(April 17, 2019 at 11:26 am)Brian37 Wrote: Questions for anyone who can answer.
One of the saved "artifacts" is the alleged thorn crown the church claims was worn by the Jesus character. Any history on when the church "acquired" it? And from the very short clips in the news, is it gold gilded? It looks like it was to me.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_of_thorns
Quote:In 1238, Baldwin II, the Latin Emperor of Constantinople, anxious to obtain support for his tottering empire, offered the crown of thorns to Louis IX, King of France. It was then in the hands of the Venetians as security for a heavy loan (13,134 gold pieces), but it was redeemed and conveyed to Paris where Louis IX built the Sainte-Chapelle (completed 1248) to receive it. The relic stayed there until the French Revolution, when, after finding a home for a while in the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Concordat of 1801 restored it to the Church, and it was deposited in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame.[4]
The relic that the Church received is a twisted circlet of Juncus balticus rushes; the thorns preserved in various other reliquaries are of Ziziphus spina-christi and had apparently been removed from the crown and kept in separate reliquaries since soon after they arrived in France.[5] New reliquaries were provided for the relic, one commissioned by Napoleon, another, in jewelled rock crystal and more suitably Gothic, was made to the designs of Eugene Viollet-le-Duc. In 2001, when the surviving treasures from the Sainte-Chapelle were exhibited at the Louvre, the chaplet was solemnly presented every Friday at Notre-Dame. Pope John Paul II translated it personally to the Sainte-Chapelle during World Youth Day. The relic can be seen only on the first Friday of every month, when it is brought out for a special veneration mass, as well as each Friday during Lent.[6] See also Feast of the Crown of Thorns.
The relic was saved by Jean-Marc Fournier, chaplain of the Paris Fire Brigade, during the Notre-Dame de Paris fire of April 15, 2019.[7]
If you look more closely at the image in the article linked above it looks like the gold is a circlet built to house the crown itself, not that the crown itself is gold-leafed, but that's totally a guess on my part. This is as much googling as I care to do this morning.
Teenaged X-Files obsession + Bermuda Triangle episode + Self-led school research project = Atheist.