Jerusalem in time & place Mark Coleridge

Transcript

In these podcasts, we are seeking to explore Jerusalem in its many aspects. Jerusalem in time and place. And we’ve already traced a journey from the conquest of Jerusalem by King David to establish a new capital, right down through history until the time of the New Testament. Now we’ve only been touching on the mountaintops. In fact, the history of Jerusalem, as you might have begun to sense, is extraordinarily complex. And to go into every detail, we’d be doing podcasts forever. And that’s not our task. So, we are touching upon mountaintops. But even that, I think, is worthwhile.

So last time we came to the point of the New Testament, the time of Jesus, and we saw that King Herod really to establish his credibility, state his credentials among a people who were at least sceptical in his regard, built this magnificent new temple. And that was the temple that Jesus knew and in which he spent considerable time. We know that for certain. There was much about Jesus that we do not know, but we know that when he came to Jerusalem from the north, from Galilee, which was his home turf. When he came to Jerusalem, often on pilgrimage, he went to the temple. As any pious Jew would have done.

He didn’t stay in the city of Jerusalem, we know that too, that he stayed up on the Mount of Olives and around the ridge a bit to the town of Bethany, where his friends Martha, Mary, and Lazarus lived. He stayed with them. And that’s why in the Gospels, you’ll find Jesus coming down the Mount of Olives into Jerusalem and into the temple. Or leaving Jerusalem and the temple, therefore, and going down into the Kidron Valley and up the Mount of Olives, and around the ridge to Bethany, where he would have stayed the night. We know that for certain.

Now, I mentioned pilgrimage with regard to the temple. Way back in the time of the prophet Jeremiah in the six hundreds. In other words, before the exile. There was that great reform movement that we’ve seen in an earlier podcast that we often called the Deuteronomic Reform. Deuteronomic just means the second law, a kind of new beginning. When Jerusalem and the Jewish state knew that they were in big trouble with the emergence of Babylonian power in the region. And what the prophets were saying, prophets like Jeremiah was, you’re doomed unless you turn to the law with a new kind of commitment. It will be your disobedience of God’s law that will be your downfall. Not so much the Babylonian army, but your disobedience of the divinely given law, which is a royal road of liberation. And you will find the exact opposite of liberation if you turn away from that God given royal road to freedom.

Now, one of the things in that time of reform that happened was they closed all the other shrines except the temple in Jerusalem. So, the only place where you could worship the living God was where it was believed, God had himself made a home in Jerusalem. So, all the other shrines, were closed. And from that moment on, you had to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. And that’s why pilgrimage to Jerusalem became such a fundamental element of Judaism at this time and beyond of course.

It would be a bit like in a diocese like the Archdiocese of Brisbane if I decided, and I won’t, but if I did decide to close all the parish churches and all the chapels and say, there’s only one place where you can come to Mass, and that’s the Cathedral. Now you can imagine the effect that that would have if I tried it. But it was similar in the sixth century before Christ. When this decree went forth from Jerusalem, that Jerusalem and the temple were the only place that you could worship the living God.

And that was the situation that applied in the time of Jesus. So, for instance, when his parents bring him to Jerusalem, as we’re told in the gospel on pilgrimage, when he’s about twelve. Now, twelve in those days was older than it is now. They would have been doing what, again, any pious Jew would have done, making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in order to sacrifice, according to the law, sacrifice to the one true God.

So right from his childhood, right through his life, Jesus is in and out of the temple. Not just on pilgrimage, because one of the things that he certainly did in the temple was to teach in the temple. And the temple wasn’t just a place of worship, it was a place of meeting, it was a place of teaching, all kinds of things went on in the temple complex, which was enormous by the way.

So, he certainly taught in the temple and became a controversial figure. Particularly when he starts cleansing the temple. The story where he drives all the merchants, the money makers out of the temple. Mind you, he only uses, a whip of cord, you know, string, some rope, so it’s not particularly violent. But again, this only stirs greater controversy. Tell us by what authority you do this, is what the religious leaders put to Jesus. And it’s a fair question.

And in his reply, he talks about not so much the building of the temple, because one of the things that emerges in his preaching is the prophecy of the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. This was an extraordinary, and an extraordinarily subversive thing to say. That this temple, which took forty-six years to build, will be destroyed. Jesus says, not one stone will be left on another. And in fact, in Jerusalem now the only stones left are what we call the Western Wall. That was the retaining wall of Herod’s Temple.

And Jewish belief is, and this is why they worship there now, that if there is some spark of the divine glory left, it’s left somehow in those stones. The glory left the temple, but there might be some tiny trace of the divine glory attaching to those great stones that that compose the Western Wall.

So, Jesus says, destroy this temple. And he has prophesied its destruction. Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. Well, of course, you can imagine the reaction. It’s taken us nearly fifty years to build this temple, and you’re saying you’re going to destroy it and then build it up again in three days? But this is the Gospel of John, and the evangelist says, but he was talking about the temple that was his Body. So, the body of Jesus becomes the new temple. Once the old temple, the temple of Herod is destroyed, the temple becomes the body of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen.

This is fundamental to John’s Gospel, but it is fundamental to the kind of shift that marks Christianity from the New Testament onwards. In other words, the temple, the building in Jerusalem, in all its magnificence was really only foreshadowing, a kind of fulfillment that would come in the body of Christ. So, where is the glory of God to be found now? In the body of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. This is an incredible claim. To think that a body of someone executed as a criminal, could be the epicentre of the divine glory is turning the world on its head. But that’s the kind of claim that Christianity makes.

And again, in John’s Gospel, we’re told that when Jesus dies, one of the soldiers came to deliver the coup de grâce to make sure he was dead. Or to break his legs if he wasn’t dead, to make sure that he died quickly. But he saw that he was dead, and we’re told he pierced his side with a lance and immediately there flowed forth blood and water.

Now, this is all the language of symbol. It’s symbolic language that looks back to a great passage in the prophet Ezekiel, where the prophet is taken to Jerusalem, and he stands on the eastern side of the temple, and he sees coming from the side of the temple, a tiny little trickle. And the trickle becomes a little river. And that river becomes a great torrent flowing down from the side of the temple, down through the desert and hitting the Dead Sea. And everywhere it goes, it turns the desert to a garden. And even the Dead Sea teems with life. In other words, this is the stream coming from the side of the temple that turns death to life.

Now on Calvary, not the Temple Mount, but Calvary, the dark mountain. What we find in John’s Gospel is from the side of the new temple, the body of the dead Christ, who could believe that? There comes another river, just as in the prophet Ezekiel. From the side of Christ there comes a river, not just of water, but of blood and water now, his lifeblood. And that river from his side flows out into the deserts of the cosmos and turns all death to life. That’s the way the symbolism works.

So that again, the passage, the great passage in Ezekiel, chapter 47, foreshadows the great passage of John chapter 19. So that transfer of meaning from the temple building to the body of Christ. The temple building which can be destroyed and was destroyed, again. The body of Christ, which can never be destroyed, this is the temple that no one can now destroy. The temple that is forever. Now Jesus foretells the destruction of the temple. Keeping in mind, just by the way, that the Gospels, well certainly three of the four canonical gospels Matthew, Luke, and John, are written after the destruction of the temple in 70 AD. Mark is almost certainly written before. But by that stage the end was foreseeable.

Now, what happened was this. The first century of the Common Era was a profoundly unsettled time in this part of the Roman Empire, for all kinds of reasons. Not only the Roman occupation, but there had been famines, and there was a sense that the end had to be near, because things had reached such a pitch of horror that they could hardly get worse. The sense that God must intervene for the sake of His people. That the kingdom of God must come. Which meant the destruction of the Roman kingdom, for some.

Now, there were those who said that the only way to react to this crisis situation that had emerged was to take up arms against the occupying force, the Romans. And by violent struggle to create a new order. And this again is a theme through history, is it not?

So, in 66 AD, 66 of the first century of the Common Era. The Jewish War breaks out. And it’s a revolt against Roman power. In what was a very unstable part of the empire, and Rome was very sensitive to trouble in this part of the empire. So, 66 breaks out, the Jewish War breaks out.

Now, Rome expected to be able to crush the Jewish War very quickly. And they don’t. The reason for that was no one could beat Rome at a pitched battle. But this wasn’t a pitched battle, because the Jewish War was a war in which the rebels fought a guerilla war. Not unlike the kind of tactics used by the Viet Cong in Vietnam against the Americans who had massive military power. But they weren’t used to fighting guerrilla warfare.

Now, similarly with Rome. It took them, eventually they had to send in their crack legion, the 10th Legion, to try and bring the thing to an end because it became acutely embarrassing for the Empire, that it had taken them years to seize Jerusalem. Which doesn’t happen until 70.

So, it’s taken them four years to seize Jerusalem. And once they do, the revenge they take is in proportion to the embarrassment they had suffered. They flattened the city, they destroy the temple, put it to the torch. And this magnificent temple that had stood for only a few years, really, is down in the dust, never to rise again. The only thing left, as I have said, is the retaining wall with those magnificent limestone blocks that you see in Jerusalem still today.

So that’s the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in 70 AD which is a fundamentally important moment in the life not only of Judaism, because all the leadership pretty well was wiped out, but also in Christianity, because up until then, the Mother Church unquestionably had been the Church in Jerusalem. It was there that you went for a decisive judgment in matters of controversy. And again, you see this in the New Testament.

And what happened at that point was that the centre of gravity of Christianity moved across the Mediterranean, moved from Jerusalem to Rome. And that’s when eventually the bishop of Rome acquires an unusual kind of authority in the Church, because the centre of gravity has moved across the Mediterranean after the destruction of Jerusalem from Jerusalem to Rome. So, this had fateful consequences. And really, it’s the catastrophe of 70 that gives us the New Testament as we now have it. Just as the catastrophe of the Babylonian exile gave us more or less the Old Testament as we as we now have it. So, in that sense, again, the Bible is the product of the two catastrophes, we could say.

Beyond the destruction of 70, and by the way, they didn’t finally conclude the Jewish War until something like 73. Because the last to hold out against the Roman power were the refugees who took shelter in the fortress of Masada, the desert fortress of King Herod. So, it was the fall of Masada in 73 that finally brought the Jewish War to an end. Now, at that point, the Romans took this part of the empire by the scruff of the neck. And you would have thought that that was the end of any attempt to fight against the Roman domination. But it wasn’t.

Because in 135, so we’re looking, you know, sixty-five years later. You have yet another rebellion. And this time it’s called the Bar Kokhba rebellion. And, Bar Kokhba just means the son of the star, who seems to have been the leader of the rebellion. And it again, it wasn’t as embarrassing to the Romans as had been the Jewish War. But it was embarrassing enough so that finally, when they crushed the rebellion, what Rome decided to do was to build over the ruins of Jerusalem, to build a Roman city, to cancel the name of Jerusalem forever, they thought. And they called it Aelia Capitolina, a Latin, a Roman name. And so that’s what you had from 135 onwards. You had this Roman city, Aelia Capitolina, from which Jews were forbidden. They couldn’t live there. They were expelled from the city.

Now, beyond that, you have eventually the arrival of the imperium, in other words, the emperor. Constantine appears on the scene in the early three hundreds. And this is again a decisive turning point in the history of Jerusalem. Because Constantine, under the influence in part of his pious mother, who’s known as Saint Helena. He becomes Christian. It’s again quite a complex story. He wasn’t baptised until his deathbed, but he decides that Christianity is to be the religion of the empire.

And he builds in Jerusalem, again under the influence of his mother and others, but certainly his mother. He builds magnificent Christian churches, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of the Nativity and so on. Various magnificent churches, fragments of which still remain. But these in time were destroyed, again keeping in mind Jerusalem seventeen times destroyed, eighteen times rebuilt.

So, the arrival of Constantine does mark a turning point in the history of Jerusalem and Byzantine power. In other words, the Roman power which now had its capital in Constantinople. The capital under Constantine, had moved from Rome to Constantinople. So, it was Rome based in Constantinople, that now controlled not only Jerusalem, but the region. And it’s referred to as Byzantine power because the original name of the town, Constantine, turned into Constantinople, named after himself was, Byzantium. So, the power that dominates in Jerusalem up until, the Islamic invasions or the Arab conquest that comes in about the 630’s.

So, you have the Byzantines, the Romans, up until the seventh century. And then the Arab presence, which is Islamic, dominates Jerusalem until the Crusades, until 1099, when the First Crusade, astonishingly in some ways, succeeds in taking Jerusalem. So that once again Jerusalem is made a Christian city. And the Arab conquest of the seventh century had destroyed much of what Constantine had built. So, on the ruins of Constantine’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the crusaders build another church of the Holy Sepulchre, not as big and not as magnificent. But that’s the Basilica that you see in Jerusalem when you go now. And it has all the shapes of crusader architecture. It’s medieval essentially, in its forms.

So, the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, as it was called, lasts from 1099 until the destruction, well the victory of the Arab armies, the Islamic armies over the Crusaders in the twelfth century. And something like 1187.

So that’s the end of the Christian domination of the city. Once Saladin and his troops win the battle and take the city, therefore. So that through a period of centuries you had Islamic rulers in the city, really until 1918. Because you had a people known as the Mamluks, who were the dominant power in Jerusalem from about 1200 to 1500. And then after that, the Ottomans. A name which is more familiar to us, perhaps, and they retain control of Jerusalem and of the region until the end of the First World War.

And at that point you have the British then come in with the British Mandate in 1917. And that holds good, the British Mandate, until 1948. When you have the establishment of the State of Israel. The whole history of Zionism itself is a very fascinating story. But the roots of what happened in 1948, go back a very long way. Zionism, in other words, establishing, a Jewish state in the Middle East was not a new idea at all. But it was given a unique kind of impetus by the Holocaust. Because what became, what the Holocaust made abundantly clear was that Judaism, Jews had nowhere to go. Europe had made that abundantly clear through centuries. So that their only hope, in one sense, beyond the Holocaust, was to establish a Jewish state. And for many, obviously, the natural place for that to be was the so-called Holy Land in the Middle East.

So that was 1948. However, the Jewish state did not have control of Jerusalem until 1967. And it was the Israeli victory in 1967 which allowed, the state of Israel to take control of Jerusalem. So that for the first time for many, many, many centuries, you had Jerusalem in Jewish hands. And the State of Israel declared at the time that Jerusalem was the eternal and undivided capital of the Jewish state. And that, of course, drew lots of, a fire and still does. So that’s where we are more or less at the moment. Again, it’s a little more complex than that makes it sound, because the Jordan controls the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This, again, is a source of controversy.

But the state of Jordan, and not the state of Israel, controls the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Which remains essentially in Islamic hands, therefore. Because on the Temple Mount, you have not only, the Dome of the Rock, which was the first great Islamic building. Really built to contend with the great buildings of Christianity, and it is magnificent. And you also have the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which in fact goes back to, crusader times. But it became a mosque and is venerated by Islam, far and wide. Because Jerusalem is, Mecca, Medina and then Jerusalem. They’re the three holiest cities of Islam.

And that’s one of the reasons why the story and the status of Jerusalem is so complex, because it is regarded as the holy city, or certainly one of the holy cities of Judaism, obviously, but also of Christianity and also of Islam. And once you’re talking about holy ground, you are talking potential trouble.

That then, is a thumbnail sketch at best of an extraordinary story. And there are many wonderful books that tell the story in far greater detail than I have in these podcasts. So, if you wish to know more, and it’s certainly worth the effort. There is a book that I could recommend by, Simon Sebag Montefiore, who is a well-known writer. And it’s called Jerusalem: The Biography. Now, I’ll warn you, it’s a big fat book, but it is a great read.

Even when you know the history more or less as I do. He tells a great story, and it is an extraordinary story. And it’s not just about Judaism or Christianity or Islam. It really is a story about the human being. And I have said before, and I say again, that we are talking of a city that is holy, certainly, its holy ground. But there you encounter the best and the worst, of the human being. Which gives the place the most extraordinary human intensity. And makes it, and it did for me make it, one of the most exhausting, but exhilarating places, in the world in which to live.

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