicle, was simply editing and polishing material already collected by George remains uncertain (see Mango and Scott 1997, liv-lv). The Chronicle of George Synkellos contains some material relevant to the cult of saints, up to its stopping point in 284; however, this is not included in the CSLA database because the sources for all George's information (chiefly Eusebius) survive and have database entries in their own right.
Theophanes and his sources
The key characteristic of Theophanes’ Chronicle is that it is not a composition of Theophanes’ own, but a patchwork of extracts from earlier sources, collected and arranged in chronicle form, in other words under an entry for each year. Theophanes’ role was confined to piecing the patchwork together (i.e. removing pieces from their original context and placing them under individual years), and to some extent condensing and abbreviating material. As he put it in his preface: 'I did not set down anything of my own composition, but have made a selection from the ancient historians and prose-writers and have consigned to their proper places the events of every year, assigned without confusion' (trans. Mango and Scott 1997, 2). Since many of Theophanes’ sources are still extant, the extracts in his chronicle can often be compared with the original, which shows that that this was indeed his method of compilation, though he makes occasional editorial interventions, and sometimes misunderstands source material (Mango and Scott 1997, lxxii, xci-xcv; Howard-Johnston 2010, 272-3, 276-84).
It is because Theophanes' Chronicle is essentially a compilation of earlier sources that a number of extracts from the Chronicle are included in the CSLA database, even though the work itself dates from more than a century after AD 700, our usual cut-off point for evidence. We have not included material which reproduces sources that have their own entries in our database (such as Eusebius, John Malalas, Theodore Lector, Procopius, and Theophylact Simocatta), but have included entries (for the period up to 700) for items in Theophanes whose original source is lost.
For discussion of Theophanes' work as a whole, see the introduction to Mango and Scott's translation (Mango and Scott 1997, xliii-c); Howard-Johnston 2010, 268-312; and the essays in Jankowiak and Montinaro 2015.
Chronology
Theophanes' chronology is based primarily on the annus mundi (year since Creation). There was more than one system of calculating AM dates: the one used by Theophanes, following George Synkellos, was the Alexandrian era, which started from the equivalent of 5492 BC, thus making the first year of the chronicle, AD 284/5, the AM year 5777. The first day of the year under the Alexandrian system was 25 March, and this was used by George Synkellos; however, it is evident that Theophanes (without ever stating his practice explicitly) used 1 September as the first day of his chronicle years, thus matching the standard secular dating system in the Byzantine empire (indictions): see Mango and Scott 1997, lxvi. While the year-by-year chronology is based on the annus mundi, Theophanes includes considerable other information in the heading for each entry (not given here): the year from the Incarnation (the same principle as AD dating, but the system used by Theophanes dated the Incarnation to AD 8/9), and the regnal years of the Roman emperor (Theophanes only ever lists one emperor here, normally the one ruling in Constantinople), the king of Persia (the Caliph in later entries), and the bishops of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. The accuracy and mutual consistency of these different forms of dating varies considerably across different entries. In the body of each entry, Theophanes often preserves the form of dating used by his source, such as consular years or indictions. For a full overview, see Mango and Scott 1997, lxiii-lxxiv.
Discussion
The discovery of the Cross and the Holy Sepulchre during the visit to Jerusalem of Constantine's mother Helena (in 327, not 324/5 as given in Theophanes) is described by many sources (though none dates from earlier than several decades after the event). Several of these attribute a role to Makarios, the bishop of Jerusalem at the time, but this is greater in Theophanes than in other sources, and in particular the idea that it was Makarios (rather than Helena) who identified the site of the Sepulchre, as a result of a revelation from God, appears only in the tradition represented by Theophanes and Alexander the Monk (on whom see the discussion in E07993).The remaining details in Theophanes' account of the discovery of the Cross parallel those in sources like Socrates (1.17), Sozomen (2.1-2) and Theodoret (1.17), with the slight difference that in Theophanes the woman is healed after being touched merely by the shadow of the Cross rather than the Cross itself.
(Users of our database should note that, while her discovery of the True Cross was undoubtedly central to the emergence of a cult of saint Helena, we have not systematically entered all the texts that relate to the finding of the Cross, a relic of the Crucifixion, rather than of a saint. There is a summary discussion of the relevant evidence in the Discussion section of E02994.)
Bibliography
Edition:de Boor, C., Theophanis Chronographia (Leipzig: Teubner, 1883).
English translation and commentary:
Mango, C., and Scott, R., The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History AD 284-813 (Oxford: OUP, 1997).
On Theophanes:
Howard-Johnston, J., Witnesses to a World Crisis: Historians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century (Oxford: OUP, 2010).
Jankowiak, M., and Montinaro, P. (eds.), Studies in Theophanes (Travaux et mémoires 19; Paris: Centre d'Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance, 2015).
David Lambert
11/12/2020
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S01428 | Makarios, bishop of Jerusalem, ob. c. 335 | Μακάριος | Certain |
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