Judas Cyriacus - Judas Cyriacus and The True Cross

Judas Cyriacus and The True Cross

The local tradition of Ancona has identified this saint with the Jew named Judas Quiriacus or Kyriakos.

According to legend, the Jew Judas Kyriakos aided the Empress Helena in finding the deeply-buried True Cross. It is said that Judas suggested that three centuries of debris had accumulated over Golgotha and that the caves be removed. The oldest extant Syriac text of the legend of the discovery of the True Cross by Judas Kyriakos dates from ca. 500 AD. Its recent editor and translator says that the manuscript is "of great value for the history of the legend of the inventio crucis".

Sozomen (died c. 450 AD), in his Ecclesiastical History, states that it was said (by whom he does not say) that the location of the Holy Sepulchre was "disclosed by a Hebrew who dwelt in the East, and who derived his information from some documents which had come to him by paternal inheritance" (although Sozomen himself disputes this account) and that a dead person was also revived by the touch of the Cross. Later, popular versions of this story state that the Jew who assisted Helena was named Jude or Judas, but later converted to Christianity and took the name Kyriakos (kyriakos means "lordly" or "lord-like" in Greek).

Among the three accounts about the discovery of the True Cross of the Crucifixion that circulated throughout the Roman Empire in the 4th century, the two most widely repeated both credited Helena, the aged mother of Constantine the Great, who travelled to Jerusalem at some time after the Council of Nicaea (325) and her death (probably in 330) with the discovery. To recover it, it was necessary to demolish a temple, perhaps dedicated to Venus, that occupied the site. In one, the Jew Judas knew of the location of the Cross, and revealed it under torture. As J. W. Drijvers, the editor of the text, has noted,

The Judas Kyriakos legend originated in Greek, but became also known in Latin and Syriac and later on in many vernacular languages. This version relates how Helena discovered the Cross with the help of the Jew Judas, who later converted and received the name Kyriakos. It became the most popular version of the three.