The Crown of Thorns
The thorns soldiers forced on Jesus' head before the Crucifixion, a sign of his suffering and his mocked kingship.
What the Crown of Thorns means
Three of the Gospels report that soldiers wove a crown of thorns and put it on Jesus' head, mocking him as King of the Jews (Matthew 27:29; Mark 15:17; John 19:2). In art the crown is a sign of Christ's suffering and is also associated with martyrdom. It is common in Passion art for Lent and Holy Week.
History of the relicSixth-century pilgrim accounts place a crown venerated as this relic on Mount Sion in Jerusalem, and it was later kept in Constantinople. In 1238 Emperor Baldwin II offered it to King Louis IX of France while it was pledged to the Venetians as security for a loan. Louis redeemed it and built the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, completed in 1248, to house it. After the French Revolution it was returned to the Church and placed in Notre-Dame Cathedral in 1806.
What survives in Paris is a circlet of rushes with no thorns left on it. Authorities cited by the Catholic Encyclopedia think the soldiers' crown was more like a cap of thorns held together by a band of rushes, and that the thorns were separated from the band before it reached Paris. St. Louis and his successors gave away some sixty or seventy of them, and more than 700 "holy thorns" have been claimed, not all of which can be authentic.
