Jerusalem: The Biography (157 page)

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This is an unfinished family tomb. Its family probably perished in the siege, so it was an appropriate place for Jews to gather to mourn the Temple. These pilgrims carved the Hebrew inscriptions that are still visible today.

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This displeased the Romans. Greek love was conventional and not regarded as effeminate: Caesar, Antony, Titus and Trajan were all what we would call bisexual. However, in a reversal of morality today, Romans believed it was acceptable to have sex with boys but not with adults. Yet even when Antinous became a man, Hadrian ignored his wife and treated his lover as his partner.

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Hadrian’s buildings survive in some odd places: Zalatimo’s Sweet Shop, 9 Hanzeit Street, incorporates the remains of the gate of Hadrian’s Temple of Jupiter and the entrance to the main forum. The shop was opened in 1860 by Muhammad Zalatimo, an Ottoman sergeant; it is still run by the family patriarch of this Palestinian cake dynasty, Samir Zalatimo. Hadrian’s walls continue into another old Palestinian family business – the fruit-juice store of Abu Assab – and then into the Russian Alexander Nevsky Church. The archway of Hadrian’s lesser forum survives on the Via Dolorosa, which many Christians mistakenly believe is where Pilate presented Jesus to the crowd with the words ‘Ecce homo’ (Here is the man). In fact, the arch did not exist until a hundred years later. The base of the Damascus Gate has been excavated to reveal its Hadrianic glory. Today’s main street Ha-Gai or El Wad follows the route of Hadrian’s Cardo, which has been excavated in the Western Wall plaza. The historian Cassius Dio and the later Christian source Chronicon Paschale suggest that a Temple of Jupiter was built on the Temple Mount. This is possible, but no traces have been found.

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Upside down just above the decorated section of the Double Gate in the southern wall of the Temple Mount is an inscription that reads ‘TO THE EMPEROR CAESAR TITUS AELIUS HADRIANUS ANTONINUS AUGUSTUS PIUS’, almost certainly the base of the equestrian statue of Antoninus Pius that also stood on the Temple Mount. It must have been looted and then reused by the Umayyad caliphs who built the gate.

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The Gnostics were one of these strands: they believed that the divine sparkwas released only to an elite few with special knowledge. In 1945, the discovery by Egyptian peasants of thirteen codices hidden in a jar and dating from the second or third centuries has revealed much more – and generated many bad movies and novels. In the Apocalypse of Peter and the First Apocalypse of James, it is a substitute who is crucified in place of Jesus. In the Gospel of Philip, there are fragmentary references to Jesus kissing Mary Magdalene, encouraging the idea that they may have married. The Gospel of Judas, which emerged in 2006, appears to present Judas as Jesus’ assistant in accomplishing the Crucifixion, rather than traitor. The texts were probably hidden in the fourth century when the Christian emperors started to crackdown on heresies, but the word ‘Gnostic’, based on the Greekfor knowledge, was coined in the eighteenth century. The Jewish Christians survived in tiny numbers as the Ebionites – the Poor Ones – rejecting the Virgin Birth and revering Jesus the Jewish prophet into the fourth century. As for the mainstream Christians, though relatively small in numbers, their sense of community and mission gave them a growing disdain for the gentiles whom they called bumpkins –
pagani
, hence pagan.

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While excavating the ancient Armenian Chapel of St Helena, Armenian archaeologists opened up a space (now the Varda Chapel) which contained the most intriguing graffito: a sketch of a boat and a phrase in Latin: ‘
Domine ivimus
’ (Lord we have come), a reference to Psalm 122 which starts ‘In domum domini ibimus’ (We’ll go the house of the Lord). This dates from the second century, proving that Christians were secretly praying beneath the Temple of Jupiter in pagan Aelia.

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Initially, Constantine identified the Unconquered Sun with the Christian God, placing crosses on some of his coins, the Sun on others, and remaining Pontifex Maximus (High Priest) of the pagan cults. In 321, Constantine declared Sunday – the day of the Sun – as the Christian version of the Sabbath. Mithraism was a Persian mystery religion with a following among Roman troops. As for Manichaeanism, the Parthian prophet Mani preached that existence was a perpetual struggle of light and dark, ultimately judged and enlightened by Jesus Christ. Now only the word survives to describe a world-view that sees life as a tournament between good and evil.

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In killing his son, Constantine joined an unsavoury crewof royal filicides that includes Herod the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Suleiman the Magnificent. Herod, the emperor Claudius and Henry VIII also executed their own wives.

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But she was not the first lady of Constantine’s family to be there. Eutropia, Fausta’s Christian mother, was already in Jerusalem, perhaps to supervise the emperor’s plans, when her daughter was killed. She shared her daughter’s downfall and was almost written out of history.

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We do not knowthe exact sequence of these buildings and discoveries. Eusebius of Caesarea, who provides the contemporary record, mentions only the orders of the emperor and the actions of Bishop Macarius in building the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (but nothing about Helena’s role in finding the Cross). Yet he gives her credit for the Ascension Church on the Mount of Olives. The story of Helena and the Cross is told later by Sozomen (also a local Christian). Some of Constantine’s walls can still be seen, within the Russian Alexander Nevsky Church: the stones contain the niches by which Constantine’s architects attached the marble. Constantinian churches were based not on pagan temples but the secular basilica, the audience-halls of emperors. Church rituals and clerical costumes were based on the imperial court to promote for the representatives of the King of Heaven a hierarchy parallel to that of the emperor.

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Up until Nicaea, Easter still fell on Passover, since it was at Passover that Jesus had been crucified. NowConstantine’s hatred of the Jews informed his decision to change this for ever. Constantine decreed that Easter should be fixed on the first full moon Sunday after the vernal equinox. This system remained universal until 1582 when the Eastern and Western calendars diverged.

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Arius was on his way through Constantinople after a meeting with Constantine when he felt a ‘relaxation of the bowels’. Before he could reach a convenience, wrote Socrates Scholasticus, Arius’ bowels burst in the middle of the Forum with his intestines, liver and spleen haemorrhaging out of him, a clear demonstration of the evil of his heresy. Yet Arianism lived on after Constantine’s death, supported by his heir Constantius II until condemned again by Theodosius I, who in 381 decreed that Jesus was equal to the Father in the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit and of the same substance.

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Nothing remains of this very short Jewish blossoming, but there may be one small clue. High on the Western Wall, a Hebrewinscription has been discovered reading: ‘And when you see this, your heart will rejoice, and your bones shall flourish like young grass.’ It was too high on the wall for the Second Temple but in this period the ground was much higher. Some scholars believe this expresses the joy of the Jews at Jerusalem’s restoration. More likely, it refers to a tenth-century cemetery: bones were found below this spot.

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Zion was originally the name of the citadel of David’s City, south of the Temple, but became synonymous with the Temple Mount. Now ‘Zion’ became the Christian name for the western hill. In 333, the Bordeaux Pilgrim already called it Zion. In 390, the Bishop of Jerusalem built the magnificent and colossal Zion, Mother of Churches there on the site of the Coenaculum. Jerusalem’s gift for dynamic reinvention and cultural theft is endless – but it does make names very confusing. Take this example: Hadrian’s Neapolis Gate with the huge column standing before it nowbecame St Stephen’s Gate for some centuries before the Arabs called it the Gate of the Column, and later the Nablus Gate (Neapolis being today’s Nablus); the Jews called it the Shechem Gate; the Ottomans called it today’s name, Damascus Gate. (Today’s St Stephen’s Gate is on the eastern side of the city.)

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The Byzantines moved most of the Jewish traditions of the Temple Mount to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The reddish stone of the Temple Mount had been known as the ‘Blood of Zacharias’ (the priest murdered there as told in 2 Chronicles 24.21), but this site nowmoved to the Church as did the Creation, the burial place of Adam, the altars of Melchizedek and Abraham and Solomon’s devil-catching silver bowl. These joined the platter for John the Baptist’s head, the sponge that soothed Jesus on the cross, the column where he was scourged, the stone that killed St Stephen and, of course, the True Cross. The Temple had been the ‘centre of the world’ for Jews; no wonder this one-stop shrine of all biblical holiness, the Church, was now itself regarded as ‘a navel of the world’.

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Monastic women often had to disguise themselves as eunuchs, which led to some entertaining stories: a certain Marina shaved her head, donned a male tunic and joined a monastery as Marinos but was accused of fathering a child and expelled. She brought up the child and only on her death did the monks discover that she was unequipped to perpetrate the sin of which she had been accused.

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Eudocia was inspired by Psalm 51: ‘Do good in thy good pleasure [Greek:
eudocia
] unto Zion: build the walls of Jerusalem.’ She was advised by the celebrated Armenian monk Euphemius whose protégé Sabas later founded the hauntingly beautiful Mar Saba Monastery, today inhabited by twenty monks, in the Judaean mountains not far from Jerusalem. Armenia, in the Caucasus, had been the first kingdom to convert to Christianity in 301 (after the mythical conversion of King Abgar of Edessa), followed by its neighbour Georgia (known as Iberia) in 327. Eudocia was joined by her own protégé, Peter the Georgian, the king of Iberia’s son, who built a monastery outside the walls. This was the start of the Caucasian presence in Jerusalem that endures today.

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Nestorianism became popular in the East through the Assyrian Church of the East that converted some of the royal family of Sassanid Persia and later many of Genghis Khan’s family. Simultaneously, Monophysite Eastern Christians, rejecting Chalcedon, formed the Egyptian Coptic, Syriac Orthodox (known also as Jacobite after its founder Jacob Baradeus) and Ethiopian Churches. The latter developed a special link with Judaism –
The Book of Glory of Kings
celebrates the union of King Solomon and Sheba, as the parents of the ‘Lion of Judah’ King Menelik who brought the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia, where it is now said to rest in Axum. This link later created the House of Israel (Beta Israel), the Falashas, black Ethiopian Jews, who existed at least from the fourteenth century; in 1984, the Israelis airlifted them to Israel.

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One of Justinian’s earliest decisions in his uncle’s reign was to destroy the Arabian Jewish kingdom of Yemen. In the early fifth century, the Kings of Yemen (Himyara) had converted to Judaism. In 523, in response to Byzantine threats, the Jewish king Joseph – Dhu Nuwas Zurah Yusuf – massacred Christians in Yemen and forced neighbouring principalities to convert to Judaism. Justinian ordered the Christian king Kaleb of Axum (Ethiopia) to invade Yemen. King Joseph was defeated in 525 and committed suicide by riding into the sea on horseback. Yet many Jews remained in Yemen and Judaism did not disappear in Arabia: many of its tribes remained Jewish in Muhammad’s day; Yemenite Jews would start to settle in Jerusalem in the nineteenth century and emigrate to Israel after 1948. Only one village of Jews remains in Yemen in 2010.

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For years this immense complex was lost, but its foundations, stretching from the Jewish Quarter under the present walls to outside the Old City, were discovered in excavations by the archaeologist Nahman Avigad in 1973. Justinian built on a series of vaults constructed along the slope to support its weight. This inscription was found among them: ‘And this is the work carried out by the generosity of our most gracious Emperor Flavius Justinianus.’

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In 1884, a colourful mosaic was found on the floor of a Byzantine church in Madaba (in Jordan), inscribed ‘The Holy City of Jerusalem’, the first Jerusalem map to showthe Byzantine view of the city with its six main gates, churches and the Temple Mount scarcely worth showing at all. Yet the Temple Mount was not completely empty. It has never been excavated by archaeologists, but in the 1940s British engineers, restoring the Islamic holy sites, made shallowprobes and found Byzantine traces. Optimists hoped these might be the foundations of Emperor Julian’s (unbuilt) Jewish Temple. But these may be traces of the only Byzantine shrine on this site – the small Church of the Pinnacle marking Jesus’ temptation by the devil.

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Christian accounts make the exaggerated claim that 10,000 to 90,000 Christians were murdered by the Jews and buried by Thomas the Gravedigger. Christian legend claims the victims were buried in the Mamilla cemetery of the Lions’ Cave, so named because survivors hid in the cave until they were saved by a lion. The Jews claim that it was Jewish victims of a Christian massacre who were saved by the lion.

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Some traces of a building at the Temple Mount’s south-west corner seem to show a menorah painted over a cross, possibly a Christian shrine inherited for a short time by Jews. But this may date from the early Islamic period.