Jerusalem. The Biography

succeeded by the commander of his guard, who restored Christianity, reversed allJulian’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. * 3
    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.
    The very presence of this teenaged virgin seemed to inflame Jerome who smelled sex everywhere and spent much of the trip writing tracts warning of its dangers. ‘Lust’, he wrote, ‘tickles the senses and the soft fire of sensual pleasure sheds its pleasing glow.’ Once in Jerusalem, Jerome and his pious millionairesses found a new city that was an entrepot of sanctity, trade, networking and sex. The piety was intense and the richest of these ladies, Melania (who enjoyed an annual income of 120,000 pounds of gold), founded her own monastery on the Mount of Olives. But Jerome was horrified by the sexual opportunities offeredby the mixing of so many strange men and women crowded together in this theme park of religious passion and sensory excitement: ‘all temptation is collected here’, he wrote, and all humanity – ‘prostitutes, actors and clowns’. Indeed ‘there is no sort of shameful practices in which they don’t indulge’, observed another saintly but sharp-eyed pilgrim, Gregory of Nyssa. ‘Cheating, adultery, theft, idolatry, poisoning, quarrels and murder are everyday occurrences.’
    Imperial patronage, monumental building and the stream of pilgrims now created a new calendar of festivals and rituals around the city, climaxing with Easter, and a new spiritual geography of Jerusalem, based on the sites of Jesus’ Passion. Names were changed, * traditions muddled, but all that matters in Jerusalem is what is believed to be true. Another female pioneer, Egeria, a Spanish nun, who visited in the 380s, described the ever-expanding panoply of relics in the Holy Sepulchre † that now included King Solomon’s ring and the horn of oil that had anointed David. These joined Jesus’ crown of thorns and the lance that pierced his side.
    The theatre and sanctity drove some pilgrims into a delirium special to Jerusalem: the True Cross had to be specially guarded because pilgrims tried to bite off chunks when they kissed it. That curmudgeon Jerome could not bear all this theatrical screaming – hence he settled in Bethlehem to work on his masterpiece, translating the Hebrew Bible into Latin. But he visited frequently and was never shy about expressing his views. ‘It’s as easy to find the way to Heaven in Britain as in Jerusalem,’ he snarled in reference to the vulgar crowds of British pilgrims. When he watched his friend Paula’s emotive prayers before the Cross inthe Holy Garden, he cattily claimed that she looked ‘as though she saw the Lord hanging upon it’ and kissed the tomb ‘like a thirsty man who had waited long and at last comes to water’. Her ‘tears and lamentations’ were so loud that they ‘were known to all Jerusalem or to the Lord himself whom she called upon’.
    Yet one drama that he did appreciate took place on the Temple Mount, kept in desolation to confirm Jesus’ prophecies.