The city of Jerusalem

by C. R. Conder

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.