Jerusalem: The Biography

  * 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’.

  * Herod’s tomb was discovered in 2007 by Professor Ehud Netzer who found an ornate red sarcophagus, decorated with flowers, smashed to pieces almost certainly by the anti-Herodian Jewish rebels of AD 66–70. Two other sarcophagi are white, decorated with flowers: do they belong to his sons? Herodium was another miracle of Herod’s construction – a man-made mountain 210 feet in diameter with a massive luxurious palace on top containing a domed bathhouse, towers, frescoes and pools. Herod’s pyramidal tomb was on the Herodium Hill below the eastern tower of the fortress, also destroyed in 66–70

  * One of these ‘kings’ was Simon, a hulking slave belonging to Herod, soon beheaded by the Romans. Simon may be the subject of the so-called Gabriel’s Revelation, a stone inscription found in southern Jordan in which the Archangel Gabriel acclaims a ‘prince of princes’ called Simon who will be killed but will rise again ‘in three days’ when ‘you will know that evil will be defeated by justice. In three days you will live, I, Gabriel, command you.’ The details – resurrection and judgement three days after a prophet’s death – predate Jesus’ crucifixion by over thirty years. After killing Simon, Publius Quinctilius Varus commanded the German frontier. Some ten years later, in AD 9, he was ambushed, losing three legions. This disaster spoiled the last years of Augustus, who supposedly wandered his palace crying, ‘Varus, give me back my legions!’

  † All three sons adopted the name ‘Herod’, causing much confusion in the Gospels. Archelaus was married but fell in love with Glaphyra, that daughter of the King of Cappadocia who had been married to Herod and Mariamme’s son Alexander. After Alexander was executed, she married King Juba of Mauretania and after his death returned to Cappadocia. Now she married Archelaus.

  * Salome the dancer symbolizes cold-hearted caprice and female depravity, but the two Gospels Mark and Matthew never give her name. Josephus gives us the name of Herodias’ daughter in another context but simply recounts that Antipas ordered John’s execution without any terpsichorean encouragement. The dance of the seven veils was a much later elaboration. There were many Herodian Salomes (Jesus’ sister was also named Salome). But most probably the dancer was the wife of Herod Philip, Tetrarch of Trachonitis, until his death when she married another cousin who was later appointed king of Lesser Armenia: the dancer ended upas a queen. Ultimately John’s head would become one of the most prized of Christian relics. There would be at least five shrines claiming to have the original: the shrine of John’s head in the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus is revered by Muslims.

  * No one knows exactly when Jesus came to Jerusalem. Luke starts Jesus’ ministry with his baptism by John, around AD 28–29, saying he was about thirty, suggesting that his death was between AD 29 and say AD 33. John says his ministry lasted one year; Matthew, Mark and Luke say it lasted three years. Jesus may have been killed in 30, 33 or 36. But his historical existence is confirmed not only in the Gospels but in Tacitus and Josephus, who also mentions John the Baptist. At the very least, we know that Jesus came to Jerusalem at Passover after Pilate’s arrival as prefect (26) and before his departure (36) during the reigns of Tiberius (died 37) and Antipas (before 39) and the high priesthood of Caiaphas (18–36): most likely between 29 and 33. Pilate’s character is confirmed by both Josephus and Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, and his existence confirmed by an inscription found in Caesarea.

  * Such as those of the Essenes, probably an offshoot of the pious Hasidim who had originally backed the Maccabees. Josephus explained that they were one of the three sects of Judaism in the first century AD, but we learned more in the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in eleven caves at Qumran near the Dead Sea in 1947–56. These contain the earliest Hebrew versions of some of the biblical books. Christians and Jews had long debated the differences between the Septuagint Bible (translated into Greek, from a vanished Hebrew original and the basis of the Christian Old Testament, between the third and first centuries BC) and the earliest surviving Hebrew Bible (the Masoretic, dating from seventh to the tenth centuries AD. The Aleppo Codex is the oldest, but incomplete; the St Petersburg Codex is dated 1008, and it too is complete.) The Scrolls revealed differences but confirm that the Masoretic was fairly accurate. The Scrolls prove, however, that there were many versions of the biblical books in circulation as late as Jesus’ time. The Essenes were austere Jews who developed the apocalyptic ideas of Jeremiah and Daniel and saw the world as a struggle between good and evil ending in war and judgement. Their leader was a mystical ‘Teacher of Righteousness’; their enemy was the ‘Wicked Priest’ – one of the Maccabees. They feature in many crackpot theories about the origins of Christianity, but we can only say that John the Baptist may have lived with them in the desert and that Jesus may have been inspired by their hostility to the Temple and by their apocalyptic scenarios

  * This Iraqi kingdom remained Jewish well into the next century. Queen Helena and her sons were buried just outside the old city of Jeruslaem under three pyramids; the ornate King’s Tomb survives today, north of the Damascus Gate on the Nablus Road that leads past the American Colony Hotel. In the nineteenth century, a French archaeologist excavated the site and announced it had belonged to King David. Adiabene was not the only Jewish fiefdom in that area: two Jewish rebels against Parthia, Asinaeus and Anilaeus, created an independent Jewish state around Babylon that lasted about fifteen years.

  † 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

  * Every event in this story was to develop its own geography in Jerusalem, though many of these sites are probably historically wrong. The Upper Room (Cenacle) on Mount Zion is the traditiona
l site of the Last Supper; the real site was maybe closer to the cheaper houses around the Siloam Pool since Mark mentions ‘a man carrying a jar of water’ there. The Last Supper tradition developed later in the fifth century and even more strongly under the Crusaders. A stronger tradition suggests this site was where the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles at Pentecost, after Jesus’ death: this is certainly one of the most ancient Christian shrines. Its holiness was so infectious that Jews and Muslims later revered it too. The traditional but plausible site of Annas’ mansion is under the Church of Holy Archangels in the Armenian Quarter. A stone weight inscribed ‘belonging to the house of Caiaphas’ in Aramaic has been uncovered in Jerusalem and in 1990 builders found a sealed burial case in which one ossuary was inscribed ‘Joseph son of Caiaphas’ – so these are possibly the high priest’s bones. The Gethsemane Garden with its ancient olive grove is believed to be the correct site

  * 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 Pilate had made his judgements. Medieval Franciscan monks developed the tradition of the Stations of the Cross along the Via Dolorosa, from the Antonia site to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre – almost certainly the wrong route. Golgotha derives from the Aramaic for ‘skull’, Calvary from the Latin for ‘skull’, calva.

  † Crucifixion originated in the east – Darius the Great crucified Babylonian rebels – and was adopted by the Greeks. As we have seen, Alexander the Great crucified the Tyrians; Antiochus Epiphanes and the Jewish king Alexander Jannaeus crucified rebellious Jerusalemites; the Carthaginians crucified insubordinate generals. In 71 BC the Roman suppression of the Spartacus slave revolt culminated in a mass crucifixion. The wood for the cross is said to have come from the site of the fortified eleventh-century Monastery of the Cross, near today’s Israeli Knesset. The monastery was long the headquarters of the Georgian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem

  * The Gospel of Peter, a Gnostic codex dating from the second or third century, discovered in nineteenth-century Egypt, contains a mysterious story about the removal of the body. The oldest Gospel, Mark, written forty years later around AD 70, ends with Jesus being laid in his tomb, never mentioning the Resurrection. Mark’s account of the resurrection was a later addition. Matthew, written about AD 80, and Luke are based on Mark and another unknown source. Hence these three are known as the Synoptics – from the Greek meaning ‘seen together’. Luke minimized the role of Jesus’ family at the Crucifixion, but Mark mentions Mary mother of James, Joses and Jesus’ sister. John, the latest Gospel, written probably at the end of the century, portrays a more divine Jesus than the others but has other sources, giving more detail on Jesus’ earlier visits to Jerusalem.

  † Acts of the Apostles tells this story, but Matthew has another version: the remorseful Judas threw away his silver in the Temple at which the high priest (who could not put it into the Temple treasury because it was blood money) invested it in the Potter’s Field ‘to bury strangers in’. Then he hanged himself. The Akeldama – Field of Blood – remained a burial place into the Middle Ages.

  * ‘It fell to me’, Agrippa wrote as a Maccabee and a Herodian, ‘to have for my grandparents and ancestors, kings, most of whom had the title High Priest, who considered their kingship inferior to the priesthood. Holding the office of High Priest is as superior in excellence to that of king as God surpasses men. For the office of one is to worship God, of the other to have charge of men. As my lot is cast in such a nation, city and Temple, I beseech you for them all.’

  * Claudius was unlucky in his marriages: he killed one wife and the other killed him. He executed his unfaithful teenaged wife Messalina for treason then married his niece, Julia Agrippina, the sister of Caligula, who started to promote Nero, her son by an earlier marriage, as heir. Claudius made Nero joint heir with his own son Britannicus, named to celebrate his conquest of Britain. On his accession, Nero murdered Britannicus.

  * James’ head was buried alongside another Jacobite head – that of the St James killed by Agrippa I – in what became the Cathedral of the Armenian Quarter. Hence its name is the very plural St Jameses’ Cathedral.

  † Felix and Drusilla had a son who lived in Pompeii. When the town was destroyed by the volcano in 79, the son and his mother Drusilla died in the ash.

  * The street that survives right beside the Western Wall was his – and so was another pavement that can be seen on Mount Zion.

  * If the Greek form of ‘Nero Caesar’ is transliterated into Hebrew consonants and the consonants are replaced by their numerical equivalent, the resulting figures added together equal 666. Revelation was probably written during the persecutions of Emperor Domitian in 81–96. In 2009, papal archaeologists discovered a hidden tomb beneath the Church of St Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, always reputed to be the place of Paul’s burial. The bones were carbon-dated to the first to third centuries – they could be the remains of Paul.

  * As for Vespasian, he is best remembered in Italy for creating public lavatories, which are still known as vespasianos.

  * * Vespasian’s coins boasted ‘JUDAEA CAPTA’ with the female figure of Judaea seated, bound, at the foot of a palm tree while Rome leaned on his spear above her. The fate of the Jerusalem treasures is mysterious. In 455, Genseric, King of the Vandals, sacked Rome and tookthe Temple treasures to Carthage, where they were later captured by Emperor Justinian’s general Belisarius, who in turn brought them to Constantinople. Justinian sent the candelabra backto Jerusalem, but it must have been looted by the Persians in 614; at any rate, it vanished. The Arch of Titus, completed by Titus’ brother Domitian, shows the arms of the candelabra lengthened and turned upwards to resemble a trident: it may have been altered or it may be the artist’s mistake. Ironically the Romanized candelabra (except the pagan symbols) became the basis for the modern Jewish menorah, the candelabra used at Hanukkah and as the insignia of Israel.

  * * Herod Agrippa II was rewarded with an expanded kingdom in Lebanon. Perhaps he was not tempted to rule the ruins of Judaea but he may have played with the idea of a political career in Rome. When he visited in 75 for the inauguration of the Temple of Peace (exhibiting some of the Temple vessels), he was granted the rankof praetor. Having reigned under ten emperors, he died around AD 100. His relatives became kings of Armenia and Cilicia and ultimately even Roman consuls.

  * This is an unfinished family tomb. Its family probably perished in the siege, so it was an appropriate place for Jews to gather to mourn the Temple. These pilgrims carved the Hebrew inscriptions that are still visible today.

  * This displeased the Romans. Greek love was conventional and not regarded as effeminate: Caesar, Antony, Titus and Trajan were all what we would call bisexual. However, in a reversal of morality today, Romans believed it was acceptable to have sex with boys but not with adults. Yet even when Antinous became a man, Hadrian ignored his wife and treated his lover as his partner.

  * Hadrian’s buildings survive in some odd places: Zalatimo’s Sweet Shop, 9 Hanzeit Street, incorporates the remains of the gate of Hadrian’s Temple of Jupiter and the entrance to the main forum. The shop was opened in 1860 by Muhammad Zalatimo, an Ottoman sergeant; it is still run by the family patriarch of this Palestinian cake dynasty, Samir Zalatimo. Hadrian’s walls continue into another old Palestinian family business – the fruit-juice store of Abu Assab – and then into the Russian Alexander Nevsky Church. The archway of Hadrian’s lesser forum survives on the Via Dolorosa, which many Christians mistakenly believe is where Pilate presented Jesus to the crowd with the words ‘Ecce homo’ (Here is the man). In fact, the arch did not exist until a hundred years later. The base of the Damascus Gate has been excavated to reveal its Hadrianic glory. Today’s main street Ha-Gai or El Wad follows the route of Hadrian’s Cardo,
which has been excavated in the Western Wall plaza. The historian Cassius Dio and the later Christian source Chronicon Paschale suggest that a Temple of Jupiter was built on the Temple Mount. This is possible, but no traces have been found.

  * 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.

  * The Gnostics were one of these strands: they believed that the divine sparkwas 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 crackdown on heresies, but the word ‘Gnostic’, based on the Greekfor 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.