Jerusalem: The Biography (27 page)

CONSTANTINE THE GREAT: THE FAMILY KILLINGS

Soon after Constantine’s victory, his wife Fausta denounced his eldest son (by an earlier marriage) Crispus Caesar for a sexual offence. Did she play on Constantine’s new Christian chastity by claiming that Crispus had tried to seduce her or that he was a rapist? Was it actually an affair turned sour? Crispus would not have been the first young man to have an affair with his stepmother nor the last to want one, but perhaps the emperor was already jealous of Crispus’ military successes. Certainly Fausta had every reason to dislike this obstacle to the rise of her own sons.

Whatever the truth, Constantine, outraged by his son’s immorality, ordered his execution. The emperor’s Christian advisers were disgusted and the most important woman in his life, his mother, now intervened. Helena had been a Bithnian barmaid and possibly never married his father, but she was an early convert to Christianity and was now the Augusta – empress – in her own right.

Helena convinced Constantine that he had been manipulated. Perhaps she revealed that Fausta had actually tried to seduce Crispus, not vice versa. Redeeming one unforgivable murder with another, Constantine ordered the execution of his wife, Fausta, for adultery: she was either scalded to death in boiling water or suffocated in an overheated steamroom, a particularly unChristian solution to a highly unChristian dilemma. But Jerusalem would benefit from this double murder,
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scarcely mentioned by the embarrassed Christian eulogists.

Soon afterwards, Helena, securing carte blanche to embellish Christ’s city, set off for Jerusalem.
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Her glory would be Constantine’s penance.
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HELENA: THE FIRST ARCHAEOLOGIST

Helena, septuagenarian empress, whose coins show her sharp face and her braided coiffuer and tiara, arrived in Aelia ‘with all the energy of youth’, and generous funds, to become Jerusalem’s most monumental builder and miraculously successful archaeologist.

Constantine knew that the place of Jesus’ Crucifixion and burial lay beneath Hadrian’s Temple with its statue of that ‘impure demon called Aphrodite, a dark shrine of lifeless idols’, as Eusebius put it. He had ordered Bishop Macarius to purify the place, demolish the pagan temple, excavate the original tomb within and build there a basilica that would be ‘the finest in the world’ with ‘the most beautiful structures, columns and marbles, the most precious and serviceable, ornamented in gold’.

Helena determined to find the actual tomb. The pagan temple had to be smashed, the paving stones lifted, the earth removed and the holy place located. The empress’s quest must have created an excited and lucrative search in small Aelia. A Jew, perhaps one of the remaining Christian Jews, produced documents that led to the discovery of the cave that was declared to be Jesus’ tomb. Helena also sought the site of the Crucifixion and even the Cross itself.

No archaeologist has ever approached her success. She discovered three wooden crosses, a wooden plaque that read ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of Jews’, and the actual nails. But which cross was the right one? The empress and bishop are said to have borne these pieces of wood to the bedside of a dying woman. When the third was placed beside her, the invalid ‘suddenly opened her eyes, regained her strength and sprang well from her bed’. Helena ‘sent part to her son Constantine together with the nails’, which the emperor had set into the bridle of his horse. From now on, all Christendom craved the holy relics that usually originated in Jerusalem, and this Life-Giving Tree begat a forest of splinters of the True Cross, which started to replace the earlier Chi-Rho as the symbol of Christianity.

Helena’s discovery of the Cross was possibly a later invention, but she certainly changed the city for ever. She built churches of the Ascension and of the Eleona on the Mount of Olives. Her third church, that of the Holy Sepulchre, which took ten years to complete, was not one building but a complex of four parts, its façade facing eastwards, which was entered from the main Roman street, the Cardo. (Today’s church faces south.) The visitor climbed steps into an atrium that led via three entrances into the Basilica or Martyrium, a huge ‘church of wondrous beauty’, with five aisles and rows of pillars, which led in turn, through its apse, into the Holy Garden, a colonnaded courtyard where, in the south-eastern corner, stood the hill of Golgotha enclosed in an open chapel. The gold-domed Rotunda (the Anastasis) opened to the sky so that the light shone down on to Jesus’ tomb. Its splendour dominated Jerusalem’s sacred space, mocking the Temple Mount, where Helena levelled any pagan shrine and ‘ordered filth thrown in its place’ to show the failure of the Jewish God.
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Just a few years later, in 333, one of the first new pilgrims, an anonymous visitor from Bordeaux, found Aelia already transformed into a bustling Christian temple-city. The ‘wondrous’ Church was not finished but was rising fast, yet Hadrian’s statue still stood amid the ruins of the Temple Mount.

Empress Helena visited all the sites of Jesus’ life, creating the first roadmap for the pilgrims who slowly began to flock to Jerusalem to experience its special holiness. Helena was nearly eighty by the time she returned to Constantinople where her son kept parts of the Cross, despatching another splinter and the plaque to her aptly named Roman church, Santa Croce in Gerusalemme.

Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, was jealous of Jerusalem’s new eminence, doubting that this Jewish city, ‘which after the bloody murder of the Lord had paid the penalty of its wicked inhabitants’, could be the city of God. After all, the Christians had paid little attention to Jerusalem for three centuries. Yet Eusebius had a point: Constantine had to confront the heritage of the Jews just as the creator of the New Jerusalem had to divert the holiness of the Jewish sites towards his new shrines.

When the Romans worshipped many gods, they tolerated others, providing they did not threaten the state, but a monotheistic religion demanded the recognition of one truth, one god. The persecution of the Jewish Christ-killers whose wretchedness proved Christian truth, thus became essential. Constantine ordered that any Jews who tried to stop their brethren from converting to Christianity were to be instantly burned.
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Yet a small Jewish community had been living in Jerusalem, praying at a synagogue on Mount Zion, for over a century and Jews discreetly prayed on the deserted Temple Mount. Now‘ the detestable mob of Jews’, as Constantine called them, were banned from Jerusalem except once a year when they were allowed on to the Temple Mount, where the Bordeaux pilgrim saw them ‘mourn and rend their garments’ over the ‘perforated stone’ – the foundation-stone of the Temple, today enclosed by the Dome of the Rock.

Constantine decided to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of his accession in Jerusalem but was still struggling to control the controversy stirred up by the troublesome priest Arius – even after he had departed this world in a fecally explosive incident.
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When Constantine ordered a synod ‘to free the Church from blasphemy and lighten my cares’, once again the Arians defied him, overshadowing the first Christian festival in Jerusalem, a gathering of bishops from across the world. But the emperor was too ill to come. Finally baptized on his deathbed in 337, he divided the empire among his three sons and two nephews. The only things on which they agreed were the continuation of the Christian empire and the promulgation of more anti-Jewish laws: in 339, they banned intermarriage with Jews, whom they called a ‘savage, abominable disgrace’.

Constantine’s heirs fought for twenty years, a civil war finally won by his second son Constantius. This turbulence unsettled Palaestina. In 351, an earthquake in Jerusalem led all the Christians to rush to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre ‘seized with awe’. When the Galilean Jews rebelled, led by a messianic king, they were so wantonly slaughtered by the emperor’s cousin Gallus Caesar that even the Romans were sickened. Yet the Jews now found sympathy in a surprising place: the Emperor decided to overturn Christianity – and rebuild the Jewish Temple.
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JULIAN THE APOSTATE: JERUSALEM RESTORED

On 19 July 362, the new emperor, Constantine’s nephew Julian, who was in Antioch on his way to invade Persia, asked a Jewish delegation: ‘Why do you not sacrifice?’

‘We aren’t allowed,’ replied the Jews. ‘Restore us to the city, rebuild the Temple and the Altar.’

‘I shall endeavour with the utmost zeal’, replied Julian, ‘to set up the Temple of the Most High God.’ The emperor’s astonishing reply was greeted with such Jewish enthusiasm that it was ‘as if the days of their kingdom had already arrived’.

Julian reversed the Hadrianic and Constantinian persecutions, restored Jerusalem to the Jews, returned their property, revoked the anti-Jewish taxes and granted power of taxation and the title praetorian prefect to their patriarch Hillel. Jews must have poured into Jerusalem from all over the Roman and Persian worlds to celebrate this miracle. They reclaimed the Temple Mount, probably removing the statues of Hadrian and Antoninus to raise a provisional synagogue, perhaps around the stones that the Bordeaux Pilgrim called the House of King Hezekiah.

Julian was shy, cerebral and awkward. A biased Christian recalled his ‘oddly disjointed neck, hunched and twitching shoulders, wild darting eye, swaying walk, haughty way of breathing down that prominent nose, that nervous and uncontrolled laughter, ever-nodding head and halting speech’. But the bearded, burly emperor was also decisive and single-minded. He restored paganism, favouring the family’s old divine patron, the Sun, encouraging the traditional sacrifices in pagan temples and dismissing Galilean (as he called Christian) teachers in order to diminish their effete, unRoman values.

Julian had never expected to rule the empire. He was just five when Constantius murdered his father and most of his family; only two survived, Gallus and Julian. In 349, Constantius appointed Gallus as Caesar only to behead him, partly for his inept suppression of a Jewish revolt. Yet he needed a Caesar in the West and there was now only one candidate left. Julian, then a student of philosophy in Athens, became Caesar, ruling from Paris. Understandably, he was nervous when the unpredictable emperor summoned him. Inspired by a dream about Zeus, he accepted the imperial crown from his troops. As he marched eastwards, Constantius died and Julian found himself ruler of the entire empire.

Julian’s rebuilding of the Jewish Temple was not just a mark of his tolerance but a nullification of the Christian claim to have inherited the true Israel, a reversal of the fulfilment of the prophecies of Daniel and Jesus that the Temple would fall, and a sign that he was serious in the overturning of his uncle’s work. It would also win the support of the Babylonian Jews during his planned Persian war. Julian saw no contradiction between Greek paganism and Jewish monotheism, believing that the Greeks worshipped the Jewish ‘Most High God’ as Zeus: Yahweh was not unique to the Jews.

Julian appointed Alypius, his representative in Britain, to rebuild the Jewish Temple. The Sanhedrin were nervous: was this too good to be true? To reassure them, Julian, setting off for the Persian front, wrote ‘To the Community of Jews’, repeating his promise. In Jerusalem, exhilarated Jews ‘sought out the most skilled artisans, collected materials, cleared the ground and embarked so earnestly on the task that even women carried heaps of earth and brought their necklaces to defray the expenses’. Building materials were stored in the so-called Stables of Solomon. ‘When they had removed the remains of the former building, they cleared the foundation.’

As the Jews took control of Jerusalem, Julian invaded Persia with 65,000 troops. But on 27 May 363 Jerusalem was struck by an earthquake that somehow ignited the building materials.

The Christians were delighted by this ‘wonderful phenomenon’, though they may well have helped it along with arson. Alypius could have continued the work, but Julian had crossed the Tigris into Iraq. In tense Jerusalem, Alypius decided to await Julian’s return. The emperor, however, was already in retreat. On 26 June in a confused skirmish near Samara, an Arab soldier (possibly a Christian) stabbed him in the side with a spear. Pierced in the liver, Julian tried to pull it out, shredding the sinews of his hand. Christian writers claimed that he died saying, ‘Vicisti, Galilaee!’, ‘Thou has conquered, Galilean!’. He was succeeded by the commander of his guard, who restored Christianity, reversed all Julian’s acts and again banned the Jews from Jerusalem: henceforth there would again be one religion, one truth. In 391–2 Theodosius I made Christianity the empire’s official religion and started to enforce it.
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JEROME AND PAULA: SAINTHOOD, SEX AND THE CITY

In 384, a splenetic Roman scholar named Jerome arrived in Jerusalem with an entourage of wealthy Christian women. Obsessively pious, they nonetheless travelled under a cloud of sexual scandal.

Now in his late thirties, the Illyrian Jerome had lived as a hermit in the Syrian desert, always tormented with sexual longings: ‘Although my only companions were scorpions, I was mingling with the dances of girls, my mind throbbing with desires.’ Jerome then served as the secretary to Damasus I, the Bishop of Rome, where the nobility had embraced Christianity. Damasus felt confident enough to declare that the bishops of Rome served with divine blessing in direct apostolic succession from St Peter, a big step in their development into the supreme, infallible popes of later times. But now the Church had such patrician support, Damasus and Jerome found themselves entangled in some very worldly scandals: Damasus was accused of adultery, dubbed ‘the tickler of the ears of middle-aged women’, while Jerome was said to be having an affair with the rich widow Paula, one of the many such ladies who had embraced Christianity. Jerome and Paula were exonerated – but they had to leave Rome and so they set out for Jerusalem, accompanied by her daughter Eustochium.