Jerusalem. The Biography

the city gate of the fortress of Lachish: they give a human glimpse of the unstoppable Babylonian advance. Lachish and another fortress, Azekah, held out the longest, communicating with each other and Jerusalem by fire-signals. At Lachish, the beleaguered Judaean commander Yaush received reports from his outposts as they were gradually destroyed. His officer Hoshayahu soon noted that the fire-signals no longer came from Azekah. Then Lachish too was destroyed in heavy fighting.

* One of Cyrus’ decrees of tolerance, later found inscribed on a cylinder, won him the soubriquet Father of Human Rights, and a copy now stands at the entrance of the United Nations in New York. But he was no liberal. For instance, when the Lydian capital of Sardis rebelled, he slaughtered thousands of its inhabitants. Cyrus himself believed in Ahura Mazda, the winged Persian god of life, wisdom and light in whose name the prophet of the Aryan Persians, Zoroaster, had decreed that life was a battle between truth and lie, fire versus darkness. But there was no state religion, just this polytheistic vision of light and dark that was not incompatible with Judaism (and later Christianity). Indeed the Persian word for heaven –
paridaeza
– became our own ‘paradise.’ Their priests – the magi – gave us the word ‘magic’, and the three eastern priests said to have heralded the birth of Christ.

* Jesus’ birth is historically challenging, the Gospels contradictory. No one knows the date but it was probably before Herod’s death, in 4 BC which means Jesus died in his early thirties if he was crucified in AD 29–30, forty if it was AD 36. The story of the census summoning the family to Bethlehem is not historical because Quirinius’ census took place after Herod’s successor, Archelaus, was deposed in AD 6, almost ten years
after
Jesus’ birth. In recounting the journey to Bethlehem and his Davidic genealogy, Matthew’s Gospel provides Jesus with royal birth and fulfilment of prophecy – ‘for thus it is written by the prophet.’ The Massacre of the Innocents and the escape to Egypt are clearly inspired by the Passover story: one of the Ten Plagues was the Killing of the First Born. Wherever Jesus was born, it is likely that the family did travel to the Temple for the sacrifice. Muslim tradition, expanded on by the Crusaders, believes that Jesus was raised in the chapel beneath al-Aqsa Mosque, Jesus’ Cradle. Jesus’ family is mysterious: after the birth, Joseph simply disappears from the Gospels. Matthew and Luke state that Mary remained a virgin and Jesus was fathered by God (an idea familiar in Roman and Greek theology, and also suggested in Isaiah’s prophecy of Emmanuel). But Matthew, Mark and John name Jesus’ brothers: James, Joses, Judas and Simon along with a sister, Salome. When Mary’s virginity became Christian dogma, the existence of these other children became inconvenient. John mentions ‘Mary the wife of Cleophas’. If Joseph died young, Mary may have married this Cleophas and had more children because, after the Crucifixion, Jesus was succeeded as leader first by his brother James then by ‘Simon son of Cleophas’.

† The Golden Gate is the traditional gate by which Jesus entered the Temple, and in Jewish, Muslim and Christian mysticism, the Messiah will enter Jerusalem there. But Jesus would not have entered this way: the Gate was not built for another 600 years and the nearby Shushan Gate was not open to the public and only rarely used by the high priest himself. Another Christian tradition says Jesus entered through the Beautiful Gate, on the other side, today probably close to the Bab al-Silsila (Gate of the Chain) on the west. This is more likely. But the Beautiful Gate is also the place where Peter and John performed a miracle after Jesus’ death. The very name Golden Gate may be a muddled version of ‘beautiful’ since golden in Latin (
aurea
) and beautiful in Greek (
oreia
) are so similar. Jerusalem’s holiness is criss-crossed with such misunderstandings, and multiple legends applied to the same sites to enforce and embellish their sanctity

* This is a totally different route from the traditional Via Dolorosa. The Gennath Gate, mentioned by Josephus, was identified by the Israeli archaeologist Nahman Avigad in the northern part of the Jewish Quarter in a section of the First Wall. In the Muslim period, Christians wrongly believed that the Antonia Fortress was the Praetorium where