Good day Worthy Knights,
In this part 47, the Twelve Grand Points of the Cross: 1st.
V.Ill.Kt. Werner M. Schwab, Deputy Intendant-General, Benelux Division.
RCC Lecture delivered in the Schola Palatina Conclave No 509, on 19 December A.D. 2015.
Introduction
There is a moment in the public part of the ceremony of the installation of the Viceroy, before he is consecrated to Eusebius in the inner working, that the Twelve Grand Points of the Cross are read to him. Now, we can safely assume that up until that moment the Eusebius Elect has never heard of those twelve points. Therefore, when our Most Puissant Sovereign asked me to give a short lecture I decided to acquaint you a little with these twelve grand points, so then when you hear them read in the future you may reflect on their meaning for us, as good men and Christian masons.
- The Humility of Christ upon the Cross.
The cross, obviously, was made of wood. But of what kind of wood as used, there are several legends. One version has it that the true cross came from three trees which grew from three seeds from the ‘Tree of Mercy’ which Seth collected and planted in the mouth of Adam’s corpse.
Or that it came from a tree that grew from part of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, or ‘the tree that Adam ate of’, that Seth planted on Adam’s grave where it ‘endured there unto the time of Solomon’ when the tree was cut down and the wood used to build a bridge over which the Queen of Sheba passed. She told Solomon that a piece of wood from the bridge would bring about the replacement of God’s Covenant with the Jewish people, by a new order. So Solomon had the timber buried. But after fourteen generations, the wood taken from the bridge was fashioned into the Cross used to crucify Christ.
In the tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Church however the True Cross was made from three different types of wood: cedar, pine and cypress, an allusion to Isaiah 60:13.
Another tradition holds that the three trees from which the True Cross was constructed were used to construct the Temple in Jerusalem (‘to beautify the place of my sanctuary’). Later, during Herod’s reconstruction of the Temple, the wood from these trees was removed from the Temple and discarded, eventually being used to construct the cross on which Jesus was crucified (‘and I will make the place of my feet glorious’).
Of course in the tradition of our order, the True cross was made from wood of an acacia tree: the sprig of acacia, planted on the grave of Hiram being the figure of the Cross.
Whatever kind of wood was used, the cross as used by the Romans would have been a pole, erected on the spot of the crucifixion at Golgotha, three or four meters in height, with a transverse branch of two meters wide. It was this transverse branch, the crossbeam or patibulum, weighing 35-60 kilos that the condemned would have carried through the narrow streets of Jerusalem, not the complete cross which would have had a weight of over one 135 kilos. About his neck was hung, or carried before him, the Titulus, a board with the causa poena, the reason for the verdict.
Now, the Titulus used at the crucifixion of our Lord has been preserved. As we will see later, it was found by Saint Helena, the mother of Constantine and brought to Rome where she gave it in A.D. 325 to the newly built church of the ‘Santa Croce in Gerusalemme’ where it still is kept. Sometime before 1145 the relic was placed in a box which has the seal of a cardinal who became Pope in 1144 and apparently forgotten until February 1, 1492, when it was discovered by workmen restoring a mosaic, hidden behind a brick with the inscription Titulus Crucis. It is a board made of walnut wood, 25×14 cm in size, 2.6 cm thick and has a weight of 687 g. It is inscribed on one side with three lines, of which the first one is partly destroyed. The second line is written in Greek letters, the third in Latin letters.
St. John the Evangelist states that the causa poena was written in three languages: Hebrew, Latin and Greek.
In Greek it would have been: Ἰησοῦς ὁ Ναζωραῖος ὁ Bασιλεὺς τῶν Ἰουδαίων.
In latin, Iēsus Nazarēnus, Rēx Iūdaeōrum, which we often see as the only text, INRI.
But it is the text in Hebrew that concerns us. Now, when reconstructed, the Hebrew lines would have read:
Ieshu HaNozri WeMelech HaYehudim
Now the scribe who made the Titulus would first have whitewashed the board and have painted the text is in four groups of words and as was the practice, he would have begun each group with highly charged and coloured letters. That would mean that above INRI one would read:
YOD HE WAW HE, so above our Lord everyone could read the Tetragrammaton.
Now this would explain why the Pharisees so vehemently argued with Pilate to change the words. Because, perhaps unwittingly, perhaps on purpose, the scribe would have declared that Christ WAS God. Remember this, whenever you read the text on the scroll on a crucifix.