Jerusalem: The Biography

By day, Jesus taught, and healed sick people at the Bethesda Pool just north of the Temple and at the Siloam Pool to its south, both crowded with Jewish pilgrims purifying themselves to enter the Holy House. At night he returned to his friends’ home in Bethany. On the Monday morning, he again entered the city but this time he approached the Royal Portico of the Temple.

At Passover, Jerusalem was at its most crowded and dangerous. Power was founded on money, rank and Roman connections. But the Jews did not share the Roman respect for military kudos or cold cash. Respect in Jerusalem was based on family (Temple magnates and Herodian princelings), scholarship (the Pharisee teachers) and the wild card of divine inspiration. In the Upper City, across the valley from the Temple, the grandees lived in Grecian-Roman mansions with Jewish features: the so-called Palatial Residence excavated there has spacious receiving-rooms and mikvah

s. Here stood the palaces of Antipas and the high priest Joseph Caiaphas. But the real authority in Jerusalem was the prefect, Pontius Pilate, who usually ruled his province from Caesarea on the coast but always came to supervise Passover, staying at Herod’s Citadel.

Antipas was not the only Jewish royalty in Jerusalem. Helena, the Queen of Adiabene, a small kingdom in today’s northern Iraq,^*

had converted to Judaism and moved to Jerusalem, building a palace in the City of David, donating the golden candelabra over the doorway of the Temple sanctuary and paying for food when there were bad harvests. Queen Helena too would have been there for Passover, probably wearing the sort of jewellery recently discovered in Jerusalem: a large pearl inlaid in gold with two drop pieces, each with an emerald set in gold.

Josephus guessed that two and a half million Jews came for Passover. This is an exaggeration but there were Jews ‘out of every nation,’ from Parthia and Babylonia to Crete and Libya. The only way to imagine this throng is to see Mecca during the haj. At Passover, every family had to sacrifice a lamb, so the city was jammed with bleating sheep – 255,600 lambs were sacrificed. There was much to do: pilgrims had to take a dip in a mikvah

every time they approached the Temple as well as buy their sacrificial lambs in the Royal Portico. Not everyone could stay in the city. Thousands lodged in the surrounding villages, like Jesus, or camped around the walls. As the smell of burning meat and heady incense wafted – and the trumpet blasts, announcing prayers and sacrifices, ricocheted – across the city, everything was focused on the Temple, nervously watched by the Roman soldiers from the Antonia Fortress.

Jesus now walked into the towering, colonnaded Royal Portico, the bustling, colourful, crowded centre of all life, where pilgrims gathered to organize their accommodation, to meet friends, and to change money for the Tyrian silver used to buy sacrificial lambs, doves, or, for the rich, oxen. This was not the Temple itself nor one of its inner courts but the most accessible and public section of the entire complex, designed to serve like a forum. In the Portico, Jesus attacked the Temple establishment: ‘Is this house, which is called by thy name, become a den of robbers?’ he said, overturning the tables of the money-changers while quoting and channelling the prophecies of Jeremiah, Zachariah and Isaiah. His demonstration attracted attention but not enough to warrant any intervention by Temple guards or Roman soldiers.

After another night in Bethany, he returned to the Temple^† the next morning to debate with his critics. The Gospels cite the Pharisees as Jesus’ enemies, but this probably reflected the situation fifty years later when their authors were writing. The Pharisees were the more flexible and populist sect, and some of their teachings may have been similar to those of Jesus. His real enemies were the Temple aristocracy. The Herodians now challenged him about paying taxes to Rome, but he replied adeptly, ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.’