Jerusalem At the Time of Jesus
By David Van Biema/Jerusalem
This would have been his path. According to the Gospels, it was
in the area of Bethany and Bethphage that Jesus would have stayed each evening
of the Passover holidayon the far slope of the Mount of Olives, where his followers
Mary and Martha lived and where he raised their brother Lazarus from the dead.
During the festival it was a tradition and a necessity for pilgrims to spend
the night on the outlying hills. Each morning Jesus would have set out again,
over the top of the mount and then down its western slope to the great holy
city below.
Today verses from the Koran waft from a dozen open windows in
the town of Bethany. Islam regards Jesus as a great prophet, and Bethany's mostly
Muslim residents are proud of its 2,000-year-old tradition. Just a few yards
down a steep road from the tomb believed to have been Lazarus' is al Ozir Mosque,
named for him in Arabic; a few yards up is a Greek Orthodox church honoring
Mary and Martha. Jesus, on his way to Jerusalem, would have walked up this hill,
a local woman explains, and turned right at the top toward Bethphage.
Next would have come a hike along the hill's crest, which would
have led him to a place now occupied by a hotel called the Seven Arches. The
view here is stunning. Directly below is an ancient necropolisan immense graveyard
dating back long before Jesus that could cause anyone, not just a religious
rebel with a price on his head, to consider his mortality. The ground falls
off sharply, dotted with stands of pine and, yes, silvery green olive trees.
Jesusor his donkeywould have picked his way from here down into the Kidron
Valley. On the other side, then as now, a great tan wallthe grandiose platform
for a place of worshipwould have reared up before him. He would have passed
through what was known as the Beautiful Gate and entered Jerusalem.
Across from the Seven Arches, five or six colored hens pick for
corn, and a herd of sheep grazes among scarlet anemones. Hiba Gaith, an 11-year-old
Palestinian girl who lives nearby, is singing a song she and her friends learned
at school. She wears jeans, and her long ponytail is done up with a brown butterfly
clip. "The sound of the stone/ The blood of usurpers/ The hearts are bleeding
in fury/ They carry stones in their small hands/ And challenge the aggressors,"
she sings. "The martyr Mohammed/ Seen by millions/ Taking refuge in the bosom
of his father/ Dying by damned bullets/ His blood is splashing in the sky."
The song, by Egyptian pop artist Walid Tawfiq, is about Mohammed al-Durra, the
12-year-old whom the world witnessed dying in his father's arms in cross fire
last October during the early stages of the latest Israeli-Palestinian conflagration.
The tune, says Hiba, "is implanted in my heart."
Seven-year-old Mahmoud Zomored zooms by on his red-and-black
tricycle. He pauses to peer down at the city below. What does he see there?
"I see war." Why? "The Arabs throw stones at Jews, and Jews kill Arabs." Does
he throw stones? "No. I do not want to die."
It is impossible today to hear the word Jerusalem without thinking
about the violence that is again bedeviling the Holy Land. The Palestinians
do more than throw stones; and the Israelis are entitled to their own odes to
lost children. Like 10-month-old Shalhevet Pass, the daughter of Jewish settlers
in the mostly Palestinian city of Hebron, who died last month when a sniper
put a bullet, apparently intentionally, through her head. Last week, one-year-old
Ariel Yered was critically wounded in a Palestinian mortar attack on the Atzmona
settlement in the Gaza Strip. Almost 400 Palestinians and 65 Israelis have died
since last fall, when peace negotiations imploded over the question of Jerusalem's
status.
The current agony is not atypical of the locale's holy, bloody
history. Over the centuries, each of the West's great faiths has coveted the
city; each alternately has controlled it, and each has constructed around it
a separate sacred history. As the myths have collided, the result has been a
play of extremes: physical splendor alternating with utter destruction; moments
of pious exultation oscillating with the grossest carnage. Or sometimes carnage
and exultation at once. "Men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins,"
wrote an 11th century Crusader fresh from a massacre of Muslims on the Temple
Mount. He added, "Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God."
The years from A.D. 1 to A.D. 33 happened to be a high point
for the holy city. It was, says Eric Meyers, professor of Judaic studies at
Duke University, "a great, great metropolitan area" and home to the lavishly
restored Jewish Temple, a world-renowned wonder. It was prosperous and cosmopolitan.
And it was also, unknowingly, the cradle for something else, a way of believing,
of seeing, that would change the West and the rest of history. It is worth revisiting
Jerusalem during this period not so much in celebration as in curiosityto know
the metropolis that shaped Jesus' last ministry and so wove itself into his
great story, and to note, cautiously, the ways in which its vexations foreshadow
those of Jerusalem today.
It is the Gospel of Luke that describes Jesus' childhood visit
to Jerusalem. Though he had been there beforeLuke says his family was visiting
"as usual" for Passoverthe 12-year-old from Nazareth, 60 miles to the north,
must still have been agog walking south down the grand new Roman street toward
the Temple's lower entrance. A stretch of that road is visible today, just below
the Western Wall, majestically wide but piled high on one side with huge blocks
of stone that rained from above during one of the city's many destructions.
There is a debate regarding exactly how citified the young Jesus
would have been. Excavations of the city of Sepphoris, near Nazareth, reveal
a bustling town, suggesting that he may have been less of a country lad than
previous scholarship posited. But his native Galilee certainly had nothing to
compare with this. Jerusalem was one of the biggest cities between Alexandria
and Damascus, with a permanent population of some 80,000. During Passover, Succoth
and Shavuoth, the great festivals during which Jews were obligated to make sacrifices
at the Temple, between 100,000 and 250,000 visitors (historians differ) would
stream down the long city thoroughfare.
The pilgrims would have shared the road with ox teams hauling
huge slabs of limestone. Jerusalem, like today's Chicago, New York City or London,
was a huge, ongoing building project. The sounds of construction would have
mixed with the bleats and bellows of sacrificial animals for sale in streetside
shops. The view to Jesus' left would have been taken up by a wall up to 150
ft. higha wall not of the Temple itself but of a gargantuan platform atop which
it perched. To his right would have been Jerusalem's Upper City, its Gold Coast,
where the families of the priests who tended the sacrificial altars lived according
to Jewish law but in Roman splendor. Asked to imagine the boy's main impression,
Roni Reich, director of Temple Mount excavations for the Israeli Antiquities
Authority, says, "Big!"
The city was in a renaissance. Its initial splendor had
been snuffed out by Babylonia in 586 B.C. Within 50 years, Jews had begun
rebuilding, but full glory awaited the rule, from 37 B.C. to 4 B.C., of Herod
the Great. Herod is one of ancient history's extraordinary figures. Ten times
married, a serious drinker and a half-Jew who was half-trusted by his subjects,
he played the superpower politics of his day consummately. In 63 B.C., Rome
became Judea's ruler, succeeding Babylonia, Persia, Greece and the Jews themselves.
Herod, who hailed from the neighboring province of Idumea (which included part
of today's West Bank), won and maintained his position as the empire's proxy
King of the Jews by allying himself successively with Julius Caesar, Mark Antony
and Emperor Augustus, a dance involving very tricky pirouettes.
Herod killed thousands of Jerusalemites in the streets while
taking power. But he was also a local who understood Judea's needs and its hard-won
privilege of being governed under Jewish law. A builder king, he ordered up
huge forts, palaces and indeed whole cities throughout Judea, and he created
an artificial harbor at Caesarea Maritima that lasted 600 years.
But it was in Jerusalem, says Meyers, that Herod "undertook to
make one of the major wonders of the ancient world." He rebuilt the existing
meandering streets on a paved grid and created a moat-ringed palace featuringin
a moisture-starved regionpicturesque water gardens. He added an amphitheater
and a hippodrome. But the jewel in the crown, the spiritual, economic and social
center of Judea and an icon to Jews throughout the region, was the Temple. It
was his bid to rival Solomon, biblical builder of the Jews' first great house
of worship, which had been razed by the Babylonians some 570 years earlier.
Physical remains of Herod's masterpiece are scarce. But they
tend to support descriptions in the four surviving written sources from approximately
the same period: the Gospels and the biblical book of Acts; the part of the
Jewish Talmud called the Mishnah; and the histories of Flavius Josephus, a Jewish
priest and commander turned Roman military aide who lived in the years A.D.
30 to A.D. 100. For instance, a stone found later near the Temple's likely site
was inscribed with the words to the place of trumpeting, which corroborate
Josephus' description of the signal for the beginning of the Sabbath.
Tradition forbade the Temple's enlargement beyond Solomon's original
dimensions. So Herod expressed his egomania by adding a 35-acre platform "the
greatest ever heard of," writes Josephuson which the Temple could sit. The
Western Wall where Jews pray today is a small slice of the platform's 16-ft.-thick
western side. Some of the stones are 30 ft. long and weigh up to 50 tons. ("Look,
Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!" exclaims a disciple in
the Gospel of Mark.) As Herod built out over the adjacent valleys, the outline
of the mountain on which the compound sat gradually disappeared. The great stone
featured in the Dome of the Rock, the Muslim shrine that now occupies Herod's
immense pedestal, may be the mountain's peak.
At the time, the platform (Jews call it the Temple Mount) had
up to seven entrances. Most experts believe the remains of an expansive, carved-stone
stairway on the south side of the mount, perpendicular to the Roman street,
were once the main entry for common pilgrims. At the foot of the stairs are
the ruins of a series of baths, for ritual purification, and small shops, some
of which still have hitches for animals.
Temple worship revolved around sacrifice: a lamb for Passover,
a bull for Yom Kippur, two doves"the poor woman's sacrifice"to celebrate
a child's birth. Before buying an animal, visitors changed their Roman denarii
(the dollar of the day) for shekels, or Temple coins, that had no portraits
on them and so did not violate the Jewish prohibition of graven images. Herod
appears to have allowed the money changers onto the Temple platform, which may
have spurred Jesus' scourging of them in "my father's house." Joshua Schwartz,
a professor of historical geography at Israel's Bar Ilan University, styles
the stairway as a Judean version of London's Hyde Park Corner. There would be
"beggars and upper-class Jews and Gentiles from all over," he says. "Scholars
would be teaching, and would-be prophets would be preaching. The steps were
the experience in Jerusalem."
After the Temple itself, perhaps. Scholars have hypothesized
that the southern steps led pilgrims into a tunnel under an administrative building
and out again amid a series of courtyards. The outermost was open to curious
Gentiles. The remaining enclosures were for Jews only, as indicated by another
of the Temple's remaining relicsa sign, in Greek, warning that any non-Jew
passing farther "is answerable himself for his ensuing death."
Next came the Court of Women, followed by the Court of Israelites,
the Court of the Priests and, above all, the massive sacrificial altar. The
Temple's innermost shrine, featuring the holy room that the Bible said had been
occupied by the Ark of the Covenant in Solomon's Temple, loomed 80 ft. high,
a glistening tower.
The scene must have been spectacular. Whether that spectacle
is understood as deeply felt or empty depends on later interpretation. "The
place was as vast as a small city. There were literally thousands of priests,
attendants, temple soldiers and minions," writes historian Paul Johnson. "Dignity
was quite lost amid the smoke of the pyres, the bellows of terrified beasts,
the sluices of blood, the abattoir stench, the unconcealed and unconcealable
machinery of tribal religion inflated by modern wealth to an industrial scale."
Bruce Chilton, a religion professor at Bard College whose book
"Rabbi Jesus" was published in October, says recent scholarship finds
a great deal more meaning and joy in the proceedings. Pilgrimages were festive
occasions, with families or friends traveling together and camping overnight
in the hills around the city and singing cheerful sacred songs outside the Temple.
Although parts of the sacrifice would be immolated for the Lord or consumed
by the priests, others would be cooked and shared by the pilgrims, who ate little
meat the rest of the year. "Not only would they offer this very scarce protein
to the deity," says Chilton, "but actually share a meal of meat with the Lord
of Israel. The sense was one of wealth and celebration."
Hollow or hallowed, the Temple was a formidable economic engine.
Although only 2 million of the ancient world's 5 million Jews lived in the region,
all were expected to pay a yearly half-shekel Temple tax. Historians have not
definitively established a shekel's worth, but certainly the total earnings
were great. At the three pilgrimage holidays, the economy shifted into overdrive.
Jewish law required that sacrificial animals and grain offerings be "unblemished."
Rather than risk spoilage along the way, most pilgrims raised the sacrificial
goods at home, sold them and used the proceeds to buy fresh items in the holy
city, supporting farmers for miles around.
An excavation under what is now the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's
Old City reveals the way the town's élite lived. Two-story houses, built around
stone-paved inner courts, had separate baths for regular and ritual cleansing.
Floors boasted fine mosaics; on the walls were frescoes or trompe l'oeil stucco
that mimicked masonry. Archaeologists have uncovered finely crafted glass goblets
and delicate perfume flasks. Experts are divided as to whether such prosperity
was shared. Says Reich: "There weren't any real poor people in Jerusalem then.
There were the rich and the less rich." Argues Fabian Udoh, professor of liberal
studies at Notre Dame University: "The high priests, the aristocrats and the
administrators would have been very, very rich, but there were also people who
were very, very poor." The obvious economic tension in Jesus' preaching may
reflect his experience either in Jerusalem or in Galilee.
Those in the middle, the craftsmen (like Jesus) and small businessmen
and jewelers and tax collectors, would have got their education at home and
at their local synagogue. (The wealthy would have hired tutors for their children,
in the Greek style.) Women married in their early teens and would generally
undergo seven or eight pregnancies in hopes of having three or four surviving
children. They often managed the household and exerted considerable influence
in the synagogue. The family would have observed religious laws regarding food
and ritual purity, although many aspects of Jewish law were not formalized until
later.
Jerusalem was a monoculture, comparable to Washington or Redmond,
Wash. (It remains so today, although it is now tourism rather than religion
that is the city's dominant business.) Unlike many company towns, however, the
city in Jesus' time had a cosmopolitan feel. Its material needs drew caravans
from Samaria, Syria, Egypt, Nabatea, Arabia and Persia. Two-thirds of its population
were Jews (roughly the same percentage as today), practicing a religion that
counted millions of adherents in the Roman Empire and a large group of "God
fearers," Gentiles who observed some key precepts without full conversion. At
the same time, the city was in its 15th generation of Greco-Roman influence
(since the conquests of Alexander the Great in 332 B.C.). Parents gave their
children Greek names; intellectuals were conversant in classical philosophy.
Greek had become along with Hebrew and Aramaic one of the area's main languages,
and one of the most commonly used versions of the Torah was in Greek. (Jesus
presumably spoke all three languages.) The interaction of Jewish and classical
thought would lend the Christian Bible much of its strength.
This Greco-Roman "modernism" was conflicted, however. A building
full of soldiers loomed over the Temple courtyards like a watchtower over a
prison. As Jesus and the other pilgrims performed the most sacred rites of their
faith, they would never be beyond surveillance. After Herod's initial rise,
the Roman yoke was relatively light, consisting mostly of tribute. But the Jews
had been independent for a century before the imperial conquest, and many hoped
to return to that state. In recognition of this, above the Temple's northwestern
corner stood the city's great Roman garrison, the Antonia, named after Herod's
patron Mark Antony and housing between 2,000 and 3,000 soldiers.
Their presence in the city's very soul posed a painful conundrum.
Beneath its prosperous surface, says Neil Asher Silberman, director of the Ename
Center for Public Archaeology in Brussels, Jerusalem was actually "extremely
turbulent." To some, "the beautiful Temple of Herod was a horrible betrayal
of Israelite tradition. Herod obliterated the original Temple and replaced it
with a Roman one." Even the most prosperous citizens must have had some major
identity issues.
This led, Silberman suggests, to "movements of desperation where
people harked back to a purity of faith and looked for signs of messianic redemption."
The city's dominant religious authorities, skewered in the Gospels, were the
Sadducees, who made up most of the Temple élite, and the Pharisees, respected
for their ongoing explorations of the correct interpretation of religious law.
But the city also played host to groups like the Zealots, a militant nationalist
group, and the Essenes. The Essenes detested the Temple priests, lived in monastic
communities and may have been authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the treasure
trove of texts uncovered in the Judean desert in 1947. Josephus assigns the
Essenes a membership of 4,000, only 2,000 fewer than his count of Pharisees.
And then there were radical free-lancers like Jesus. Up until
20 years ago, it was left to Jewish analysts to present Jesus' various messagesof
inner purity over legal adherence; of baptism; of messianism; of the expectation
of God's kingdom on earthas growing out of various 1st century Jewish beliefs.
But lately, says Chilton, more Christian scholars have scuttled the idea that
Jesus' Judaism was mere "ethnic happenstance." He argues, "If you were to take
the elements of Jesus' position in isolation, each would [recall] the practice
of a certain type of Judaism. He is distinctive in the way in which he brings
the elements together and is able to mediate the spirit of God to his followers
so that they can be part of the revelation."
In any case, Jesus' radical new synthesisand his dramatic preaching
of itwas dangerous, especially in an atmosphere that Schwartz says had turned
into "a tinderbox." Herod had managed to keep a lid on anti-Roman sentiment
for most of his reign. But starting with his fatal illness in 4 B.C. and continuing
over the careers of several less effective successors, a series of bloodily
suppressed revolts erupted.
In 4 B.C., angry Jews, protesting the execution of students who
had tried to remove a Roman eagle from the Temple decorations, threw stones
down on their occupiers from the mount's porches and set off a citywide riot;
eventually 2,000 rebels were crucified. In A.D. 26, the Roman governor provocatively
ordered his troops to raise flags with Caesar's face within a few hundred feet
of the central shrine. A mob marched to his house in Caesarea. His soldiers
drew their swords. The Jews, in an extraordinary act of passive resistance,
laid bare their necks and said they would rather die than see their religious
laws flouted. The governor, a normally hot-tempered newcomer named Pontius Pilate,
recalled the flags.
The situations now and then are not analogous. Israel's current
Jewish government, unlike the Roman Empire, is not alien to Jerusalem. The Palestinians
are not as defenseless as the ancient Jews. And Israeli opposition leader (now
Prime Minister) Ariel Sharon's unwelcome stroll last September around the two
Islamic shrines that now occupy the Temple platforma provocation that may have
sparked the Holy Land's current strife when Muslims responded by throwing rocks
down on Jews at prayer belowhas no precise 1st century cognate. Still, the
intertwined dynamic of military occupation and religious clash is shockingly
familiar.
Two thousand years ago, the man in the middle of this potentially
deadly tug-of-war was the high priest. The position, ritually paramount at the
Temple, had been politically hobbled by Herod. Nonetheless, as head of the Sanhedrin,
a Jewish religious and civic body, and a key participant at city council meetings,
the officeholder still had great power and responsibility.
The actions of Caiaphas, high priest from A.D. 18 to A.D. 36,
are traditionally attributed to rage over Jesus' challenges to his class's power
and his personal standing. But historians have begun to argue for a more nuanced
appreciation. Caiaphas knew better than anyone that the doomed Jewish revolts
inevitably started at the Temple, frequently during Passover, as keyed-up pilgrims
celebrated Israel's liberation from an earlier oppressor. He knew Pilate as
a ruler, says Richard Horsley of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, who
"shot first and asked questions later." Personal pride notwithstanding, the
high priest had reason to act against a Jew who had disrupted the Temple and
may have been plotting another grand entrance on the second day of the feast.
To Caiaphas, says Lee Levine, professor of Jewish history at Jerusalem's Hebrew
University, "Jesus and others like him were just a bad idea. Bad for the Temple,
bad for the Romans and bad for the Jews."
Rome reserved crucifixion primarily for capital crimes and discontinued
the practice in the 4th century. Historians learned considerably more about
its specifics in 1968, when the remains of a man crucified in his mid 30s were
discovered north of Jerusalem with a 7-in. iron nail still embedded in the heel.
The state of the bones indicated that the condemned man's arms were outstretched
and that his feet had been placed sideways, with the nail driven first through
a small block of wood and then through both heels into the cross. Later the
wood block would prevent the feet from coming free as the wound ripped and enlarged.
Contrary to most representations, the knees were bent.
The path of the Via Dolorosa, the Stations of the Cross, through
the Old City of Jerusalem is almost certainly inaccurate. It follows a 14th
century grid of the city rather than a 1st century plan, and probably reflects
the desire of 14th century merchants along the way to get pilgrims' business.
But the hill of Golgotha (a.k.a. Calvary) and Jesus' burial cave, both located
by tradition in Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulcher, are a different matter.
In Jesus' day executions and burials took place outside the city.
Today the church is tucked within the Old City's Christian Quarter, but at the
time, the area would have been safely outside town walls. The niche-style grave
is consistent with 1st century custom. Written attestations to its authenticityand
that of the Calvary rock a few yards awaydate back more than 1,800 years. Tellingly,
early rulers who might have been tempted to "adjust" the site's location did
not do so. Says Dan Bahat, for many years Jerusalem's district archaeologist:
"There's nothing to prove that this is not the site of the Crucifixion." If
this sounds weak to a believer, coming from an archaeologist, it carries significant
weight.
When the unnamed disciple remarked on the size of the Temple
stones, Jesus replied that "not one stone will be left upon another; all will
be thrown down." He was right. After one last rebellion, in A.D. 135, the Romans
leveled Jerusalem, leaving only the bald platform behind. The city, of course,
rose again and fell again, was conquered and reconquered . . .
Yousef Abu Ghannam's family holds the key (and the souvenir concession)
for the Mosque of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives; it was a Christian shrine
until Saladin took Jerusalem back from the Crusaders. Abu Ghannam reports sadly
that business is down. "We used to get 700 to 800 people a day," he says. "Now
we're lucky to get 150. People are afraid." The few visitors who brave Jerusalem
today encounter a metropolis again edgy and turbulent. In the sanctuary of the
city's churches, mosques and synagogues, pilgrims can find momentary tranquillity.
But the streets bear new pocks from the bullets that flew here late last year.
Herod's ancient platform had been closed since last fall to all but Islamic
worshippers to avoid further confrontation: Sharon's directive last week to
reopen it to non-Muslims may make it a flashpoint again. Travel in the area
is the riskiest in a decade, and a U.S. State Department warning against it
remains in effect.
At the Ascension Mosque there is at least one optimist, albeit
with a long view. The Rev. Frank Booke of Anniston, Ala., has led his tour group
to the small off-white domed tower. On its floor is an indentation that pilgrims
have thought for centuries is the imprint made by Jesus' right foot as he ascended
to heaven.
Booke is an ebullient Pentecostal Christian in an orange Stetson.
Consistent with his faith, he takes solace in Christ's expected return to earth
and his re-establishment of God's kingdom here, regardless of humankind's errors.
Like many, Booke believes his Saviour will arrive at precisely the point from
which he left. "This is the place," he says. His flock responds with an explosive
"Hallelujah!" and a rendition of The Old Rugged Cross.
But Booke will not simply leave it at that. His joy over the
eschatological future does not render him blind to the scandalous present. "We
love the Jewish people," he says, then glances at the Muslim gatekeepers and
adds, "These are all God's people. When everybody else is afraid, we come to
support this land. To support the souvenir sellers. We pray for this land. We
pray for the peace of Jerusalem."
With reporting by Andrea Dorfman and Jonathan Calt Harris/New
York and Said Ghazali, Eric Silver and Haim Watzman/Jerusalem
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