The third was that the people must keep the Friday of Pascha—Good Friday—and the Friday that follows it as days on which no work is done and in which no fighting takes place.
He said: Constantine then instructed the bishop of Bayt al-Maqdis (Jerusalem) to locate the site of the tomb and the Cross, to build the churches, and to begin with the construction of the sacred Church of the Resurrection (al-Qiyāma).
Helena, Constantine’s mother, said to the emperor, “I have vowed to travel to Jerusalem, to seek out the holy places and rebuild them.” He therefore entrusted her with an enormous sum of money.
She set out for Jerusalem with the city’s bishop, and once she arrived her sole concern and ambition was to find the Cross. She gathered the Jews and the local inhabitants, selected ten of them, and from the ten chose three; one of the three was called Judah. She asked them to guide her to the location of the Cross, but they refused, saying, “We have no knowledge of it and no information about the place.”
She ordered that they be thrown into a dry pit with no water. They remained there for seven days without food or drink, until one of them, Judah, said to his two companions, “My father told me the spot this woman is looking for, and my grandfather had told my father.”
At that, the other two cried out from the pit, “Bring us out so that we may inform the queen about what this man has said.”