Passion: the fragments of the Holy Cross at St Peter’s, Rome, at St Sophia, at Worms, at Clairvaux, at Chapelle-Lauzin, at the Hospice of the Incurables at Baugé, at St Thomas’s, Birmingham, etc.; the Nails at the Abbey of Saint-Denis, at Naples Cathedral, at S Felice at Syracuse, at SS Apostoli in Venice, at the Church of Saint-Sernin, Toulouse; the spear with which Longinus pierced the Lord’s breast at S Paolo fuori le Mura, at S Giovanni in Laterano, at Nuremberg, and at the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris; the chalice, in Jerusalem; the Three Dice used by the soldiers to gamble for Christ’s Tunic, at Sofia Cathedral; the Sponge Soaked in Vinegar and Gall at S Giovanni in Laterano, at S Maria-di-Trastevero, at S Maria Maggiore, at Saint Mark’s, at S Silvestro-in-capite, and at the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris; the Thorns of the Crown at St Taurin’s, Evreux, Châteaumeillant, Orléans, Beaugency, and at Notre-Dame in Rheims, at Abbeville, Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, Vézelay, Palermo, Colmar, Montauban, Vienna, and Padua; St Lawrence’s Vase at S Lorenzo in Genoa, Veronica’s Veil (the vera icon ) at S Silvestro in Rome; the Holy Shroud, in Rome, Jerusalem, Turin, Cadouin in the Périgord, Carcassonne, Mainz, Parma, Prague, Bayonne, York, Paris, Ayrshire, etc.
The remaining items were no less interesting. Guido Mandetta had collected a whole scientific and historical file on the Relics of Golgotha and most particularly on the most highly treasured of all, the vase Joseph of Arimathæa was said to have used to gather the blood springing from Christ’s wounds: a set of articles by J. P. Shaw, formerly professor of history at Columbia University, New York, reviewed the various legends circulating about the Holy Vase and attempted to identify the elements of reality on which they might be rationally based. Professor Shaw’s analysis was not very hopeful: the tradition that Joseph himself had taken the Vase to England and founded the monastery at Glastonbury to house it in merely rested, according to his demonstration, on a (late?) Christian contamination of the Grail legend; the Sacro Catino at Genoa Cathedral was an emerald goblet, allegedly discovered by Crusaders at Caesarea in 1102, and it was not obvious how Joseph of Arimathæa could have got hold of it; the two-handled Golden Vase kept at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which Bede (who had never seen it) said had contained the Saviour’s Blood, was obviously just an ordinary chalice, mistakenly identified through a scribal error, “contained” having been copied instead of “consecrated”. As for the fourth legend, which said that Gonderic’s Burgundians, allied at Aetius’s instigation to the Saxons, the Alani, the Francs, and the Visigoths in order to halt Attila the Hun, reached the Catalaunian Fields bearing in front of them – as was customary for the period – their propitiatory relics, including the Holy Vase left to them by the Aryan missionaries who had converted them and which Clovis would take from them thirty years later at Soissons, Professor Shaw rejected this as the least plausible of all, for never would Arianists, who did not recognise the Transubstantiality of Jesus, have thought of worshipping or making others worship his relics.
Nonetheless, Professor Shaw concluded, in the context of the intense movement between the Christian West and Constantinople lasting from the beginning of the fourth to the end of the thirteenth centuries, and of which the Crusades formed but a tiny chapter, it was not inconceivable that the True Vase could have been preserved, in so far as it had been, from the day after the Burial, an object of the greatest veneration.
When he’d finished going through all of Mandetta’s material exhaustively – even though most of the documents remained undecipherable – Sherwood was convinced that the Italian had tracked down the Holy Vase. He put an army of detectives on his trail, but they came up with
The remaining items were no less interesting. Guido Mandetta had collected a whole scientific and historical file on the Relics of Golgotha and most particularly on the most highly treasured of all, the vase Joseph of Arimathæa was said to have used to gather the blood springing from Christ’s wounds: a set of articles by J. P. Shaw, formerly professor of history at Columbia University, New York, reviewed the various legends circulating about the Holy Vase and attempted to identify the elements of reality on which they might be rationally based. Professor Shaw’s analysis was not very hopeful: the tradition that Joseph himself had taken the Vase to England and founded the monastery at Glastonbury to house it in merely rested, according to his demonstration, on a (late?) Christian contamination of the Grail legend; the Sacro Catino at Genoa Cathedral was an emerald goblet, allegedly discovered by Crusaders at Caesarea in 1102, and it was not obvious how Joseph of Arimathæa could have got hold of it; the two-handled Golden Vase kept at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which Bede (who had never seen it) said had contained the Saviour’s Blood, was obviously just an ordinary chalice, mistakenly identified through a scribal error, “contained” having been copied instead of “consecrated”. As for the fourth legend, which said that Gonderic’s Burgundians, allied at Aetius’s instigation to the Saxons, the Alani, the Francs, and the Visigoths in order to halt Attila the Hun, reached the Catalaunian Fields bearing in front of them – as was customary for the period – their propitiatory relics, including the Holy Vase left to them by the Aryan missionaries who had converted them and which Clovis would take from them thirty years later at Soissons, Professor Shaw rejected this as the least plausible of all, for never would Arianists, who did not recognise the Transubstantiality of Jesus, have thought of worshipping or making others worship his relics.
Nonetheless, Professor Shaw concluded, in the context of the intense movement between the Christian West and Constantinople lasting from the beginning of the fourth to the end of the thirteenth centuries, and of which the Crusades formed but a tiny chapter, it was not inconceivable that the True Vase could have been preserved, in so far as it had been, from the day after the Burial, an object of the greatest veneration.
When he’d finished going through all of Mandetta’s material exhaustively – even though most of the documents remained undecipherable – Sherwood was convinced that the Italian had tracked down the Holy Vase. He put an army of detectives on his trail, but they came up with
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