CONSTANTINE had become emperor in the West after his victory at the Milvian Bridge. In 323 he went on to defeat Licinius, emperor of the eastern provinces, and become sole ruler of the Roman world. Constantine always attributed his astonishing rise from obscurity to the God of the Christians, and though he had very little understanding of its theology and delayed his baptism until he was on his deathbed, he would continue to be loyal to the church. He also hoped that once it was legalized, Christianity could become a cohesive force in his far-flung empire. In Palestine only a tiny minority of the total population was then Christian, but during the third century Christianity had emerged as one of the most important religions of the empire and one of the largest in numbers of adherents. By 235, Christians could boast of a “Great Church” with a single rule of faith. It had begun to attract highly intelligent men who could interpret this originally Semitic religion in a way that the broad Greco-Roman world could understand. During the years of persecution the church had evolved an efficient administration, which was a microcosm of the empire itself: it was multicultural, catholic, international, and ecumenical and was run by capable bureaucrats. Now that Constantine had made the church religio licta, Christians could come out of hiding and make a distinctive contribution to public life, and Constantine hoped to channel its power and skill into the imperium.
Yet he would not promote Christianity at the expense of other faiths. Constantine was a realist and knew that he could not afford to antagonize his pagan subjects. He retained the title pontifex maximus, and the old sacrificial cult of the empire continued unabated. Constantine did find one way to begin to express his vision of the new Christian Rome—by a huge building program. In Rome he built shrines at the tombs of the Christian martyrs and a martyrium, or mausoleum, similar to those commemorating Roman emperors, to St. Peter the Apostle. These new church buildings were nothing like the ancient temples: they were not designed as cosmic symbols, and the newly emancipated church had yet to evolve a public ceremonial liturgy. But these basilicas had started to appear alongside the pagan symbols of Rome, and showed that Christianity had begun to take its place in the world. In Rome, however, the central sites were already occupied by pagan buildings, and Constantine’s martyria had to be confined to marginal areas. But no such restrictions applied in the new imperial capital he built for himself on the Bosphorus, on the site of the ancient Greek city of Byzantium. Constantinople could be a wholly Christian city, where the cross could be displayed proudly and centrally and statues of biblical heroes could adorn its squares. Yet Constantinople had no history: the emperor, who had a near-magical belief in the power of symbols, knew that his Christian empire must be shown to have roots in a venerable past if it was to express that continuity which was such a crucial value in late antiquity.
One of Constantine’s most ardent supporters in the early years of his reign was Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea. After Milvian Bridge, Eusebius hailed the emperor as a new Moses who had cut down Maxentius as Moses had smitten the Egyptians.1 He also called Constantine a second Abraham, one who would restore the pure monotheism of the patriarchs.2 Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, he argued, had had no Temple and no elaborate Torah: Eusebius pointed out that they had worshipped God wherever they found themselves, simply, in spirit and truth.3 Eusebius had stood on the Mount of Olives like the other Christians of the region contemplating the ruined Temple Mount. He found it a grim irony that the citizens of Aelia had pillaged the stones of the Temple to build their pagan shrines and theaters.4 The fate of the Temple was clear proof that God no longer wanted that showy type of sacrificial ritual. He wanted them to follow the spiritual religion preached by Jesus, which did not depend on temples or holy places. Like Origen, Eusebius had no time for sacred geography. God would not come to those who sought him in “lifeless matter and dusky caves” but only to “souls purified and prepared with clear and rational minds.”5 The Law of Moses required believers to hurry to one single holy place but Eusebius imagined Christ saying:
I, giving freedom to all, teach men not to look for God in a corner of the earth, nor in mountains, nor in temples made with hands, but that each should worship and adore him at home.6
He had come to teach men the primordial religion of Abraham, free from irrational mythology and carnal imagery.
With considerable satisfaction, Eusebius gazed at the suburb of Mount Sion, imagining, like all his contemporaries, that this had been the site of the biblical Zion. Now instead of being a center of study and learning, Mount Sion was merely “a Roman farm, like the rest of the country. Indeed, with my own eyes, I have seen bulls plowing there and the holy place sown with seed.”7 Devastated and deserted, the present state of “Zion” proved that God had indeed abandoned the city. It is interesting, however, that Eusebius never mentioned that Mount Sion was also the Christian center of Aelia. By the beginning of the fourth century, the local Christians had started to argue that, as the “Mother of the churches,” Aelia should have higher ecclesiastical status than Caesarea, which had no sacred associations. Besides displaying the throne of James the Tzaddik, they had also begun to identify some of the ruins on Mount Sion as important biblical landmarks: one old house was thought to be the residence of Caiaphas, another the palace of King David. There was a pillar that was supposed to be the place where Jesus had been scourged by Pilate. Yet Eusebius ignored these developments. In the Onomasticon, his guide to the place-names of the Bible, he had pointed out that the geography of Palestine “proved” the accuracy of the gospels: the towns and villages were exactly where the evangelists said. But Eusebius never cited the sites on Mount Sion as proofs or witnesses of the life of Christ. He may as a historian have been rightly skeptical of their authenticity, but he could also have been aware that Makarios, the bishop of Aelia, was using these places to support his campaign to make Aelia the metropolitan see of Palestine instead of Eusebius’s own see of Caesarea.
The conflict between Caesarea and Aelia came out into the open in 318, when Eusebius and Makarios found themselves on opposite sides of a doctrinal controversy that threatened to split the whole church down the middle. Arius, a charismatic presbyter of Alexandria, had put forward the argument, which he was able to back up with an impressive array of biblical texts, that Jesus, the incarnate Logos, was not divine in the same way as God the Father: he had been created by God before the beginning of time.8 Arius did not deny the divinity of Christ—he called Jesus “strong God” and “true God”—but he did not think that he was divine by nature. God the Father had conferred divinity upon him as a reward for Jesus’s perfect obedience.9 Jesus himself had said that his Father was greater than he. Arius’s ideas were not new, nor were they, at this date, obviously heretical. The great Origen had had a rather similar view of Jesus. Christians had long believed that Jesus was God, but they had as yet no agreement about what this actually meant. If Jesus was divine, were there not in fact two gods? Was it not idolatry to worship a mere man? Arius may have expressed his theology more clearly and forcefully than his predecessors, but many of the bishops had similar notions, and at the beginning of the dispute it was by no means clear why—or even whether—Arius was wrong.
Arius was opposed by his bishop, Alexander, and the bishop’s brilliant young assistant Athanasius, who argued that the Logos was God in exactly the same way as God the Father. He shared the same nature as God the Father and had been neither begotten nor created. Had the Logos been a mere creature, called by the Father from a primal, abysmal nothingness, he would not have been able to save humanity from death and extinction. Only the One who had created the world had the strength to save it, so Jesus, the Logos made flesh, must share the Father’s essential divinity. His death and resurrection had redeemed human beings from sin and mortality, and now, by incorporation into Christ, the god-man, men and women could also become divine.
The conflict grew heated, and bishops were forced to take sides. In Palestine, Makarios sided with Athanasius and Eusebius with Arius, whose theology bore some resemblance to his own. Again, it must be emphasized that when he took this position, Eusebius was not flying in the face of the official doctrine of the church. There was, as yet, no orthodox teaching on the person and nature of Christ. Eusebius was one of the leading Christian intellectuals of his generation, and his views were similar to those espoused by several previous theologians. Athanasius saw Christ’s coming as dramatic and unique, but Eusebius’s interpretation of Christianity stressed its quiet continuity with the past. Athanasius saw the incarnation of the Logos as an absolutely unparalleled event in world history: the divine had erupted into the mundane sphere in an entirely unprecedented way. Jesus was, therefore, the one and only revelation of God. Eusebius did not believe this. In his view, God had revealed himself to humanity before. The Logos had appeared to Abraham in human form at Mamre;10 Moses and Joshua had experienced similar epiphanies. So the Logos had simply returned to earth in Jesus of Nazareth.11 The incarnation was not a unique event but clarified theophanies of the past. God’s revelation of himself to humanity was an ongoing process.
Athanasius saw the salvation of the world as Jesus’s most important achievement. Eusebius did not see it quite in this light; certainly Jesus had saved us, but his principal task was to be a revelation of God to the world. Jesus had been a theophany: by looking at him, human beings could form some idea of what the invisible, indescribable God was like. One of Jesus’s chief objectives had been to remind Christians of the essentially spiritual nature of religion. Over the centuries, men and women had forgotten Abraham’s pure spirituality and had muddied their faith with such physical emblems as the Torah and the Temple. Jesus had come to remind us of this ancient purity. Thus we should not focus on Christ’s humanity: Eusebius once wrote a sharp letter to Constantia, the emperor’s sister, who had foolishly asked him for a picture of Jesus. Christians should look through the flesh to the divine essence of the heavenly Logos. After his sojourn on earth, the Logos had returned to the spiritual realm, and Christians should follow him there. The attachment of permanent value to Jesus’s humanity was as perverse and irrational as the Jews’ attachment to an earthly city. Christians were engaged in a constant katharsis, or purification. They must learn to read Scripture in a more spiritual way, looking for the timeless truth within the historical event. Thus Jesus’s resurrection was not the dramatic, eruptive act that Athanasius envisaged; it simply revealed the immortality that was natural to the human condition.
These were clearly imponderable issues, impossible to prove one way or the other, yet the dispute was threatening to tear the church apart. This was infuriating to Constantine, who could not understand the theology but had no intention of allowing these intellectual quibbles to divide the institution that was supposed to be cohesive and unitive. By the beginning of 325, Athanasius’s party had won his support, excommunications were issued against the “Arian” leaders, and Constantine summoned all the prelates of the church to a council to sort the matter out once and for all. Thus it happened that Eusebius—then sixty-five years old and one of the most eminent bishops in the church—found that when he arrived at Nicaea in May to take part in the council, he had been excommunicated. His rival Makarios, however, who had managed to pick the winning side, was in a very strong position: surely his colleagues would see that it was intolerable that the bishop of Aelia, the Mother of the churches, should be subject to the heretical bishop of Caesarea.
The Council of Nicaea issued an official creed that expressed Athanasius’s ideas but was unable to bring peace to the church. Most of the bishops would have espoused views midway between those of Athanasius and Arius and probably regarded both as extreme and eccentric. Under pressure from the emperor, however, all the bishops save two brave Arian supporters signed the creed for the sake of peace; but afterward they continued teaching as before. Again, they were not contumaciously embracing heresy. The Council of Nicaea was the first ecumenical council of the church, and there was as yet no tradition to insist that its decrees were “infallible.” The bishops understandably felt that their own views should also be heard, and the result was that the Arian controversy dragged on for another sixty years. One of the prelates who signed the creed was Eusebius, but after the council he immediately began to campaign against Athanasian “orthodoxy.” He wrote a treatise called Theophany, which put forward his view of Jesus, and, as he had always supported Constantine, was able to gain the emperor’s ear. In 327, two years after Nicaea, Eusebius’s moderate party gained the ascendancy and the ban on Arius was lifted.
Yet if the Council of Nicaea had little effect on theological realpolitik, it would have immense repercussions on the history of Jerusalem. First, Makarios had been able to exploit his position: the seventh canon of the council insisted that “custom and ancient tradition” decreed that the bishop of Aelia should hold an honored position in the church, though he was still subordinate to the metropolitan bishop of Caesarea. Makarios did not get everything he wanted, but it seems likely that it was at Nicaea that he proposed a scheme that would have far more impact on the status of Aelia than a cautiously worded conciliar directive and would do far more to ensure the eventual victory of Athanasius’s theology than the creed signed by the reluctant bishops. Makarios asked Constantine’s permission to demolish the Temple of Aphrodite and unearth the Tomb of Christ, which was said to be buried beneath it.
This proposal immediately appealed to Constantine, who, a pagan at heart, did not share Eusebius’s lofty disdain for holy places. He wanted to visit Palestine himself, and his mother-in-law, Eutropia, had already begun her trip to the Land of the Bible. Constantine also knew that his Christian empire needed symbols and monuments to give it a historical resonance. Makarios’s extraordinary plan was also very risky. The vast majority of the inhabitants of Aelia were pagan, and they would not take kindly to having one of their principal temples destroyed. They would have to agree if the excavations had imperial backing, but it was nearly two hundred years since Hadrian’s contractors had built the Temple of Aphrodite. How certain could the Christians be that Golgotha and the tomb really were under that shrine? The pagans of Aelia would be understandably enraged if they lost their temple for nothing. Emperor and church alike would suffer an unacceptable embarrassment, not to mention the fact that if the excavations drew a blank, this might reveal a worrying lacuna at the heart of imperial Christianity.
Nevertheless, Constantine gave his permission, and work began immediately after the council under the supervision of Makarios. There were two sites, which were worked on simultaneously. First, Constantine had ordered a house of prayer to be built beside the Cardo Maximus, the main street of Aelia, some yards east of the supposed site of Golgotha. This was a relatively straightforward project, and the construction proceeded swiftly, without a hitch. The second task was much more onerous. The Temple of Aphrodite had to be demolished, the supporting platform dismantled, and the ground beneath leveled. This massive undertaking had a twofold religious dimension. First, the Christians were delving beneath the pagan city to make contact with the historical roots of their faith. During the persecutions, the murderous hatred of the pagan establishment led Christians to believe that the world was against them. They had developed an otherworldly theology, certain that they had no abiding city here below. But since Constantine’s succession, they had experienced a spectacular reversal and were beginning to feel that they had a stake in this world after all. This act of holy archaeology would lay bare the physical roots of their faith and enable them to build literally on these ancient foundations. A new Christian identity was also in the process of being constructed. The second aspect of this building project was less positive. The creation of the new Christianity involved the dismantling of paganism, eloquently symbolized by the destruction of Aphrodite’s temple. The demolition took on the character of a ritual purification. Paganism was “filth”: every last trace of the temple was to be obliterated, the materials cast out of the city, and even the soil beneath transported to a “far distant spot” because “it had been polluted by the defilements of pagan worship.”12 The new birth of Christianity involved the rooting out and undermining of paganism, which had the very ground cut from beneath it.
As the excavations proceeded, Makarios and his colleagues must have had some bad moments: they knew that they had to find something. Yet it was two years before the grand discovery was made. A rock tomb was unearthed beneath the old Temple platform and was immediately declared to be the sepulcher of Christ. Even Eusebius, who had every reason to be skeptical, did not question the authenticity of this relic. Although the discovery had been eagerly anticipated, the find stunned the Christian world. Eusebius described the event as “contrary to all expectation,” and even Constantine felt that it “surpassed all astonishment.”13 One of the reasons for this amazed acceptance was probably that the event fitted so closely with the internal dimension of what seemed to be happening that it appeared to have a mythical quality. Three hundred years earlier, Jesus had risen from that tomb. Now the tomb itself had risen, as it were, from its own untimely grave, just as Christians were witnessing an unlooked-for resurgence of their faith.
The rock tomb had been found in an ancient quarry which had been obliterated by Hadrian’s builders. Now it had to be disengaged from the surrounding hillside in such a way that the mass of rock surrounding the cave was retained. Then a circular space about 38 yards in diameter had to be cut around it to clear the site for the circular martyrium commissioned by the emperor. That meant that about 16,500 cubic feet of rock had to be hacked by pickaxes into building blocks that could be used for the monument. It was a huge undertaking and this round shrine—which would be called the Anastasis, or Resurrection—was not finished until long after Constantine’s death. For many years, the tomb in its huge block of cliff remained outside in the open air, while the ground was prepared. At the same time as they unearthed the tomb, the workers also discovered what they identified as the rocky hillock of Golgotha. Since what remains of this rock is today almost entirely encased in the Golgotha chapel of the Holy Sepulcher Church, it is difficult to imagine how it appeared originally. Excavations undertaken in 1961 suggest that “Golgotha” was a vertical block of stone, about ten meters high, which had probably stood by itself in the corner of the quarry. At its base was a cave, which may long before Jesus’s time have been a tomb. Could this stone column have been a memorial stone, similar to those found in the Kidron Valley? By the time Jesus was crucified, earth had accumulated around the block to form a hillock, from which the rock protruded like a skullcap, giving the hill its name of Golgotha: the Place of the Skull.
Thus the excavations had brought to light not one holy site but two: the hill on which Jesus had been crucified and the tomb in which he had been buried. Meanwhile, Constantine’s basilica was nearing completion. Constantine wanted the church to be the finest in the world. No expense was to be spared, and the building was financed by contributions from all the governors of the eastern provinces. Space was limited, however, so the basilica was quite small: it cannot have exceeded 44 by 30 yards. It had five naves, one of which included the Rock of Golgotha, and ended in a semicircular apse at the western end, nearest the tomb. For Eusebius, the only contemporary writer to record his impressions, the basilica was a place of wondrous beauty. It was lined inside and out by slabs of variegated marble and polished stone; the interior “was finished with carvings of panel work, and, like a great sea, covered the whole basilica with its endless swell, while the brilliant gold with which it was covered made the whole temple sparkle with rays of light.”14 The basilica of St. Constantine was usually known as the Martyrium, because it was a “witness” to the resurrection and a memorial to Christ.
It was thus a complex site, which introduced the worshipper to the tomb, the new Holy of Holies, step by step, rather like the old Jewish Temple. (See diagram.) Visitors entered the Martyrium from the Cardo Maximus in the heart of pagan Aelia. Its three doors were left ajar, so that strangers could glimpse the splendors of the church and feel moved to enter. First, they had to walk through a courtyard before entering the basilica, which was itself simply another step along the way. All the western doors of the basilica opened into the large courtyard in front of the tomb, designed to accommodate crowds of pilgrims. A garden was planted there in memory of the garden where the women had first seen the risen Christ. Constantine had taken possession of the center point of Roman Aelia and transformed it into a Christian holy place. He had built a New Jerusalem beside the forum of Aelia. Hitherto Aelia had been off the spiritual map of most gentile Christians, and in the city itself the church had been marginalized, located outside the walls in the largely uninhabited suburb of Mount Sion. Now Constantine had demonstrated the centrality of the new faith to his empire. It was a gesture that immediately captivated the Christian imagination. As soon as the tomb had been discovered and the lovely basilica completed, Christians started to evolve their own mythology about the place, which located it at the heart of their spirituality. They recalled the old Jewish-Christian tradition that Adam had been buried at Golgotha. Soon they had also come to believe that Abraham had bound Isaac for sacrifice there. This new Christian holy place had started to inspire the same kind of belief and legend as the old Jewish Temple. It had become a symbolic “center,” where the divine power had touched the frail world of humanity in a unique way. It represented a new start for humanity, a fulfillment of the religion of Abraham and a new era in Christian history.
Today an elaborate shrine covers the remains of the rock of Golgotha within the Holy Sepulcher Church. The discovery of this relic led Christians to concentrate on Christ’s crucifixion in an entirely new way.
Yet Christians had thought that they were above this type of piety. They had proudly proclaimed that theirs was a purely spiritual faith that was not dependent upon shrines and holy places. Their startling response to the discovery of the tomb shows that the myths of sacred geography are deeply rooted in the human psyche. A sudden shock or an unexpected reunion with one of the physical symbols of our faith and culture can reawaken this enthusiasm for sacred space, particularly after a period of persecution when people have experienced the threat of annihilation in an especially acute manner. It is never safe to assume that we have outgrown these primal myths: even in the secular, scientific world of the twentieth century, we are not immune to their appeal, as we can see in Jerusalem today. When they looked at the resurrected tomb, the Christians felt a shock of recognition and, for the first time, were impelled to root themselves in a physical place, make a home for themselves in the mundane world and appropriate this sacred area. This healing link with the past enabled them to place themselves right in the center of Roman Aelia, abandon their marginal position, and take up an entirely new place in the world.
Nobody could have been more opposed to the whole notion of sacred space than Eusebius, but the discovery of the tomb seems to have touched him to the core of his being, so that he was forced to revise some of his former beliefs. Now that he was back in favor with Constantine, Eusebius had the task of interpreting these astonishing events. He found that when he tried to explain the impact of this archaeological find, he had to resort to the kind of mythological language he had hitherto despised. Its significance could not be explained in terms of reason but only according to the old imagery that described the deeper workings of the mind and heart. The tomb was a theophany: an apparition, in physical form, of something previously hidden and inaccessible. It reproduced the miracle of Christ’s resurrection from the dead, which now seemed to Eusebius to have been a victory over the powers of darkness, not unlike those described in the old combat myths. “The most holy cave received what was an exact emblem of its coming to life,” he wrote in his official Life of Constantine, “for after its descent into darkness it again came forth into light, and afforded to those who came to see a clear insight into the history of the wonders which had there been wrought.”15 The destruction of the Temple of Aphrodite had been a triumph over the powers of evil, for it had been “the haunt of an impure demon called Aphrodite, a dark shrine of lifeless idols.” Abominations had been practiced there, “foul oblations on profane and accursed altars.” But the God of light who illumines men’s hearts had inspired Constantine to order a katharsis of this filth. “As soon as his orders were given, the contrivances of deceit were cast down from on high to the ground, and the dwelling places of error, images, and demons and all were overthrown and utterly destroyed.”16 The tomb had reproduced the whole Christian experience, for its discovery had been simultaneously a revelation, a resurrection, and a victory for the forces of light. Hitherto Eusebius had seen the resurrection in much calmer terms: now he had started to invest this event with some of the drama it had in Athanasius’s theology.
Eusebius does not seem to have been very interested in the Rock of Golgotha: he never mentions it. But the sight of the cave, so recently hewn out of the rocky hillside, moved him profoundly. He was struck by its solitude—“standing out erect and alone in a level land”—and by the fact that no other body had ever been placed there.17 It was an emblem of the uniqueness of Christ’s victory. When he looked at the tomb, the events of Christ’s life became vivid for Eusebius in an entirely new way. If we are not able to envisage the place in which something happened to us, it is very difficult to recall it in any detail. Seeing this place bridged the gap between past and present in a way that mere hearsay could not do. Eusebius acknowledged that the sight of the tomb “spoke louder than all words.”18 Other Christians would find that it made sense of Athanasius’s theology of incarnation. Instead of looking through the human figure of Jesus to the divinity, as Eusebius had advised, they would want to see and touch the places associated with his humanity and find that Jesus the man was a powerful symbol of God’s link with the world.
Eusebius had not entirely reversed his opinions, however. He continued to call the city Aelia: there was nothing holy about this pagan metropolis, and it was “not only base but impious” to imagine that there was, “the mark of an exceedingly base and petty thinking.”19 The name “Jerusalem” applied only to the tomb and to Constantine’s new buildings on the Western Hill. The rest of the city was as profane and guilty as ever. Eusebius called the Constantinian complex the New Jerusalem precisely because it was “built over against the old.”20 It was utterly distinct from the old Jewish city which had been cursed by Christ. Indeed, the New Jerusalem gave Christians yet another vantage point from which to contemplate the defeat of Judaism. Situated on one of the highest points of the Western Hill, the Martyrium towered above the desecrated Temple Mount. It was a graphic illustration of the resurgence of the new faith, which now enjoyed imperial backing while Judaism was entirely off the map of Aelia. To that extent the establishment of the New Jerusalem reinforced Eusebius’s former beliefs. Christianity had now been able to come out of hiding and put down roots in the mundane world. It was now able to take its place alongside the other institutions of the empire and was acquiring a wholly new identity. The New Jerusalem was an important part of this process. But this new Christian self was based on a destructive rejection of the older religious traditions, and this had become obvious in Aelia. The New Jerusalem was “built over against” its predecessors: its establishment had entailed a violent uprooting of pagan religion, a demonization of older traditions, and a contemptuous assertion of superiority over Judaism. Christians would make sure that Jews were never permitted to live in Jerusalem while they were in power there. The old ban remained on the imperial statute books. Christianity may have been liberated from oppression but it was still embattled and defensive, poised in an attitude of resolute and destructive opposition to its rivals. Persecution does not always make its victims compassionate. From the start the New Jerusalem involved the exclusion and denigration of others in a way that was far removed from the compassionate ethic of Jesus.
Eusebius therefore continued to see Aelia as hopelessly contaminated by both Judaism and paganism. He also continued to ignore the new “holy places” on Mount Sion and may have used his influence with Constantine to ensure that they got no imperial funding. They were too important to his rival Makarios: the bishop of Aelia had certainly achieved a coup by masterminding the discovery of the tomb, but in the coming years Eusebius was able to ensure that his theology was also reflected in the Christianization of Palestine. Thus when Eutropia, Constantine’s mother-in-law, visited the country, Eusebius, as metropolitan, almost certainly had the honor of conducting her around the sites. At Mamre, near Hebron, he drew her attention to the dubious worship going on at the very place where Abraham had received his theophany. Abraham, it will be recalled, was very important to Eusebius, and he would have been horrified by the festival in which Jews, Christians, and pagans celebrated the patriarch on the site of his sacred oak tree. Each year, people came from the various districts of Palestine, Phoenicia, and Arabia to hold an annual fair and a magnificent feast, to which everybody contributed: Jews, Christians, and pagans would pray to God or to Zeus Olympios, the God of all; they would call upon the angels, make libations of wine and burn incense; pagans would sacrifice an ox or a sheep. It was a decorous occasion; people used to wear their best clothes for the festival and there was no licentiousness or debauchery. But Eusebius had no time for this ecumenical gathering, which seemed to him an unholy consorting with false religion. He made sure that Eutropia informed Constantine about the festival in a way that would get Makarios into trouble. Since Mamre was in Makarios’s diocese, Constantine wrote him a stern letter, rebuking him for permitting these “unhallowed pollutions.” The letter shows that Constantine had already begun to be influenced by Eusebius’s theology. It was at Mamre that the religion of the Logos had been founded; “there first did the observance of the holy law receive its beginning; there first did the Savior himself with the two angels vouchsafe the manifestation of his presence to Abraham.”21 A new basilica was built beside Abraham’s altar, well and oak tree by the emperor whom Eusebius had hailed as the second Abraham.
Constantine had intended to visit Palestine himself, but was prevented by the continued rumblings of the Arian conflict which kept him occupied in Constantinople. Instead he sent his mother, the dowager empress Helena Augusta. Helena’s “pilgrimage” to the Holy Land has been enshrined in Christian legend as an act of personal piety, but in fact her tour of the eastern provinces in 326 was an imperial progress that finished with a grand flourish in Jerusalem. Like Hadrian, Constantine used the progress to advertise his particular conception of the Roman empire: the sight of the aged dowager and her huge entourage praying at the Christian holy places was a powerful symbol of Constantine’s Christian Rome. Hadrian had built temples, stadia, and aqueducts during his progress: Aelia Capitolina had been his gift to the people of Palestine. Now Helena donated new churches. She had arrived during the planning of the Martyrium and the excavations for the tomb. She may even have been present when the tomb was discovered in 327. Again, Eusebius probably had the job of escorting Helena around Palestine, and he may have suggested the location of the two new churches commissioned by the empress. He had always been enthusiastic about the two caves—one in Bethlehem at Christ’s birthplace and the other on the Mount of Olives—which had been sites of theophanies of the incarnate Logos. The caves thus expressed his view of the revelatory nature of Jesus’s mission. Helena herself had Arian sympathies, and she may have been responsive to Eusebius’s doctrines. At all events, the dowager commissioned two new basilicas to consecrate these caves. Eusebius might well have been pleased to have a holy place established in Bethlehem: the new basilica of the Nativity would deflect Christians’ attention from Aelia and the New Jerusalem. The basilica on the Mount of Olives, known as the Eleona, seventy meters from the summit, commanded a magnificent view of the city. As in Constantine’s complex of buildings, the basilica at both the Eleona and Bethlehem was separate from the actual “holy place.” On the Mount of Olives, staircases led down from the basilica into the sacred cave so that the pilgrims could visit the holy place without disturbing the liturgy. Again, the architecture ensured that worshippers approached the inner sanctum step by step, so that they had time to prepare their minds and hearts.
Helena’s visit was soon shrouded in legend. By the middle of the fifth century, Christians tended to believe that she rather than Constantine and Makarios had supervised the excavations at Golgotha. It was also said that she had discovered the relic of the cross on which Jesus had died. In his account of Helena’s visit to Palestine, Eusebius never mentioned the finding of the True Cross. We have no contemporary description of this archaeological discovery, but by 390 the cross was part of the Jerusalem scene and portions of the relic had been distributed all over the Christian world. It must have been produced at some time during the excavations of 325-27, and it is not impossible that Helena was involved in this discovery. In the early fourth century, Christians did not dwell overmuch on the Crucifixion as a distinct event in itself. It was seen as inextricably bound up with the Resurrection. Christ’s death and his rising from the tomb were seen as two aspects of a single mystery. But the experience of worshipping in Jerusalem would teach Christians to focus on the Crucifixion by itself, as we shall see in the following chapter, and Christ’s agonizing death came more to the forefront of the Christian imagination. Ultimately people would not remember the discovery of the tomb; the more famous event would be the legend of Helena’s finding of the True Cross.
Before the Golgotha excavations, there had been no pilgrimages to Jerusalem, but once the tomb had been discovered pilgrims started to come from all corners of the Roman empire, even from the distant West. The first to leave an account of his travels came from Bordeaux in 333, his immense journey made slightly easier by the military roads that now linked Europe with the imperial capital at Constantinople. The pilgrimage must have been an astonishing experience, but the Pilgrim’s laconic itinerarium gives little clue to his feelings: it is merely a catalogue of the biblical sites and the events associated with them. The Pilgrim was utterly single-minded. He did not pause to look at the great monuments of classical antiquity but concentrated solely on places mentioned in the Bible. His guides may have been Jews, since many of the sites he visited were connected with what Christians now called the “Old Testament” and some of the lore he cites was known only in the Jewish tradition. Pilgrimage was still a novel Christian devotion, and the early pilgrims probably had to rely on the Jewish residents of Palestine before they had established their own tours. Nor was the Pilgrim much interested in Jesus’s earthly life: he must have passed through Galilee, but he did not bother to visit Nazareth or Capernaum. Instead, he made straight for Jerusalem and headed first for the Temple Mount, pausing only to note the pagan healing cult that still flourished at the Pool of Beth-Hesda.
The Pilgrim’s is the first description of the Temple Mount since 70. Over the years, it had become a rather ghostly, sinister place. There was a crypt, the Pilgrim tells us, where King Solomon was said to have tortured devils, and on the site of the Temple itself were stains of the blood of the prophet Zechariah, who had been killed during the persecution of King Jehoash.22 The marks of the nails made by the Jewish soldiers could still be seen. The desolate platform was associated in the Christian mind with the violence and apostasy of the Jewish people. The Pilgrim described the Jewish mourning rites that were still held there on the Ninth of Av. Not far from the two statues of Hadrian, he says, “there is a perforated stone [lapis perfusus], to which the Jews come every year and anoint it, bewail themselves, rend their garments and so depart.”23 The Pilgrim is the only person to mention this stone. Was he referring to the outcrop of rock protruding above Herod’s platform, which is today enshrined in the Muslim Dome of the Rock? Was this rock, which is not mentioned in the Bible, beginning to be associated with the Stone of Foundation (Even Shetiyah) in the Devir, mentioned by the rabbis? Or was this stone merely a dramatic piece of fallen masonry? It is not impossible that the Pilgrim, who does not seem to have seen these reported Jewish ceremonies himself, was simply misinformed.
But Christians were beginning to colonize the site imaginatively themselves: the Pilgrim noted a turret still standing at the southeast corner of the platform, which he identified with the “pinnacle of the Temple” where Jesus was tempted by Satan.24 There was a room in this tower where Solomon was said to have written the Book of Wisdom, and in time this site would be associated with the martyrdom of James the Tzaddik. From the Temple Mount the Pilgrim passed through the Pool of Siloam to the Christian areas of Aelia. On Mount Sion, he was shown the house of Caiaphas, the column where Jesus had been beaten, and “David’s palace.” He also saw a “synagogue,” which may have been a ruin from the days when the Jews had lived in this suburb, or the Pilgrim could have been referring to the house of the Upper Room.25 Once he had entered the city proper, he saw a ruin in the Tyropoeon Valley, which he believed to be the Praetorium where Jesus had been tried by Pilate. Then he proceeded to Golgotha, where Constantine’s basilica was still being built: the “little hill of Golgotha where the Lord was crucified” and the tomb (crypta) were still standing in the open.26 The Pilgrim betrayed no emotion when he saw the New Jerusalem. What is impressive is the huge effort that he had made to get to the Holy Land, which was beginning to be a magnet capable of drawing Christians from the other side of the known world.
In September 335, Constantine’s basilica at Golgotha was finally completed and the bishops of all the dioceses in the eastern provinces were summoned to Aelia for the dedication at state expense, together with important imperial officials. It was a momentous occasion. On 17 September, Constantine was to mark the thirtieth anniversary of his accession to the position of Caesar by consecrating the New Jerusalem. For the first time the Martyrium and its courtyards were crowded with distinguished pilgrims. Christians may still have constituted only a small minority in Aelia; the New Jerusalem was merely a little enclave in a pagan city, and all the other new holy places were actually outside the city walls; but the dedication was billed as an imperial event, and it was clear that Christianity was the coming religion of Rome.
Eusebius was one of the many bishops who preached that day, and he used the occasion to promote his own theology. Very cleverly he reassured the absent emperor, who had been unable to attend the ceremony, that his Christian experience was not incomplete simply because he had not come to Aelia. The Logos could visit him in Constantinople just as easily as in the New Jerusalem. Throughout his sermon, he insisted that the Logos had descended to earth to wean humanity away from the physical world. Athanasius had just been deposed and exiled, and Eusebius believed that his moderate party had carried the day. The tomb was undoubtedly a holy place and had immense emotional power, but Christians must not make a fetish of this relic or treat it as an idol. They must always look through the earthly symbols to the spiritual reality beyond.
But Eusebius was now an old man. His view of Christianity and Jerusalem had been standard when he had become bishop of Caesarea in 313, but since then the lives of Christians had been utterly transformed. A whole generation had grown up in a world where Christians were no longer persecuted and no longer hourly expected Christ’s Second Coming. They felt at home in the Roman empire, and this inevitably altered their religious perceptions. They wanted to find God here on earth instead of straining endlessly for the things above, and they found Athanasius’s incarnational theology more congenial than Eusebius’s wholly spiritual doctrine. Some still preferred the Christianity of Arius and Eusebius, but there was a definite shift toward the doctrines of Nicaea. When Eusebius died in 340, he was succeeded as bishop of Caesarea by an ardent Arian, but Makarios was replaced as bishop of Aelia by Maximus, a devout Athanasian. One of his first acts was to build a church around the Upper Room on Mount Sion. He received no imperial grant and had to fund the building himself, so the new basilica was very modest compared with the splendid Constantinian creations. But the Sion basilica became increasingly important. There, it was believed, Jesus had eaten the Last Supper with his disciples, had instituted the Eucharist, and had appeared after the Resurrection. Above all, the Holy Spirit had descended on the apostles there, so that the Upper Room was the birthplace of the church and the Mother of all other churches.
This was certainly the view of Cyril, who became bishop of Aelia in 349. He described his devotion to Jerusalem eloquently in his sermons. The descent of the Spirit on the festival of Pentecost “here in this city of Jerusalem,” he claimed, gave the church there “preeminence in all things.”27 The bishops of Aelia would continue to campaign for the primacy of the church in Palestine. Cyril was one of the new generation of Christians. He was five years old when the tomb had been unearthed, and found nothing odd in calling Jerusalem a “holy city.” Christ had descended to earth and taken flesh in nearby Bethlehem, he had redeemed the world on Golgotha, ascended to heaven from the Mount of Olives, and sent down the Spirit to the disciples in the Upper Room. How could the city not be holy when it had witnessed the salvation of the world? The city was not guilty because of the Crucifixion: the Cross was not a shame and a disgrace but the “glory” and the “crown” of Jerusalem.28 Eusebius had tended to ignore the cross, but Cyril saw the physical death of Jesus as a crucial event in its own right. The cross was the ground of salvation, the basis of our faith, the end of sin. God had rejected the Temple, not the city; he had not condemned Jerusalem but only the Jews. This new positive theology still contained the old rejection and denial and gave it a disturbing new twist. For Cyril, Jerusalem was not the Guilty City: he simply removed the burden of guilt from the city and placed it squarely on the shoulders of the Jews.
Unlike Eusebius, Cyril believed that the humanity of Christ had religious value in itself. There was no need to discount it and seek the spiritual essence of the Logos. By taking a body, God had voluntarily and permanently allied himself with the human race. The image of Jesus the man revealed God’s eternal disposition toward us. There was no need to reject the physical world; you could actually use it to seek God. Thus Cyril believed that the holy places of Jerusalem—he never called it Aelia—could bring Christians into contact with the divine. They were the places where God had touched our world, so they now had spiritual potency. They gave Christians an experience of God by breaking down the barrier of space—if not the barrier of time—between them and the life of Jesus. Cyril liked to emphasize that the saving events had happened “in the very city in which we are now.”29 The descent of the Spirit at Pentecost had happened over three hundred years ago, but in another sense it had happened “among us” in Jerusalem.30 When Christians came into contact with objects that Jesus had touched—the cross, the tomb, the very ground they stood on—they could reach across the years to the absent Christ. “Others merely hear,” Cyril liked to say, “but we see and touch.”31 By following literally in Jesus’s footsteps, treading where he had trod, the distant events of Jesus’s life became a present reality for the pilgrims. Of course, Christ was not confined to a single locality; Christians could experience his presence anywhere in the world. But a visit to the holy places enabled them to stand in space that was still pregnant with the divine Presence.
The New Jerusalem was obviously distressing to the Jews. A small group of zealots may have tried to prevent this Christian building in the Holy Land.32 It seemed incredible that Christianity, a bastard and apostate form of Judaism, should now have imperial backing. They had been prepared to fight to the death to prevent the building of Aelia Capitolina, but they had since made friends with some of the emperors, and until Constantine it had not been beyond the bounds of possibility that the Romans would one day allow the Jews to rebuild their Temple. But these new Christian buildings in and around Jerusalem were creating facts that would make it very difficult—if not impossible—for a future emperor to restore Jerusalem to the Jewish people. Constantine had even initiated a building project in Galilee, where Jews were in a majority, and a missionary offensive had been launched in Sepphoris, Tiberias, Capernaum, and Nazareth. Some Jews felt acute despair; others looked for the Messiah.33 Most of the rabbis, however, continued to preach moderation. They reminded their people of the catastrophes that had befallen the Jewish nation when it had attempted to rebel against Rome in the past. This peculiar imperial preference for Christianity could only be a temporary enthusiasm.
Yet the position of the Jews continued to deteriorate under the Christian emperors. Constantine himself took no new measures to oppress the Jewish people, but after his death in 337 his successors introduced new legislation forbidding intermarriage between Jews and Christians and prohibiting Jews from owning slaves—measures which were designed to isolate the Jews and to cripple Jewish industry. In 351, Jews revolted in Sepphoris, Tiberias, and Lydda, but the Romans suppressed the revolt humanely. In 353, however, Constantius II enacted new legislation, forbidding Christians to convert to Judaism and entering on the empire’s official statute books a description of the Jews as “savage,” “abominable,” and “blasphemous.”34 Jesus had preached a religion of love and forgiveness, but now that Christians had come into power they were beginning to stigmatize Jews as the enemies of society, pushing them to the margins and making them outcasts as the Christians had once been.
The theology of such Christians as Cyril established the Greek Orthodox devotion to Jerusalem which persists to the present day. Jerusalem was no longer the Guilty City: the cross is now regarded as the “glory” and “crown” of the Christian holy city.
The position of the Jews seemed hopeless. The Christians had appropriated their Scriptures, called themselves the new Israel, and had now set about annexing the Jews’ Holy City through an imperially funded building program. “Why do you take what is ours,” asked a Jew during a debate with Christians, “and make it your own?”35 Then, suddenly, redemption seemed at hand. In 361, Constantius II died and was succeeded by his nephew Julian.
Julian had been brought up as a Christian. But eventually he came to detest the new faith, which he saw as inimical to Rome’s most sacred traditions. Vigorously at odds with Constantine’s vision of Christianity as a force promoting empire-wide cohesion, he was now passionately committed to the old pagan religion. He was not alone. Paganism was in fact still alive and well and would continue to flourish all over the empire until the fifth century. To the many people who still loved the old gods and the ancient rites, Christianity represented, as it did to Julian, a flagrantly impious casting off of hallowed traditions. There was widespread anxiety that some fearful catastrophe might ensue if the old gods did not receive their due; the old sacrifices and sanctities must be observed. Pagans, moreover, were deeply offended by the Christian belief in Jesus—a man who had died a disgraceful death—as divine, a notion decidedly counter to their own conceptions of the sacred. When, therefore, the new emperor declared his intention to restore the ancient faith of their fathers to its rightful place in the Roman world, he could rely on the ardent support of great numbers of his subjects.
The Jews, for their part, must have felt at first that they had little to gain from this pagan ruler. But it soon became clear that Julian had a revolutionary plan for Jerusalem.