ABSTRACT
We know virtually nothing about Cyril’s early life. He was born shortly before that second spring in the history of the Church, when Constantine’s vision of the Cross heralded his victory over his rival Maxentius in 312 and led him to embrace Christianity, granting the Church first a tolerated, and then an increasingly favoured position in the Roman Empire. Cyril would have been a schoolboy at the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325, and was ordained priest by Maximus who had become Bishop of Jerusalem shortly before the dedication of Constantine’s great basilica there in 335.1 Though W.Telfer suggested a Caesarean origin,2 Cyril seems to have been a native of Jerusalem, for he was ordained to serve that church, and knew the appearance of the site before Constantine’s basilica was built.
