Jerusalem: The Biography

There was every chance that the Temple would be rebuilt – indeed it had been before and very nearly was again. While the Jews were still formally banned from Jerusalem, it was now the Christians who were seen as the clear and present danger to Rome.⁴

From 235, the empire suffered a thirty-year crisis, shattered from inside and out. In the east, a vigorous new Persian empire, replacing Parthia, challenged the Romans. During the crisis, the Roman emperors blamed the Christians for being atheists who refused to sacrifice to their gods and savagely persecuted them, even though Christianity was not so much a single religion as a bundle of different traditions.^* But Christians agreed on the basics: redemption and life after death for those saved by Jesus Christ, confirming the ancient Jewish prophecies which they had commandeered and adopted as their own. Their founder had been killed by the Romans as a rebel, but the Christians rebranded themselves as a faith hostile to the Jews, not to the Romans. Hence Rome became their holy city; most Christians in Palestine lived in Caesarea on the coast; Jerusalem became‘the heavenly city’, while the actual place,Aelia, was just anobscure town where Jesus had died. Yet local Christians kept alive the tradition of the site of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, now buried under Hadrian’s Temple of Jupiter, even creeping inside to pray and scratch graffiti.^*

At Rome’s nadir in 260, the Persians captured the emperor (who was forced to drink molten gold, and was then gutted and stuffed with straw) while the entire East, including the unwalled town of Aelia, was lost to a short-lived Palmyran empire led by a young woman, Zenobia. But within twelve years Rome had recovered the East. At the end of the century, the emperor Diocletian successfully restored Roman power and revived the worship of the old gods. But the Christians seemed to be undermining this resurgence. In 299, Diocletian was sacrificing to the gods at a parade in Syria when some Christian soldiers made the sign of the cross, at which the pagan diviners declared that the divination had failed. When Diocletian’s palace burned down, he blamed the Christians and unleashed a vicious persecution, martyring Christians, burning their books, destroying their churches.

When Diocletian abdicated in 305, dividing the empire, Galerius, new emperor of the East, intensified the butchery of Christians by axe, roasting and mutilation. But the emperor of the West was Constantius Chlorus, a sturdy Illyrian soldier, who assumed the purple in York. Already ill, he died soon afterwards but in July 306 the British legions hailed his young son, Constantine, as emperor. It would take him fifteen years to conquer first the West and then the East, but Constantine, like King David, would change the history of the world and the fate of Jerusalem with a single decision.⁵

PART THREE

CHRISTIANITY

Jerusalem – it is the city of the great King.

Jesus, St Matthew, 5.35

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets and stonest them which are sent unto thee.

Jesus, St Matthew, 23.37

Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.

Jesus, St John, 2.19

As Judaea is exalted above all other provinces so is this city exalted above all Judaea.

St Jerome, Epistles

Jerusalem is now made a place of resort from all parts of the world, and there is such a throng of pilgrims of both sexes that all temptation is here collected together.

St Jerome, Epistles

THE APOGEE OF BYZANTIUM

312–518 AD

CONSTANTINE THE GREAT: CHRIST, GOD OF VICTORY

In 312, Constantine invaded Italy and attacked his rival Maxentius just outside Rome. The night before battle, Constantine saw before him ‘in the sky the sign of a cross of light’ superimposed on the sun with the slogan: ‘By this sign you will conquer!’ So he emblazoned the shields of his soldiers with the Chi-Rho symbol, the first two letters of ‘Christ’ in Greek. The next day at the Battle of Milvian Bridge, he won the West. In this age of auguries and visions, Constantine believed he owed his power to the Christian ‘Supreme God’.