Jerusalem. The Biography

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. *
    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 murderof 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. * 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. † 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. 2
    JULIAN THE APOSTATE: JERUSALEM