g 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.
h The Gnostics were one of these strands: they believed that the divine spark was 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 crack down on heresies, but the word “Gnostic,” based on the Greek for 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.
i 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.
PART THREE
Christianity
Jerusalem—it is the city of the great King.
—JESUS, St. Matthew, 5.35
O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets and stonest them which are sent unto thee.
—JESUS, St. Matthew, 23.37
Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.
—JESUS, St. John, 2.19
As Judaea is exalted above all other provinces so is this city exalted above all Judaea.
—ST. JEROME, Epistles
Jerusalem is now made a place of resort from all parts of the world, and there is such a throng of pilgrims of both sexes that all temptation is here collected together.
—ST. JEROME, Epistles
CHAPTER 15
The Apogee of Byzantium
312–518 AD
CONSTANTINE THE GREAT: CHRIST, GOD OF VICTORY
In 312, Constantine invaded Italy and attacked his rival Maxentius just outside Rome. The night before battle, Constantine saw before him “in the sky the sign of a cross of light” superimposed on the sun with the slogan: “By this sign you will conquer!” So he emblazoned the shields of his soldiers with the Chi-Rho symbol, the first two letters of “Christ” in Greek. The next day at the Battle of Milvian Bridge, he won the West. In this age of auguries and visions, Constantine believed he owed his power to the Christian “Supreme God.”
Constantine was a rough soldier, a holy visionary, a murderous autocrat and a political showman who slashed his way to power but, once at the pinnacle of human supremacy, he envisioned an empire unified under one religion, one emperor. He was a bundle of contradictions—he was bullnecked, aquiline-nosed and his paranoia often exploded in the sudden killing of friends and family. He wore his hair shoulder-length, sported gaudy bracelets and bejewelled robes, and relished the pageantry of power, the debates of philosophers and bishops and schemes of architectural beauty and religious boldness. No one knows why he embraced Christianity at that moment, though, like many brutally confident men, he adored his mother, Helena, and she was an early convert. If his personal conversion was as dramatic as Paul’s on the road to Damascus, his political embrace of Christianity was gradual. Most importantly, Christ had delivered victory in battle, and that was a language that Constantine understood: Christ the Lamb became the god of victory. Not that Constantine was in any way lamb-like himself: he soon presented himself as the Equal of the Apostles. There was nothing remarkable in his promotion of himself as a military commander with divine protection. Roman emperors, like Greek kings, always identified themselves with divine patrons. Constantine’s own father revered the Unconquered Sun, a step towards monotheism. But the choice of the Christ was not inevitable—it depended purely on Constantine’s personal whim. In 312, Manichaeanism and Mithraism were no less popular than Christianity. Constantine could just as easily have chosen one of these—and Europe might today be Mithraistic or Manichaean.a
In 313, Constantine and the Eastern emperor Licinius granted toleration and privileges to the Christians in their Edict of Milan. But it was only in 324 that Constantine, now aged fifty-one, defeated Licinius to unite the empire. He tried to impose Christian chastity across his domains and banned pagan sacrifices, sacred prostitution, religious orgies, and gladiatorial shows, replacing them with chariot-racing. That year, he moved his capital eastwards, founding his Second Rome on the site of a Greek town called Byzantium on the Bosphorus, a gateway between Europe and Asia. This soon became known as Constantinople with its own patriarch, who now joined the bishop of Rome and the patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch as the ruling powers of Christianity. The new faith suited Constantine’s new style of kingship. Christianity had from the earliest days of James, Overseer of Jerusalem, developed a hierarchy of elders (presbyteroi) and overseers/bishops (episkopoi) in charge of regional dioceses. Constantine saw that Christianity, with its hierarchy, paralleled the organization of the Roman empire: there would be one emperor, one state, one faith.
Yet he had no sooner bound his supremacy to his imperial religion than he discovered that Christianity was divided: the Gospels were vague about Jesus’ nature and his relationship to God. Was Jesus a man with some divine characteristics or God inhabiting the body of a man? Now that the Church was established, Christology became paramount, more important than life itself, for the right definition of Christ would decide whether a man would achieve salvation and enter heaven. In our secular era, the debates on nuclear disarmament or global warming are the closest equivalents in their passion and intensity. Christianity now became a mass religion in an age of fanatical faith and these questions were debated in the streets as well as in the palaces of the empire. When Arius, an Alexandrian priest who preached to huge crowds using popular jingles, argued that Jesus was subordinate to God and therefore more human than divine, this upset the many who regarded Christ as more God than man. When the local governor tried to suppress Arius, his followers rioted in Alexandria.
In 325 Constantine, infuriated and bemused by this doctrinal tumult, called the bishops to the Council of Nicaea and tried to impose his solution: that Jesus was divine and human, “of one substance” with the Father. It was at Nicaea (present-day Isnik in Turkey) that Macarius, the Bishop of Aelia Capitolina (once called Jerusalem), brought the fate of his small and neglected town to Constantine’s attention. Constantine knew Aelia, probably having visited it as a boy of eight when he was in Emperor Diocletian’s entourage. Now keen to celebrate his success at Nicaea and project the sacred glory of his empire, he decided to restore the city and create what Eusebius (Bishop of Caesarea and the emperor’s biographer) called “The New Jerusalem built over against the one so famous of old.” Constantine commissioned a church that befitted Jerusalem as the cradle of the Good News. But the work was accelerated by the emperor’s murderous domestic troubles.
CONSTANTINE THE GREAT: THE FAMILY KILLINGS
Soon after Constantine’s victory, his wife Fausta den
ounced 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,b scarcely mentioned by the embarrassed Christian eulogists.
Soon afterwards, Helena, securing carte blanche to embellish Christ’s city, set off for Jerusalem.c Her glory would be Constantine’s penance.1
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 forever. 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 onto 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.d
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.e 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 onto 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.f 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 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.