Jerusalem in Christianity

• 1. Introduction

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  Jerusalem in Christianity is the story of a city so bound to Jesus that a conqueror once refused to be king there. In 1099, Godfrey of Bouillon was elected the first Latin ruler of Jerusalem. He would only call himself its protector, because he believed that only Jesus had the right to be called king in that city.

  Godfrey's scruple points to something that runs through this whole subject. For Christians, Jerusalem is a map of real streets and hills, and it is also a way of thinking about heaven and the church. This documentary asks several questions. Which places in the city do believers connect with the final days of Jesus, and how certain can anyone be? What became of his first followers when Rome destroyed the city? Who has guarded the holy places since, and how did rival churches end up sharing them?

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• 2. Streets of the Gospels

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  The New Testament places Jesus in Jerusalem from his childhood. According to its accounts, his family brought him to the Temple to be presented, and later to attend the festival of Passover. As an adult, the gospels say, he preached and healed in Jerusalem, especially in the courts of the Temple. In an episode recorded in Mark, he drove traders and money changers out of the sacred precincts. This is known as the cleansing of the Temple.

  The closing pages of each gospel return to the city for the last days of his life. They describe the Last Supper in an Upper Room, his arrest in Gethsemane, and his trial. They continue with the crucifixion at Golgotha, the entombment nearby, the resurrection and the ascension. Each also carries his prophecy that he would return.

  The Acts of the Apostles adds one more event in the same setting, because Pentecost took place in Jerusalem too. For this reason the city is generally considered the cradle of Christianity. Where in the city each of these scenes happened is a question with several competing answers.

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• 3. Walking the Way

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  Christian tradition holds that the Last Supper took place in the Cenacle, on the second floor of a building on Mount Zion. David's Tomb is reportedly on the first floor. The biblical archaeologist Bargil Pixner claims to have found three walls of the original structure still standing today.

  Gethsemane, where Jesus prayed in anguish before his betrayal, is probably somewhere near the Church of All Nations on the Mount of Olives. His trial before Pontius Pilate is harder to place. It may have happened at the Antonia Fortress, to the north of the Temple area. Popular belief puts the exterior pavement of the trial beneath the Convent of the Sisters of Zion. Other Christians believe Pilate sat at Herod's Palace on Mount Zion.

  The Via Dolorosa, meaning the way of suffering, is the traditional route to Golgotha and an important pilgrimage. It ends at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which is traditionally believed to mark both Golgotha and the nearby tomb. Constantine I built the original church in 336. Beside it stands the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of the Redeemer.

  Charles George Gordon proposed a rival site. The Garden Tomb, near the Damascus Gate, is a popular pilgrimage destination, and Gordon suggested that it, rather than the Holy Sepulchre, is the true place of Golgotha.

  The historian Dan Mazar reported in a series of articles in the Jerusalem Christian Review on discoveries made by his grandfather, Professor Benjamin Mazar. These include 1st-century stairs of ascent, where Jesus and his disciples preached, according to the report. The elder Mazar's excavations uncovered much of this area. Among the finds were mikvaot, used by both Jewish and Christian pilgrims.

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• 4. The First Community

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  After the crucifixion, Jerusalem became the center of a community of Jesus's original Jewish followers. The Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline epistles portray James the Just, the brother of Jesus, as a leader of this early church.

  The 4th-century church fathers Eusebius and Epiphanius record a tradition that the community fled before the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. They were warned to escape to Pella, in the region of the Decapolis across the Jordan River. Eusebius states that the warning came by divine instruction. Critics have questioned the account, since Pella is known to have been sacked by Jewish rebels early in the First Jewish-Roman War. The community may instead have been killed, taken captive, or forcibly removed. It has also been suggested that they surrendered to the Romans, who resettled them in Pella.

  Eusebius, a fourth-century bishop and historian, also says the displaced community returned to Jerusalem after the First Jewish Revolt. His account may be unreliable. It appears to reflect an effort to show an unbroken line of succession from the apostles to his own time.

  Approximately six decades later came the Bar Kokhba Revolt of 132-136 AD, a second major revolt in Judea. Afterward the Romans imposed punitive measures on the Jewish population, including exclusion from Aelia Capitolina. This new Roman colony was built over the ruins of Jerusalem. Gentile bishops were therefore appointed, under the authority of the Metropolitans of Caesarea and, ultimately, the Patriarchs of Antioch.

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• 5. Empire and Patriarchs

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  Around 325, Emperor Constantine I and his mother, Helena, endowed Jerusalem with churches and shrines. This reversed a decline in the city's importance to Christians outside the Holy Land, which had come during the Persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire. Under their patronage Jerusalem became the foremost center of Christian pilgrimage.

  Helena is remembered as the patron saint of archaeologists. The church historian Socrates of Constantinople reports that she found the True Cross, with the help of Bishop Macarius of Jerusalem. First she had a temple to Venus removed from the site, where it had been built over the spot.

  In 325, Canon VII of Nicaea gave Jerusalem special recognition, though without making it a metropolitan see. The Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre guards the Christian holy places in the Holy Land. It traditionally dates its founding to 313, the year of the Edict of Milan, which legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire.

  The Council of Chalcedon in 451 raised the Bishop of Jerusalem to the rank of patriarch, alongside Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria and Antioch. Politics limited the gain. Jerusalem simply passed from the Syrian jurisdiction of Antioch to the Greek authorities in Constantinople, and Greek clergy dominated its church for centuries. The Roman church never accepted this Pentarchy and claimed primacy for itself. Yet the older idea of primacy for the Church of Jerusalem survived in texts such as the early medieval list known as the Limits of the Five Patriarchates.

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• 6. Keys and Crusades

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  In 638, Sophronius, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, handed the keys of the city to the forces of Caliph Umar. One account of the period says the Muslim authorities were unkind to their Christian subjects. It describes a life of "discrimination, servitude, and humiliation".

  Conditions are said to have worsened as the armies of the First Crusade approached. Fearing that Eastern Christians were conspiring with the crusaders, the Muslim authorities of Jerusalem massacred much of the city's Christian population. There is no evidence that any such conspiracy existed. The crusaders had other aims. They hoped to protect Christian pilgrims who had been attacked and killed by the Turks. They also hoped to protect holy places destroyed by Caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah. And they were answering pleas for help from the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos.

  On the 15th of July 1099, the army of the First Crusade captured Jerusalem. Most of the population was killed. Eastern Christians were spared, but they were exiled, because the new Latin rulers believed they were conspiring with the Muslims. Jerusalem became the capital of a Latin Kingdom, with a Latin church and a Latin Patriarch, all under the authority of the Pope.

  Godfrey struggled to increase the city's population until his death in 1100. His brother Baldwin I succeeded him and accepted the title King of Jerusalem. As early as 1115, with the population still dwindling, Baldwin offered the Christians of Transjordan a section of Jerusalem. They were often targets of Muslim aggression, and they promptly accepted. In 1187, Saladin captured the city, and the Holy Sepulchre and many other churches were returned to the care of Eastern Christians.

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• 7. Sharing the Shrine

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  From the 17th to the 19th century, various Catholic European nations petitioned the Ottoman Empire for Catholic control of the holy places. The Franciscans are the traditional Catholic custodians. Control swung back and forth between the western and eastern churches throughout this period.

  Sultan Abd-ul-Mejid I, who reigned from 1839 to 1861, published a firman that laid out the exact rights and responsibilities of each community at the Holy Sepulchre. He did so perhaps out of despair. The document became known as the Status Quo, and it is still the basis for the complex protocol of the shrine. Both the British Mandate and Jordan upheld it.

  After the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the Old City passed into Israeli hands, and the Knesset passed a law protecting the holy places. Five Christian communities currently have rights in the Holy Sepulchre. They are the Greek Patriarchate, the Latins (Western Rite Roman Catholics), the Armenians, the Copts and the Syriac Orthodox.

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• 8. The Heavenly City

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  Around 230 CE, the early Christian thinker Origen wrote in his treatise On the First Principles that Jerusalem had transcendental features. He reasoned that if Israel belongs to the sphere of souls and the city of Jerusalem is in heaven, then "it follows that the metropolis of the cities of Israel is Jerusalem in the heavens". Listening to Paul's inspired wisdom, he added, means reading what Scripture says of Jerusalem as speaking of the heavenly city.

  In Christianity, Jerusalem is sometimes interpreted as an allegory, or type, for the church of Christ. A vast apocalyptic tradition focuses on the heavenly Jerusalem instead of the literal, historical city. Augustine of Hippo notably advocated this view in The City of God, a popular 5th-century philosophical work. He wrote it as the Roman Empire declined, the same empire whose emperor, Constantine I, had once raised churches in the earthly Jerusalem.

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