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.g3
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 offered by 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,h 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 Sepulchrei 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 in the 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. On each 9th of Ab Jerome gleefully watched the Jews commemorating the destruction of the Temple: “Those faithless people who killed the servant of God—that mob of wretches congregates and, while the Church of Resurrection glows and the banner of His Cross shines forth from the Mount of Olives, those miserable people groan over the ruins of the Temple. A soldier asks for money to allow them to weep a little longer.” Despite his fluent Hebrew, Jerome hated the Jews, who raised children “just like worms,” and relished this gratifying freak show that confirmed Christ’s victorious truth: “Can anyone harbour doubts when he looks upon this scene about the Day of Tribulation and Suffering?” The very tragedy of the Jews’ plight redoubled their love for Jerusalem. For Rabbi Berekhah this scene was a ritual as sacred as it was poignant: “They come silently and go silently, they come weeping and go weeping, they come in darkness of the night and depart in darkness.”
Yet now Jewish hopes were to be raised again by the Empress who came to rule Jerusalem.4
BARSOMA AND THE PARAMILITARY MONKS
Empresses tended to be described by chauvinistic historians as hideous, vicious whores or serene saints, but unusually Empress Eudocia was especially praised for her exquisite looks and artistic nature. In 438, this beautiful wife of the Emperor Theodosius II came to Jerusalem and relaxed the rules against the Jews. At the same time,
a synagogue-burning ascetic, Barsoma of Nisibis, arrived on one of his regular pilgrimages with a thuggish retinue of paramilitary monks.
Eudocia was a protector of pagans and Jews because she had been pagan herself. The striking daughter of an Athenian sophist, educated in rhetoric and literature, she came to Constantinople to appeal to the emperor after her brothers stole her inheritance. Theodosius II was a malleable boy, ruled by his pious and graceless sister, Pulcheria. She introduced Eudocia to her brother, who was instantly smitten and married her. Pulcheria dominated her brother’s government, intensifying the persecution of the Jews, who were now excluded from the army and public life, and condemned to be second-class citizens. In 425, Theodosius ordered the execution of Gamaliel VI, the last Jewish patriarch, to punish him for building more synagogues, and abolished the office forever. Gradually, Eudocia became powerful and Theodosius promoted her to Augusta, equal in rank to his sister. A coloured stone inlay of her in a Constantinople church shows her regal style, black hair, slim elegance and delicate nose.
In Jerusalem, the Jews, facing intensifying repression from Constantinople, begged Eudocia for more access to the Holy City, and she agreed that they could openly visit the Temple Mount for their chief festivals. This was wonderful news, and the Jews declared that they should all “hasten to Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles for our kingdom will be established.”
However, Jewish joy disgusted that other visitor to Jerusalem, Barsoma of Nisibis, a Syrian monk who was one of the new breed of militant monastic leaders. During the fourth century, certain ascetics started to react against the worldly values of society and the splendour of the clerical hierarchs and founded monasteries in the desert in order to return to the values of the earliest Christians. The hermits—from the Greek word for “wilderness”—believed it was not enough to know the right formula for Christ’s nature, it was also necessary to live righteously, so they existed in hair-shirted, celibate simplicity in the deserts of Egypt and Syria.j Their self-flagellating feats of ostentatious holiness were celebrated, their biographies were written (the first hagiographies), their hermitages were visited and their discomforts became sources of wonder. The two St. Simeons lived for decades, thirty feet up, atop columns and were known as the stylites (from stylos meaning “column”). One stylite, Daniel, was asked how he defecated: drily, like a sheep, he replied. Indeed, Jerome thought they were more interested in filth than in holiness. But these monks were far from peaceful. Jerusalem, which was now surrounded by new monasteries and contained many of its own, was at the mercy of these squadrons of street-fighting fanatics.
Barsoma, who was said to be so holy that he never sat or lay down, was offended by the survival of Jewish and Samaritan “idolators” and determined to cleanse Palaestina of them. He and his monks killed Jews and burned synagogues. The emperor banned the violence for reasons of order, but Barsoma ignored him. Now, in Jerusalem, Barsoma’s coenobite shock-troopers, armed with swords and clubs under monks’ robes, ambushed the Jews on the Temple Mount, stoning and killing many of them, tossing their bodies into water cisterns and courtyards. The Jews fought back, arrested eighteen attackers and handed them over to the Byzantine governor who charged them with murder. “These brigands in the respectable habits of monks” were brought to Eudocia, the pilgrim empress. They were guilty of murder but when they implicated Barsoma, he spread rumours that noble Christians were to be burned alive. The mob turned in Barsoma’s favour, especially when he cited a timely earthquake as a sign of divine approval.
If the empress planned to execute Christians, Barsoma’s followers cried, then “we will burn the empress and all those with her.” Barsoma terrorized officials into testifying that the Jewish victims had no wounds: they had died of natural causes. Another earthquake added to the widespread fear. The city was slipping out of control. Eudocia had little choice but to acquiesce. “Five hundred groups” of paramilitary monks patrolled the streets and Barsoma announced that “The Cross has triumphed,” a cry repeated across the city “like the roar of a wave” as his followers anointed him with expensive perfumes, and the murderers were freed.
Despite this violence, Eudocia cherished Jerusalem, commissioning an array of new churches, and she returned to Constantinople laden with new relics. But her sister-in-law Pulcheria was plotting to destroy her.
EUDOCIA: EMPRESS OF JERUSALEM
Theodosius sent Eudocia a Phrygian apple. She gave it to her protégé, Paulinus, Master of the Offices, who then sent it as a present to the emperor. Theodosius, hurt by this, confronted his wife who lied and insisted that she had not given his present away to anyone but had eaten it. At that, the emperor produced the apple. This white lie suggested to Theodosius that what his sister had been whispering was true: Eudocia was having an affair with Paulinus. The story is mythical—apples symbolize life and chastity—but in its very human details it chronicles just the sort of accidental chain of events that can end badly in the hothouse courts of fraught autocracies. Paulinus was executed in 440, but the imperial couple negotiated a way for Eudocia to retire from the capital with honour. Three years later, she arrived in Jerusalem to rule Palaestina in her own right.
Even then Pulcheria tried to destroy her, despatching Saturnius, Count of the Imperial Bodyguard, to execute two of her entourage. Eudocia quickly had Saturnius murdered. Once this imperial skulduggery had died down, she was left to her own devices: she built palaces for herself and the city’s bishop and a hospice next to the Sepulchre that survived for centuries. She built the first walls since Titus, enclosing Mount Zion and the City of David—her sections of wall can be seen today in both places. The pillars of her multi-levelled church around the Siloam Pool still stand in the waters there.k
The empire was now disturbed by the reignited Christological dispute. If Jesus and the Father were “of one substance,” how could Christ combine both divine and human natures? In 428, Nestorius, the new Patriarch of Constantinople, tactlessly stressed Jesus’ human side and dual nature, claiming that the Virgin Mary should be considered not Theotokos, Bearer of God, but merely Christokos, Bearer of Christ. His enemies, the Monophysites, insisted that Christ had one nature which was simultaneously human and divine. Dyophysites fought their Monophysite protagonists in the imperial palaces and in the backstreets of Jerusalem and Constantinople with all the violence and hatred of Christological football hooligans. Everyone, noticed Gregory of Nyssa, had an opinion: “You ask a man for change, he’ll give you a piece of philosophy concerning the Begotten and the Unbegotten; if you enquire the price of a loaf, he replies ‘The Father is greater and the Son inferior’; or if you ask whether the bath is ready, the answer you receive is that the Son was made out of nothing.”
When Theodosius died, his two empresses faced each other across the Christological divide. Pulcheria, who had seized power in Constantinople, backed the Dyophysites, but Eudocia, like most Eastern Christians, was a Monophysite. Pulcheria duly expelled her from the Church. When Juvenal, the Bishop of Jerusalem, backed Pulcheria, the Monophysite Jerusalemites mobilized their monkish shock-troopers who drove him out of the city, a predicament he exploited. Christianity had long been ruled by the four great metropolitan bishoprics—Rome and the Eastern patriarchates. But Jerusalem’s bishops had always campaigned for promotion to patriarch. Now Juvenal won this promotion as the prize for the loyalty that almost cost him his life. Finally in 451, at the Council of Chalcedon, Pulcheria enforced a compromise: in the Union of Two Natures, Jesus was “perfect in divinity, and perfect in humanity.” Eudocia agreed and became reconciled with Pulcheria. This compromise has lasted to this day in the Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant churches, but it was flawed: the Monophysites and Nestorians, for precisely opposite reasons, rejected it and split off from Orthodoxy forever.l
At a time when the Western Roman empire was being terrorized by Attila the Hun and hurtling toward its fatal collapse, the ageing Eudocia was writing Greek poetry and building her St. Stephen’s basilica, now vanished, but
just north of the Damascus Gate, where in 460 she was buried alongside the relics of the first martyr.5
a Initially, Constantine identified the Unconquered Sun with the Christian God, placing crosses on some of his coins, the Sun on others, and remaining Pontifex Maximus (High Priest) of the pagan cults. In 321, Constantine declared Sunday—the day of the Sun—as the Christian version of the Sabbath. Mithraism was a Persian mystery religion with a following among Roman troops. As for Manichaeanism, the Parthian prophet Mani preached that existence was a perpetual struggle of light and dark, ultimately judged and enlightened by Jesus Christ. Now only the word survives to describe a world-view that sees life as a tournament between good and evil.
b In killing his son, Constantine joined an unsavoury crew of royal filicides that includes Herod the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Suleiman the Magnificent. Herod, the emperor Claudius and Henry VIII also executed their own wives.
c But she was not the first lady of Constantine’s family to be there. Eutropia, Fausta’s Christian mother, was already in Jerusalem, perhaps to supervise the emperor’s plans, when her daughter was killed. She shared her daughter’s downfall and was almost written out of history.
d We do not know the exact sequence of these buildings and discoveries. Eusebius of Caesarea, who provides the contemporary record, mentions only the orders of the emperor and the actions of Bishop Macarius in building the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (but nothing about Helena’s role in finding the Cross). Yet he gives her credit for the Ascension Church on the Mount of Olives. The story of Helena and the Cross is told later by Sozomen (also a local Christian). Some of Constantine’s walls can still be seen, within the Russian Alexander Nevsky Church: the stones contain the niches by which Constantine’s architects attached the marble. Constantinian churches were based not on pagan temples but the secular basilica, the audience-halls of emperors. Church rituals and clerical costumes were based on the imperial court to promote for the representatives of the King of Heaven a hierarchy parallel to that of the emperor.