LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
| HEROD’S TEMPLE (MISS DUTHOIT’S MODEL) | [Frontispiece] | |
| FACING PAGE | ||
| THE SILOAM INSCRIPTION | [66] | |
| JERUSALEM IN 600 B. C. | [78] | |
| HEBREW INSCRIPTION (TOMB OF THE BENI ḤEZIR) | [104] | |
| HERODIAN GRAFFITI | [118] | |
| DOME AT THE DOUBLE GATE | [120] | |
| GREEK TEXT OF HEROD’S TEMPLE | [122] | |
| BLOCK PLAN OF HEROD’S TEMPLE | [128] | |
| THE SUPPOSED SITE OF CALVARY | [152] | |
| TOMB WEST OF CALVARY | [156] | |
| JERUSALEM IN 70 A. D. | [176] | |
| THE MEDEBA MOSAIC MAP | [200] | |
| SPECIMENS OF MASONRY | [220] | |
| JERUSALEM IN 530 A. D. | [226] | |
| JERUSALEM IN 1187 A. D. | [284] | |
| EARLY MAP OF JERUSALEM (ABOUT 1308 A. D.) | [322] | |
| MODERN JERUSALEM | [328] | |
THE
CITY OF JERUSALEM
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
I first set eyes on Jerusalem one summer morning in 1872. The view—a mile away—of the long grey wall, the cypress trees of the Armenian garden, and the single minaret at the west gate, was not then obstructed by the row of Jewish cottages since built. The population was only about a third of what it now is. The railway station was not thought of, and only a few villas outside the gate existed, while the suburbs to north and south had not grown up, and Olivet was not covered with modern buildings. I passed two winters (1873–5) in the city, the second in a house in the Jews’ quarter, and later on (1881–2) a third winter at the hotel; and during these visits my time was mainly occupied in wandering among the less-known corners of the town. It was a period very favourable for exploration. The survey by Sir Charles Wilson, the researches of de Vogüé, and the wonderful excavations of Sir Charles Warren, were then recent. The German Emperor, William I., had just ordered the clearing out of the eastern half of the great square of St. John’s Hospital, having been given by the Sultan the site of Charlemagne’s hospice beside the Church of St. Mary Latin. In 1874 Mr. Henry Maudeslay was exploring the ancient scarps at the south-west corner of the Hebrew city; and, by the Sultan’s order, the Dome of the Rock—deconsecrated for a time—was being repaired, while other excavations were in progress outside the city on the north.
DISCOVERIES
I was thus able to walk in my socks all over the surface of the sacred Ṣakhrah “rock,” and to ascend the scaffolding to the dome above, in order to examine the ancient mosaics of our seventh century, as well as those on the outside, where the old arcaded battlement of the ninth century was just laid bare. I penetrated, by the old rock-cut aqueduct at the north-west corner of the Ḥaram, to the Herodian wall, and discovered the buttresses of the Temple rampart still standing, and just like those at Hebron. In the Jews’ quarter I found the old hospice of the Teutonic Order, and the chapel of the Holy Ghost. In 1881 I crawled through the Siloam tunnel with two comrades, in danger of our lives, to find the point where the two parties of Hezekiah’s workmen heard each other calling, and joined their work by a cross cut east and west. These were but a few additions to the work of my predecessors, and since 1882 many other valuable discoveries have been made by Mr. Bliss, Mr. Stewart Macalister, and other explorers, which will be described in due course. We no longer depend on the writings of Josephus and Tacitus, or on the confused accounts of mediæval pilgrims. Our ideas are founded on existing remains. We have Hezekiah’s own inscription at Siloam; the text (found by M. Clermont-Ganneau) which forbade Gentiles to enter the court of Herod’s Temple; the red paint instructions which his master-masons scrawled on the foundations of the mighty ramparts; the votive text to Serapis set up later by Roman soldiers; the Greek inscriptions of Byzantine monks in tombs on the south side of the Hinnom Valley, and, yet earlier, those on the ossuaries, which pious Jews and Jewish Christians used in gathering the bones of their fathers for burial in the old tombs east and north of the Holy City. We have Armenian and Georgian mosaic texts, and Gothic tombstones of Crusaders. Finally, we have the great Kufic, Karmathian, and Arabic texts of the Khalîfahs and Sulṭâns of Islâm, who founded or repaired the beautiful buildings in the Ḥaram.
But all this information is still scattered in expensive memoirs, or separate reports of exploring societies; and it is remarkable that, in spite of the great accumulation of true information during the last half-century, no general account of the history of Jerusalem—as a city—exists, though large volumes of controversial literature continue to appear. It is hoped that the present volume will give a clear idea of what is now actually known, and of the natural deductions from the facts.
Recent visitors have felt themselves perplexed by conflicting statements as to the Bible sites—“Two Zions, two Temple areas, two Bethanys, two Gethsemanes, two or more Calvarys, three Holy Sepulchres, several Bethesdas.”[1] The statement is perhaps an exaggeration, and the discrepancies as a whole are by no means recent, being due to ancient misunderstandings or conjectures. Tradition is overlaid by tradition in the long period of at least 3,400 years since Jerusalem first became a royal city of the Amorite. Jewish traditions were followed by those of Christians and Moslems, who were alike ill informed as to ancient history. The Crusaders brought in new ideas, and often rejected those of the Eastern Churches. The Franciscans, after 1300 A. D., were deprived of some churches, and the Pope sanctioned the transference of old sites to other places. It is true that some literary critics have recently tried to prove that the “city of David” was not a royal city on the mountain top, but a mere hamlet on the tail of the Temple ridge. They have unfortunately—as unconscious heirs of the prejudices of Voltaire—been misled (as in so many other cases) by fixing on a single allusion, while ignoring other accounts, and dismissing the statements of Josephus as merely “traditional”; but they have not given due consideration to the results of exploration, and they have shown but slight acquaintance with the scientific study of ancient architecture.[2] As a rule, however, it is not the modern theorist but the ancient pilgrim who is responsible for the confusion; and the agreement reached already, on the more important questions of topography, has been the outcome of actual research and of monumental studies. No one seems now to doubt that the Temple stood on the top of the eastern ridge. The positions of Olivet and Siloam have never been questioned. Herod’s palace is placed by all in the north-west corner of the upper city, near the so-called “Tower of David,” and Antonia on the rock of the present barracks at the north-west corner of the Temple courts. There was a time when the differences of opinion were much greater. One theorist even went so far as to assert that Hebron was the true site of ancient Jerusalem. But the topography has hardly been changed since Nehemiah’s age. The two great citadels are still held as Turkish strongholds, the Temple is still a sacred enclosure, the upper and lower markets are still where they always were, and even the dung-hills outside the wall are close to the “Dung Gate” of Hebrew times. We may sweep aside the misconceptions due to vague literary statements, and found ourselves not on paper, but on rock and stone, on contemporary inscriptions and architectural remains.
EXCAVATIONS
Ancient cities, as we now know—whether at Troy, Lachish, and Gezer, or at Rome and in London—were constantly rebuilt on the ruins of towns previously laid waste or burned. They present successive strata, with buildings that are themselves not all of one date, and which were sometimes carried down to rock, sometimes merely founded on the old walls and roofs. The street pavements and the lintels of city gates were renewed even within the period of one city, and more frequently than the walls and other buildings. The earth was disturbed, so that old objects were brought up to the surface, and recent objects fell into the foundation trenches, presenting many puzzles for the explorer; but, broadly speaking, the strata are as a rule clearly traceable, giving an historic sequence for the successive cities. In parts of Jerusalem the valleys within the walls have gradually been filled with earth and ruined masonry to a depth of 40 or 50 feet, and it is only where the bare rock is on the surface that we can feel we are standing on the very ground trodden by the feet of our Lord. There are at least six successive cities to be studied at Jerusalem, lying one above another where the depth of the debris is greatest. Within quite recent times the level of some streets has been raised when they were repaved. In the twelfth century “Christian Street,” as it is now called, rose gradually northward, being about 15 feet higher up hill at the point where it passed the west door of the Cathedral of the Holy Sepulchre than at the corner where it joined David Street, and where was the Chapel of St. John Baptist belonging to the Knights of St. John. But to-day Christian Street runs level, and the floor of the chapel is 25 feet below the street, being on the same level as that of the floor of the cathedral. Yet even this chapel floor is 10 feet above the original level of the rock, as it descends into the great Tyropœon Valley. When I first visited Jerusalem, the buildings of the Hospital were covered with earth for some depth above the vaulted roofs of the twelfth-century buildings. Soon after, this earth was removed on donkeys, which passed in a long procession daily out at the west gate, where they made a mound on which Jewish shops now stand. Thus the central valley was filled in, to a depth of 20 feet, before the Crusaders began to build, and has been again filled in another 20 feet or more since the thirteenth century; while on the outside of the Temple, as we stand on the pavement at the Jews’ Wailing-place and gaze on the mighty rampart towering above, we must remember that we only see less than half its present height, and that it goes down beneath us nearly 40 feet, to the older pavement of Herod’s age, which was itself 20 feet above the foundation rocks. The causeway to the north of this is 90 feet above the rock, but in the sixth century the street was at least 40 feet lower, and in the time of Herod some 30 feet lower still, yet already 20 feet here also above rock. Such measurements, accurately ascertained by Sir Charles Warren, whose mine on the north-east side of the Temple was sunk through the shingle to a depth of 125 feet, will serve to show the gradual growth of the rubbish and the effacement of the ancient natural outline in the valleys which ran within the city.
TWO SCENES
Many scenes in modern Jerusalem rise before me in recalling the times when I lived within the walls, and passed so many days in the Temple enclosure, or in that grim church, defiled with blood, which some among us are glad to think of as not marking the new sepulchre without the city where the Prince of Peace was laid. But two scenes especially come back to mind. The first is that of the sleeping town before the gates were opened to admit the peasant women and their donkey-loads of cakes and vegetables. In the purple gloom the domes are beginning to shine, wet with the heavy dew, as the light spreads behind Olivet “as far as Hebron”—to quote the Mishnah. The silence is broken suddenly by the musical cry of the Muedhdhin on the minaret of a mosque—a long, rolling, and tremulous note, echoing all over Jerusalem, as he “testifies there is no God but God,” and calls to the faithful that “prayer is better than sleep.” The simple dignity of Islâm contrasts with the superstition, the hurried services, the tawdry magnificence of degraded Eastern churches, and we understand how it was that the reformed faith of Muḥammad conquered Asia. The second scene is that of the summer noon, which presents to us an epitome of the long history of the Holy City. The great Herodian tower of the upper city glares with tawny stone against the blue sky. The rough cobbles of the slippery market-place are crowded with chattering peasants. A few pious Moslems, unconscious of the world, are praying with their faces towards Mekkah on the steps of the Protestant bishop’s palace, where the town dogs also lie in summer, but go down to the covered bazaar when the winter rains and snow begin. The Armenian patriarch is being escorted, from St. James on Sion to the Holy Sepulchre, by a modest procession. A Moslem bier passes by, and men crowd round it to lend their shoulders for a few steps as a pious act. The little Pharisee, with his lovelocks and dirty gaberdine—or resplendent in his fur cap on the sabbath, just as Rembrandt drew his fathers—is jostled in the narrow street of David, yet holds his fingers on the pulses of the city life. Above the cries of the water-seller and the chinking of the brass sherbet-cups, the screams of women and the jangling of the metal plates that serve for bells in churches, rises one recurrent note from the blind beggar who wanders through the streets, forever calling aloud to the “everlasting God.” We might almost expect to see a Templar ride by, with his white gown and blood-red cross over the mail coat, or the page of some Frankish noble in stripes of yellow and crimson. But instead we witness the long procession of half-naked Dervish fanatics, with banners, on their way to the Ḥaram, and then to the “tomb of Moses” west of Jericho. They bear spears and swords, and are preceded by jesters with fox-tails or by a convict who has been tarred and covered with cotton wool—ancient survivals of pagan Saturnalia. The Jew, the Greek, the Copt, the Georgian, the Armenian, the Arab, and the Turk mingle with the modern European and with the Franciscan monk from Italy in the narrow lane; and black-veiled ladies with white cloaks, seated on crimson saddles high up on the white Damascene asses, are led to the shops, or to the lower fruit-market which glows with colour, its green and gold contrasting with the violet or rich brown robes of the merchants. The whole history of Jerusalem is represented by its crowd to-day.
RELICS
In endeavouring to follow that history we must no doubt give due attention to tradition, for tradition records the sincere beliefs of mankind. In cases where the Jew, the Christian, and the Moslem all honour the same site, it generally appears that we have the actual spot described, or casually noticed, in the Bible. But there are not many such sites in Palestine, except the tombs of the Hebrew patriarchs at Hebron, the grave of Rachel near Bethlehem, Jacob’s Well east of Shechem, and—in Jerusalem itself—the sites of Siloam and Olivet, of the Temple itself, and of Herod’s palace and tower. As to others, there is not a single existing site in the Holy City that is mentioned in connection with Christian history before the year 326 A. D., when Constantine’s mother adored the two footprints of Christ on Olivet. We may not charge the priests of the Catholic Church with “pious fraud,” for they were no doubt as sincere as those who of late have created a new site for the Sepulchre by enthusiasm without knowledge. There is something very pathetic in the story of men who came on foot from Gaul and Britain in early times, to fortify their faith by seeing for themselves the very places seen by their Lord, to be buried near Him, or to kiss the footprints and finger prints which they were shown on the rocks of Olivet, or in the Aksa Mosque and Dome of the Rock, where they are now preserved and visited by Moslems only. The adoration of relics is not peculiar to Christianity. It is an outcome of that intense longing for certainty and finality which is natural to all mankind. The Moslem and the Buddhist had from the first their relics as well as the Christian—nay, we go back to the days of Herodotus, when the footprints of Herakles was shown in Scythia, or of Pausanias who saw “Leda’s egg” in a temple. But however sincere the beliefs of the past may have been, we cannot but confess, when studying in detail the traditional topography of Jerusalem, that it has grown and changed just as the city itself has done, because of the succession of various ruling races, and because to Jew, Christian, and Moslem alike there has always been a Holy City here which they coveted, and for which they shed their blood.
Some few of the principal sites have remained always the same; others have been often shifted; and the number of sites has been increased continually from century to century. Most of the pilgrims, whether Christian or Moslem, were illiterate; and those who were better educated, and whose accounts were copied and re-copied more or less accurately, were often strangely ignorant of the Bible and of the history of Palestine. To the ordinary pilgrim the relics and the pictures were “books of the ignorant,” and strange superstitions—such as that of the crypt where “Solomon tortured demons”[3]—are mingled with the statements of the Gospels. The first record of a pilgrim visit is that of a traveller from Bordeaux in 333 A. D. He makes the curious mistakes of supposing the Transfiguration to have occurred on Olivet and David’s victory over Goliath near Jezreel. St. Silvia of Aquitaine, half a century later, accepts as genuine the forged correspondence between Christ and King Abgarus; and after the fifth century the legends of the Apocryphal Gospels—especially those concerning the Virgin Mary—form the foundation of traditional topography in many cases. In the Middle Ages the pilgrims are also influenced by the comments on the Gospels of Tertullian, Origen, and other Christian fathers, though the works of those fathers who wrote before 325 A. D. show no acquaintance with any Jerusalem sites. For these reasons it is evident that the traditions must be received with caution; and, as the pilgrim texts are only valuable in showing contemporary facts and beliefs, their accounts may be here summed up as far as regards traditional sites.
THE TRADITIONS
When Helena, the mother of Constantine, visited Palestine in 326 A. D., she was shown nothing at Jerusalem except the two footprints of Christ on Olivet.[4] The story of her discovery of the true Cross is not noticed till about a century later,[5] though as early as 348 A. D. St. Cyril of Jerusalem[6] speaks of fragments of the Cross as being distributed “piecemeal throughout the world.” The site of the Ascension is thus the first of all to be mentioned. A church was built by Constantine before 333 A. D. on the summit of Olivet, and the two footprints of the Saviour impressed in the rock continued to be shown down to the Middle Ages, though in 1342 A. D. only one was pointed out, just as at present.[7] Two other footprints of Christ were shown after the fifth century: one in the Church of St. Mary (now in the Aḳṣa Mosque), which is still shown by Moslems[8]; the other on the Ṣakhrah rock, which is now called “the noble footstep” of Muḥammad[9]; while the marks now called finger-prints of the Angel Gabriel, on this rock, were supposed to have been those of our Lord, as were others in the Cave of the Agony.[10] Yet later, in the sixteenth century, footmarks of Christ were also shown on the south-east side of the little bridge over the Kidron Valley.[11]
A fragment of the true Cross was adored by St. Paula and by St. Silvia, near Calvary, sixty years after the time of Helena’s visit; and St. Silvia was also shown the “title” once affixed to the same. About 530 A. D. the discovery of three crosses is mentioned as due to Helena. The fragment was taken by Chosroes II. to Persia, but recovered in 628 A. D., and removed to Constantinople with other relics in 634 A. D. As seen in St. Sophia by Arculphus, half a century later, there appear to have been three pieces, each less than 3 feet in length. In 1192 A. D. another fragment was believed to be in the keeping of the Syrian bishop of Lydda, besides that one which Saladin captured in 1187.[12] St. Silvia gives an extraordinary account of the precautions taken when pilgrims were allowed to kiss the original relic, due to the fact that a wretch had once bitten off a piece, which he tried to carry away in his mouth, probably meaning to sell it in Europe.[13]
“Solomon’s seal” and the “horn of David” were apparently the only other relics shown in the fourth century at the Anastasis Church,[14] but in the sixth we find described the onyx cup of the Last Supper, the lance and sponge used at the Crucifixion, and the crown of thorns. These also were removed by Heraclius to Constantinople with the Cross, and the crown of thorns was afterwards sent to St. Louis of France, who built for it the Sainte Chapelle. Yet in 867 A. D. Bernard the Wise was shown a crown of thorns hanging up in the Church of St. Sion,[15] while a silver chalice takes the place of the onyx cup in 680 A. D., and appears to have been also regarded as the original relic. The stone which the angel rolled away from the sepulchre is noticed even by Cyril and St. Paula, and is spoken of about 680 A. D. as broken in two. In the eighth century it had disappeared, and a square pointed stone was shown instead; yet a hundred years later the substitute was accepted as being the original.[16]
THE HOLY FIRE
Many marvels were reported to occur in the Church of the Resurrection. Theodorus (or Theodosius, as he is also called), in 530 A. D., was told that the holy lance, which had been made into a cross, “shone at night like the sun by day.” St. Silvia says that at the early morning service no lights were brought into the church, but that they were supplied from an ever-burning lamp within the Cave of the Sepulchre. This seems to be the germ of the later “holy fire,” which appeared at Easter, as first clearly described by Bernard the Wise,[17] who tells us that, on the eve of Easter Day, the “Kyrie eleison” was sung until the angel came to light the lamps. In the twelfth century the fire appeared sometimes in the Hospital of St. John or in the Temple enclosure, sometimes in the cathedral, and was said to pass by an underground passage between the two latter. In 1192 Saladin is said to have attended the ceremony, but the Saracens “asserted that it was a fraudulent contrivance.”[18]
The position of the traditional sites of Calvary and the Holy Sepulchre, in the middle of the north quarter of Jerusalem, seems to have given rise to suspicions very early. Eusebius[19] speaks of the “new Jerusalem rising opposite the old,” and appears to think that the latter included little more than the traditional Sion and the Temple hill. Later writers[20] are careful to urge that Hadrian was the first to enclose the sacred sites within the city wall, though there is no foundation in contemporary accounts for this assertion. Even the pilgrims were not always satisfied to accept all the traditions. John of Würzburg, about 1160 A. D., knew that the Ṣakhrah rock could not be that of Jacob at Bethel, though Theodorich a dozen years later seems to have accepted what was then a recent tradition, confounding the “House of God”—or Temple—with the city Bethel. Some of the early writers were aware that different statements in the New Testament were “hard to reconcile,” and sites which were called “Galilee”—on Olivet and on Sion—arose from apologetic explanations of the different accounts in the Gospels as to what happened after the Resurrection.[21]
PILLARS OF SCOURGING
Next to the relics in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the sites on Mount Sion were venerated from an early age. A church (now the Mosque of Nebi Dâûd) already existed in the fourth century, and was said to mark the sites of the Last Supper and of the descent of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost. By 440 A. D. it had come to be regarded as the oldest church in the world, founded by Christ or by the Apostles. It was regarded by Jews and Christians in the twelfth century as being close to David’s tomb. The Franciscans held it from 1313 till the time of Pope Sixtus IV.[22] (1471–84 A. D.), who sanctioned the transference of the traditions therewith connected to the so-called “House of Caiaphas”—now the small Armenian convent outside the south wall—when the Moslems seized the old church as being the sepulchre of “the prophet David.” About 1547 the Franciscans seem to have recovered this Church of the Cœnaculum, or Last Supper, but had again lost it by 1561. We do not know the reasons given for approving the translation of sites, but such transferences were common even in the end of the thirteenth century, as the Moslems gradually extended their boundaries in Palestine, acquiring many of the older traditional sites which pilgrims were then unable to visit. The “House of Caiaphas” was shown as early as the fourth century as being the place where Peter denied his Lord. It once belonged to the Georgians, whom the Franciscans succeeded, and it afterwards became the burial-place of the Armenian patriarchs. Many traditions clustered round it in the Middle Ages, and the scene of the Virgin’s death in the house of St. John was shown close by on the south. In the church porch was a pillar, noticed by the Bordeaux Pilgrim as that to which Christ was bound for scourging; but in the Middle Ages the site where this pillar stood is often changed, and no less than three positions are now indicated. The original Sion pillar was said, in the sixth century, to have been bidden by Christ to transfer itself from the House of Caiaphas to the Church of St. Sion,[23] and the impress of the Saviour’s face was then to be seen upon it. In the sixteenth century it was supposed to be the pillar on which the cock stood and crowed when Peter denied Christ. Another flagellation pillar was taken to Rome; a third was in the Latin chapel north of the Holy Sepulchre in 1586, and is still shown by Latins; a fourth, close to Calvary, has been shown by the Greeks since 1341; and the Franciscans, since the sixteenth century, have shown the hole where the pillar of scourging once stood in the chapel just north of the Ḥaram.
There were also two prisons in which Christ was placed, according to later accounts; one of them was at the “House of Annas,” near the south wall and within the city. This is now the Syrian convent of the “Olive Tree,” to which tree our Lord was bound. Here also, in the twelfth century, was the prison in which St. Peter was confined by Herod; and the city gate to the south was then supposed to be the “Iron Gate” which opened of itself.[24] The other prison was a chapel, north-east of the Holy Sepulchre, which is not noticed earlier than 1102 A. D., but must be included in the number of chapels found existing by the Crusaders.[25] Finally, another site connected with St. Peter was shown in the twelfth century on the east slope of Sion—namely, the cave where he wept, covered by the chapel of “Gallicantus,” or “Cock-crowing,” which some confused with “Galilee.”
BETHESDA
The sites in and round the Temple enclosure, and that of St. Stephen’s death, with some on Olivet, were equally liable to change in course of time. Thus the Pool of Bethesda has been traditionally pointed out in three separate places. From 333 A. D. down to 440 A. D. the “Sheep Pool,” or Bethesda, is placed at the “Twin Pools,” which still exist in the Antonia fosse,[26] and which may have been cut out of the rock in the time of Herod or later. They are vaulted over with masonry, probably of the sixth century A. D., and gradually disappeared from sight as the level of the street was raised above them; thus already in the sixth century the “Sheep Pool” is placed at some distance from the “House of Pilate,” which immediately adjoined the “Twin Pools.”[27] In the twelfth century Bethesda is always described as being at the “Piscina Interior,” or “inner pool,” a large rock tank west of the Church of St. Anne, which was rediscovered in 1888; but even in the thirteenth century the Templars were showing another site, namely, that which appears on the old map of Jerusalem (about 1308 A. D.), and which is the same now pointed out—the Birket Isrâîl, or “Pool of Israel.”[28] There was considerable difference of opinion also as to where the Prætorium, or “House of Pilate,” should be placed. In the sixth century it was at the Antonia site, where Justinian built a chapel of St. Sophia—now the “Chapel of the Mocking”—inside the Turkish barracks. In the seventh and early in the twelfth centuries it was supposed to be on Mount Sion, but in the thirteenth it was replaced at the north-west corner of the Ḥaram.[29]
The adoration of the Virgin began to be increasingly important after the great schism of 431 A. D., when Nestorius was condemned at Ephesus for refusing to her the title “Mother of God.” In the middle of the sixth century Justinian built his great Basilica of St. Mary on the south side of the Temple enclosure, and the Tomb of the Virgin is not mentioned by pilgrims before this time, nor are any of the other churches of St. Mary which existed within the city. The legend of the “Virgin’s Well,” where she washed the clothes of the infant Jesus, is much later. The underground church supposed in 530 A. D. to be the site of Mary’s tomb was beneath a basilica which Queen Melisinda replaced by the present church in 1161 A. D. She was buried soon after half-way down the steps to the crypt, yet in 1385 her tomb is described as that of “Queen Mary,” while to-day it is known as that of St. Joseph.[30] On Olivet the little cave-chapel of St. Lazarus in Bethany was built over in the fourth century,[31] but the sites of the Pater Noster and Credo chapels, and the Cave of Pelagia, are not noticed before the sixth century. The old “Cave of the Agony” may have been shown as “Gethsemane” in the time of Jerome,[32] but the Latin site on the south side of the road to Bethany was not enclosed by the Franciscans till 1847 A. D. Another site which is often changed is that of the place where Judas hanged himself, which is usually connected with an arch or bridge—no doubt on account of an apocryphal legend which I have been unable to trace.[33] In the sixth century Antony of Piacenza was shown the fig tree of Judas apparently north of the East Gate of Jerusalem; but if Adamnan rightly understood the account of Arculphus, his Gaulish guest in Iona, the bridge was to the south-west of the city, and Judas hanged himself on the west side of the middle arch, where a great fig tree then grew. This bridge is not otherwise mentioned, and in the fourteenth century an elder tree was shown, near Absalom’s tomb, and the little bridge over the Kidron on the east side of which Judas hung, according to Zuallardo.[34]
From the fourth to the sixth century the ancient temple wall at the south-east angle of the enclosure stood up like a “pinnacle” above the ruins, and this was pointed out as the pinnacle on which Christ was placed by the Devil. Close by was the small vaulted chamber where Solomon “wrote Wisdom,” and where (in the “House of Simeon”) was the cradle of Christ. In the middle of the twelfth century a wooden cradle was shown, whereas this is now replaced by a Roman vaulted niche laid flat, which was once intended to hold a statue.[35]
In a Church of St. John on Olivet[36] our Lord was believed, in the ninth century, to have met the woman charged with adultery, and the “writing on the ground” was here shown. Early in the twelfth century this site was transferred to the cave under the Ṣakhrah, where it was still believed to exist in the fourteenth, though the “writing” of Christ was then shown on a stone in the Pater Noster Chapel.
SAINT STEPHEN
Among the earlier sites, that of the stoning of Stephen has also been variously placed at different times. The worship of saints developed in the fifth century, and the tomb of St. Stephen was supposed to have been found, in 415 A. D., at Caphar Gamala, a village which retains its old name still, about 20 Roman miles south-west of Jerusalem. The empress Eudocia, returning after her first visit to the Holy City, brought back to Constantinople the chains of St. Peter, and the right arm of St. Stephen, with the portrait of the Virgin said to have been painted by St. Luke. She retired later to Jerusalem, where she lived sixteen years and died about 460 A. D. She is said to have built a church of St. Stephen at the site of his martyrdom by stoning, outside the North or “Galilee” Gate; but in 530 A. D. a stone was shown on Sion with which he was said to have been slain, and by the twelfth century he was believed to have been there buried. The Crusaders found the church of Eudocia (where she was buried) in ruins, and the North Gate was still called St. Stephen’s down to about 1200 A. D., though about 1160 A. D. the site of the martyrdom is shifted to the west side of the town. It first appears in its present position, outside the East Gate, in the old map of about 1308 A. D. A Greek text has recently been found at this site, bearing the words “This is the gate of the Lord, the righteous shall (enter in). Holy Stephen pray for (us).” But this slab may have been transferred from the ancient site outside the North Gate.[37]
LATIN SITES
Many new Latin sites were created by the Crusaders in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The chapels then built have been carefully planned and described by Dr. Tobler, Comte M. de Vogüé, and Herr Schick, architect to the German Emperor and the Sultan, who for so many years was an untiring student of Jerusalem. In a few cases the churches mentioned—such of those as St. Agnes and St. Giles—are not yet identified. On Sion, St. Mark, St. Thomas, St. George, and St. James the Less, with the Chapel of the Three Maries, still exist. In the centre of the town, St. Mary Latin, St. Mary Magna, and—north of the Holy Sepulchre—St. Chariton, are now known. On the north-east were St. Anne, St. Mary Magdalene, and—at the Ecce Homo Arch—the church of the “Rest” of Mary. The “Stables of Solomon” are never noticed before the twelfth century, when the “Oak of Rogel” was pointed out where a sacred tree still stands at Siloam, being supposed to be the place where Isaiah was sawn asunder. The “Gate Dolorous” was then the name of that leading from Antonia, and the “School of the Virgin” was the title given to the “Dome of the Roll,” at the south-west corner of the platform of the Dome of the Rock. The “House of Uriah” was then supposed to have been near David’s palace and tower, and the old tank near the Jaffa Gate still bears the name of “Bathsheba’s Bath”; but in the sixteenth century this house was shown at the south-west corner of the Hebrew city, and the bath was transferred to the Birket es Sulṭân. The altar of the Temple is said to have been converted into a sundial by the Saracens,[38] and a block of masonry, south of the Dome of the Rock, was still pointed out in 1874 as the place where a sundial had stood. Finally, the fig tree cursed by Christ was shown at the bend of the road near Bethany; and the place where He “descended from the ass” near Bethphage—a site said even by Bernard the Wise to be marked by a marble slab in 867 A. D.—was to be found in a small chapel, where a block of stone has been recovered, with mediæval Latin texts, and frescoes representing the raising of Lazarus, the fetching of the ass, and a third subject.[39]
After the massacre of the Christians in 1244 A. D., the Franciscans were allowed by the Sulṭân of Egypt to return to Jerusalem, and they alone—for about five centuries—represented Latin Christianity in Palestine. The Latin churches were in ruins, and were either appropriated by Greeks and Armenians, or in other cases were turned into mosques. The Franciscan monastery of St. Saviour was in the north-west corner of the city, where the Latin Patriarchate now is. The friars were the guides of pilgrims after the fall of Acre in 1291 A. D., but they were only able to show sites outside the city, or in the streets, with exception of those in the Holy Sepulchre Cathedral, which, by treaty, was reserved to Christians. This seems to have been the reason why the sites in the Via Dolorosa—which are unnoticed before 1300 A. D.—came to be established. The capital of a pillar has been found, on which the legend of St. Veronica and the “holy handkerchief” is represented,[40] which may be as old as the twelfth century. The Chapel of the “Spasm” of the Virgin, with its mosaic floor, has also been recovered at the point where the Via Dolorosa turns south,[41] and this station is mentioned in the fourteenth century[42]; but only eight stations are noticed in the sixteenth century out of fourteen now shown by the Latins.[43] The “Stone of Unction,” west of Calvary, is first noticed by Ludolph of Suchem, about 1330 A. D., as a Latin site, and “Herod’s House”—still extant, near the “red minaret” in the north-east of the town—is mentioned by Sir John Maundeville in 1342 A. D. Two footprints of Christ continued to be here shown down to the present century, and this place was still known in 1846, but has now ceased to be reckoned among the sacred sites.[44] The place where Christ wept for Jerusalem on Olivet, and the ancient tomb in the Hinnom Valley (probably that of Ananus), which was converted into a chapel with a frescoed roof and called the “Retreat of the Apostles,”[45] seem to be first noticed by Zuallardo in 1586 A. D., as are also the “House of Dives” and the “House of the Pharisee,” in the Via Dolorosa.
LATER SITES
Detailed study of the traditional sites, fixed by the Oriental and Roman Churches, thus serves to show that none of them go back to the earlier years of the fourth century saving those of the Ascension, St. Sion, Calvary, and the Holy Sepulchre. The statements of the pilgrims prove to us that the remainder, as a whole, were vague and shifting identifications, on which no reliance can be placed. We learn from the Gospel (Luke xxiv. 50) that our Lord led His disciples out “as far as to Bethany,” and He is not said to have ascended from the summit of Olivet. The site of Calvary was considered to require defence even in the fourth century, because it was within the city. There is a gap of three hundred years, which is not bridged by any ancient allusion even, separating the first notice of these older sites from the time of the Crucifixion. Pious opinions, sanctioned by Popes and Patriarchs, became fixed traditions as time went on, and the number of the sites constantly increased, while Greeks and Latins showed rival “vestigia” in rival shrines. Relics were perhaps often meant only to be regarded as representations of objects connected with the Passion; but, in the dark age of Gothic ignorance, the belief in miracles wrought by bones of the saints infected Christianity with all the superstitions which the illiterate converts brought in from paganism. The first Christians were intent on the future rather than on the past, and the Gospels themselves say nothing definite as to the position of Calvary or of the new tomb in the garden. The pilgrims devoutly believed that they had kissed the true Cross and the actual footprints of Christ, and knew little of the earlier history of the sites where they gave alms and received indulgences. But it is necessary, in endeavouring to ascertain the truth, to distinguish between their beliefs and their accounts of existing buildings, and we must found our study of the history of Jerusalem on existing monuments and inscriptions, and as far as possible on contemporary statements—on science, not on legend—even if such examination of facts leads us to discard as improbable sites which have so long been sacred to Christians; while we must also admit that certainty and finality are still impossible, in cases where the actual evidence is meagre. The account here given of the traditions will serve to show that they have not been disregarded as an element in the study of various questions of historical importance.