Christian Pilgrims in Jerusalem during the Byzantine Period

CHRISTIAN PILGRIMS IN JERUSALEMDURING THE BYZANTINE PERIOD*

JOHN WILKINSON

Christians from abroad certainly visited Jerusalem before the Byzantine period, but we knowtoo little about their motives to speak of them as pilgrims. Thus before A.D. 130Justin Martyrwas shown the cave in Bethlehem where, he was told, Jesus had been born. A little laterMelito (who lived until about A.D. 190) came from Sardis to find out about the books of theBible in the place where the biblical events 'were proclaimed and done'. And Eusebius, thechurch historian who was Bishop of Caesarea in the early fourth century, tells us of two whocame to visit 'the holy places', the obscure visitor called Alexander, who came before A.D. 213,and the famous Origen, in about 230.1 Thus Christians before the fourth century alreadyregarded certain places with special interest because of their supposed association with the lifeand work of persons mentioned in their Scriptures. But we do not know how they gaveexpression to this special regard until Egeria wrote her Travels in the late years of the fourthcentury, and provided the earliest surviving details.

Nor, as we must still admit even after fifteen years of modern excavations in Jerusalem, dowe yet know a great deal about the Jerusalem (or rather the Aelia Capitolina) to which thepre-Byzantine Christians came. At that stage Christians lived there, but only with the openingof the Byzantine period did they begin to exercise any control over the city. The long-termresults are evident to us, not least from the Madaba Mosaic Map which was made in the lastyears of our period. But to understand the transformation brought about by the Christianauthorities and its religious implications, we must begin with a brief glance at the city as it wasin the decades before A.D. 70 and the destruction of the Second Temple.

Herod the Great, as we are beginning to learn from the archaeological discoveries ofProfessors Avigad and Mazar, was the first ruler who was determined that Jerusalem shouldcompete with other Hellenistic cities on equal terms. Indeed in the later part of his reign heseems to have obliterated most of the earlier city-plan by laying out a new street-system on agrid plan, and as the awe-inspiring focal point of his city he constructed the great plinth of theTemple. How, we may ask, did Herod view this great achievement, magnificent alike for itsengineering, decoration, and sheer size? Though not himself religious he was aware of itsimportance to his religious subjects and their hierarchy. But for him personally it offered twoadvantages. Firstly this large undertaking which, with the city of Caesarea, was the last build-ing enterprise of his life, would enhance more than ever his international reputation as afounder of great monuments, and in this sense the Temple was to be Herod's memorial.Secondly the Temple in Jerusalem was the last in a long series of city temples which Herod hadprovided. He had given Sebastia its temple of Augustus (its civic deity), and had erected othertemples to Augustus in Phoenicia at Berytus and Tyre. He renewed the Pythian temple for theRhodians.2 And it seems likely that he presented the Idumaeans with the two sanctuaries atMamre and Macpelah where. according to their own customs they could celebrate the cult ofthe prophet Abraham.

* The author is grateful to the editors of SeferTerushalaim II for permission to publish in English whatwas written for publication in Hebrew.

1 For reference see Eg. Tr., 10-12. [A list of abbrevia-tions is printed at the end of this article.]

2 See Josephus, War, 1.403, 422, 424.-

76 PALESTINE EXPLORATION Q,UARTERLY

Herod's policy for Jerusalem had the results illustrated by our first map, Fig. I. Eventhough we are not yet at a stage where the line of the walls in this period is certainly known(and the same is true of our subsequent maps) we can see that the Temple andits raised enclo-sure was unquestionably the most emphatic monument in the city. Its task, in terms of cityplanning was to state thatJerusa1em was aJewish city. Indeed this statement was almost wholly

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CHRISTIAN PILGRIMS IN JERUSALEM 77true for there are several occasions when Jews demonstrated against paganism in Jerusalemduring the Second Temple period, and the violence of these reactions suggests that no non-Jewish cult was allowed to display its presence in the city. All the buildings of the city thereforebelonged more or less explicitly to a Jewish religious polity. There were memorial tombs, likethat of John Hyrcanus, Alexander Jannaeus, or the Bene l:Iezir. Indeed there was the tomb ofKing David himself: at which there must surely have been a cult of some kind. There werewater-installations like the Pool of Siloam, which was used for rites of purification or like Beth-zatha (or Bethesda), which was the site of a healing cult which, though Jewish, hardly soundsorthodox, at least as it is described in John 5. 2-7. Last were the ubiquitous synagogues,amounting to a total number which varies in our tradition: three suggestions in our ancientsources are 480, 394, and 365. If we assume that the population of the city was about 50,000persons, and we work with the lowest suggestion about the number of synagogues we find thatthere was one synagogue for roughly twenty adult males, which seems possible. On our map,Fig. I, we have arbitrarily arranged 365 dots within the smaller of the two city areas proposed,and find that there would be approximately one synagogue every sixty-five metres, which againseems possible if we remember that most synagogues were single rooms in houses.

Jerusalem in the Second Temple period, largely designed and created by Herod the Greatand his family, was thus designed to proclaim to the world that it was the preserve of Judaism,and even sixty years after Titus had destroyed the Temple the Jewish character of the city wasstill apparent. The radical change came in A.D. 135, when Hadrian broke the connexionbetween the Jews and their metropolis. By effecting an exchange of population he rendered theJewish monuments and buildings of no importance to the new inhabitants of the city. Hencewe should see Hadrian's policy for the city as two-pronged. The irrelevance of Judaism toJerusalem was symbolized by the negative treatment of the Temple Mount, which he left inruins. And the incorporation of Aelia Capitolina into the Roman official system of belief wasproclaimed through the building of a new temple in another position.

The treatment of the Jewish Temple and its enclosure is described to us by four writers,two of whom (Origen and the Pilgrim of Bordeaux) actually saw Hadrian's arrangements. Ofthe other two Dio Cassius, a contemporary of Origen, never came to Jerusalem, and Jerome,though he lived nearby for thirty years, knew the Temple area only after Hadrian's dispositionhad been fundamentally changed by the Emperor Julian when he allowed the Jews to beginrebuilding the Temple. Dio's report is given us in a carefully designed sentence of which theessence is the parallel between the replacement of the city and the replacement of the Temple:

At Jerusalem Hadrian founded a city in· place of the one which had been razed to. theground, naming it Aelia Capitolina, and on the site of the Temple of God he raised a newtemple to Jupiter. (R. Hisl. 69.12). .

Nearly two centuries later Jerome too speaks of 'an idol of Jupiter' which had been in theTemple area,3 but it is probable that he was in this case echoing Dio.

In contrast with Dio and Jerome neither of the two eyewitnesses say anything aboutJupiter being commemorated in the Temple site, whether by a statue or a temple. Both speakinstead of two statues of emperors, the Bordeaux pilgrim (59 1.4) telling us that they were bothof Hadrian, and Origen mentioning one statue of Hadrian and another of Gaius,4 or, in anotherversion of the same passage, of Titus. Despite the fact that these two reports do not exactly

3 C.Esa. 2. 9; CSL, 73, 33.4 C.Matt. 24. 15 (fr. 469, iv), GCS (Origenes xu),

193 f. Jerome's commentary on the same verse derives

from and probably embroiders Origen. On the statue ofGaius (which was never erected) see Josephus Ant.18. 261-75, 300-1.

PALESTINE EXPLORATION Q,UARTERLY

agree, each provides independent first~hand evidence that there were two statues on the Templesite, one of which represented Hadrian. The disagreement is itself instructive because it showsthat both the writers had been on the spot, at least if we are right in thinking that the plinthof one of the statues has survived.5 This inscribed plinth displays the name TITO AEL.HADRIANO, which was taken by the Bordeaux pilgrim to be that of Hadrian. In factHadrian was not Titus but Publius Aelius Hadrianus, and the inscription continuesANTONINO AUG.PIO, which means that it was in fact for Hadrian's successor, AntoninusPius, who ruled from 138 to 161 C.E. Origen on the other hand, as revealed by the secondversion of what he said, seems to have read the word TITO from the inscription and carelesslyto have concluded that it referred to the Titus who had destroyed the Temple area.

Assuming therefore that Hadrian deliberately left the Temple area in ruins, with hisstatue (soon to be joined by that of Antoninus Pius) standing guard over the desolation, thefirst and negative prong of his policy for Jerusalem was sufficiently achieved. Every visitor wasto see for himself that the God of the Jews had not succeeded in saving his people or hisTemple. The second prong (as Dio is concerned to explain) was to institute a new city whichwould be designed as an expression of the victory and continuing power of the Roman empirein its most official form. Hadrian seems to have achieved this by adding wide columned streetsto the city,6 and by creating a new city centre as suggested in our map, Fig. 2, containing thetemple of Capitoline Jupiter. Dio was almost right in his phraseology. If he had said simplythat Hadrian had raised his new temple to Jupiter to serve as the religious focus of the city'instead of' rather than 'on the site of' the Jewish Temple he would have been, as far as we canjudge, entirely accurate.

The documents which describe the new city are scanty and hard to interpret. The chiefpassage provides an object lesson in the temptations to which the interpreter is prone, since itconsists in a series of words which are capable of several different translations: Hadrian,according to the Paschal Chronicle (P.G., 92, 61.3)

destroying the Temple of the Jews in Jerusalem founded the two demosia and the theatreand the tricamaron and the tetranymphon and the dodecapylon (formerly called the anabathmoi)and the quadra.

Apart from 'theatre' none of these words is likely to be understood without the aid of archae-ology on a scale not so far possible. We may guess that the demosia were fora, since it now seemslikely that there were two, one in the city centre and the other at the north-west corner of theTemple enclosure, and we may also guess that the tetranymphon may have been a four-sided pooldedicated to the nymphs, thus possibly being Siloam. But these are no more than guesses.

The important characteristic of Aelia, as far as we are concerned, is its thorough trans-formation into a city of the Roman religion. We have evidence that there was a new healingsanctuary at Bethzatha, possibly connected with Serapis. We know that there was a columninside the Damascus Gate which was probably at this stage surmounted by a statue of Hadrian.And the non-Jewish character of the city is all the more evident since it was possible for theTenth Legion to carve its symbol over the Jaffa Gate, even though that symbol happened to bea boar (Eusebius, Chron. year 2150, ed. A. Schoene, Vol. II, Berlin, 1866, 169).

The temple of the new city was dedicated not only to Jupiter but, as with other 'colonies'of the Roman empire to the Capitoline triad, comprising jupiter, juno, and Minerva. Nearby

5 GIL, III, Supp!. 6639 is its inscription. The stone is Haram esh Sharif.now incorporated upside down above the east corner of 6 See Levant, VII, I 18-36.the lintel of the Double Gate in the south wall of the

CHRISTIAN PILGRIMS IN JERUSALEM 79and perhaps, as we shall see, in a subsidiary position, there seems to have been a shrine ofVenus, but this does not, like the main temple, appear on the coinage of Aelia Capitolina.Indeed the very name of the city makes it clear that the Capitoline Temple was to be the mainone, and: its position in Jerusalem is very like the position of the main civic temple in Gerasa(the Artemis temple in J erash on the other side of the Jordan) .

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The two-pronged policy had an explicit message, negative for Judaism and positive forthe official imperial religion of Rome. But it had also a long-term political advantage, in thatthe decision not to build the main Roman temple on the site of the ruined Temple of the Jews'left options open. The Jews lived all over the Empire and their goodwill might one day be


valuable. There might therefore come a day when it would be useful to·Rome to allow them toreturn to Aelia Capitolina and rebuild their temple, and under Hadrian's arrangement suchpermission could be granted without destroying the temple of the Roman gods.

Like the Jews, but on their own far smaller scale, Christians in the time of Hadrian wereto be found in most provinces of the Empire. Unlike Judaism their religion was not licit, andthere were times when the imperial authorities decided to prosecute them. Usually, however,they were overlooked, and quietly grew in numbers and influence until by the middle of thethird century Christians represented a large and increasingly powerful society which encircledthe whole Mediterranean. As such they began to pose a threat to the unity of the Empire, andin A.D. 250 Emperor Decius opened a severe campaign against them, but since no further actionwas taken by his successors, Christians had become even stronger by A.D. 300. Thus it was thatDiocletian in A.D. 303 destroyed the church buildings of the Christians, so inaugurating eightyears of persecution which for Palestine were recorded by Eusebius. In his book The Martyrsof Palestine he gives an account of the people who were interrogated and (many of them)executed by Urbanus and Firmilianus, the governors in Caesarea. The work speaks of over ahundred who were condemned to hard labour in the copper mines at Phaeno (Punon in theWadi Araba) and sixty-nine who were killed during the eight years when the persecution wasat its height. These detailed accounts of martyrdom awakened in Christians a new pride in thecourage of their companions, and thus served in many ways to strengthen the Church. In anycase the official Roman religion was now nearing the end of a long period of decline, and incontrast the vitality of Christianity gave it an international appeal.

In A.D. 3 I 3 those who had encouraged persecution were dead and the Christians, insteadof being persecuted, were made the recipients of positive imperial favour. Their church build-ings were restored, and they found themselves in fact, if not at first in name, the officialreligion of the Empire. This change of status the Christians themselves could interpret only inthe language of victory: of A.D. 313, the year when the persecutors died, Eusebius wrote, 'AllGod's enemies are destroyed'7 and in 3I8, when he preached the sermon at the dedication ofthe new cathedral at Tyre, he spoke of Constantine's achievement as the victory of the 'GreatCaptain', thereby likening the Emperor to the angelic figure of Josh. 5. 14. In the new regimeit became hard, if not impossible, to know whether the victory was that of Constantine or thatof God, and especially so after A.D. 324, when Constantine officially assumed the title 'Victor' .This triumphalist language was understandable enough in the aftermath of persecution, and inthe heady days when Christians found themselves approaching supreme power in the Empire.But it was to become a burden in later times, and one which the Church has not yet shaken off.

In such a frame of mind it is hardly surprising tha~ Constantine and Eusebius, who in thismatter acted as his adviser, determined to continue (in a Christianized form) Hadrian's policyfor the city plan of Jerusalem. The first prong of the policy was to leave the Temple site as itwas, in ruins,8 now with the Christian commentary that its destruction was in accordance withJesus's prophecy· and was part of God's punishment of the Jews 'for their plots against theSaviour'.9 And the second was to build 'churches and buildings in honour of the supreme God',in Eusebius's words, 'as the trophies of victory'.10 The city was henceforward to express thevictory of Christianity over both paganism and Judaism as Hadrian's city had been designedto symbolize the victory of paganism over the faith of the Jews.

7 Ch. Hist. 10.1.7, ed. E. Schwartz; GCS (Eusebius II2), 858.

8 Cyril of Jerusalem, Cat. 10.1I, 15.I 5, P.G. 33.676 f.,88g.

9 Ch. Hist. I. 1.2, ed. Schwartz, 6.

10 Eusebius, In Praise of Constantine, 17.4, ed. I. A.Heikel, 254; GCS (Eusebius I), 254; Jerome picks upthe phrase fifty years later in Ep. 46.13.4, ed. I.Hilberg, CSEL, 54, 344. See especially his C. Soph.I. I 5, CSL, 76A, 678. .

CHRISTIAN PILGRIMS IN JERUSALEM 81

AN INTERNATIONAL ROLE FOR JERUSALEM

In the days of the Second Temple Jerusalem had had an international role as the metropolis ofall Jewish people in the world. Then Hadrian forbade Jews to come to it any more, and formost practical and official purposes Aelia Capitolina was of no interest to anyone except itsown pagan citizens. If Christians andJews thought otherwise their thoughts could be expressedonly in private. None the less there are signs that both remembered their holy places in the cityand began once again to visit them as soon as opportunity arose. We do not know when JewRbegan visiting the pierced stone in the Temple area, in A.D. 333 an annual practice,l1 but it maywell have been a permission granted before Constantine's accession. And there was a traditionrecorded for us by Epiphanius, the Palestinian who in A.D. 367 became bishop of Salamis inCyprus, that there had been seven synagogues which remained standing in the time ofHadrian 'in that portion of Sion which escaped destruction' and that 'one of them remaineduntil the time of ... the Emperor Constantine'.12 Their general position is shown on map 2,and they may have escaped destruction because they were to the south of and thus outside the'wall of Sion' as it is called by the Bordeaux pilgrim, and were therefore not counted as part ofthe city. It is also possible that in the case ofJerusalem, as with so many other ancient cities, theextent of destruction was not as great as later historians pictured it. In any case the synagogueswere no longer in use after A.D. 135 and the one which remained until the fourth century waspointed out not as a functioning place of worship but as an antiquity, during the period ofwhich we are told.

Of the Christian holy places in the time before Constantine we know little. We may guessthat the caves at Gethsemane and on the Mount of Olives were sufficiently unobtrusive to havebeen used for some modest cult, and Epiphanius in the passage quoted above mentions also, inthe same place as the synagogues 'a few houses and the church of God, which was small'. Thischurch sounds as if at least for a time it had been the only place where Christians met forprayer, but in the time of Constantine it too was probably in ruins.

The earliest surviving Christian church building in the world is a fair-sized house at DuraEuropos in Syria which has been adapted for Christian worship, and the early Christianpilgrims to Jerusalem often visited holy places which they were told were houses, such as the'House of Peter' at Capernaum, or the 'House of Cornelius' at Caesarea. Houses, like caves,were private and unobtrusive, and we should envisage the small church on Sion as one of thesehouse-churches. In this case it was believed to be the place in which Jesus's disciples had stayedafter he had risen from the dead (John 20. 19, 26), and where, in an upper room (Acts 1. 13)they had waited until on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2. I) they received the Holy Spirit. InChristian eyes this place was where the Church as they knew it had been born, and from themiddle of the fifth century the official Christian liturgy of Jerusalem has contained a prayermentioning 'the holy and glorious Sion, the mother of all the Churches'. The connexion withthe apostles was already emphasized before the days of Constantine by a special chair kept inthe church which, it was claimed, had been the throne of James the Lord's Brother, the firstBishop of Jerusalem.1s This small church was probably destroyed by Diocletian at thebeginning of his persecution, and we do not hear that it was rebuilt until Cyril ofJerusalemspeaks ofit forty-five years later,14 when it was known as 'the Upper Church of the Apostles'.

11 Bordeaux Pilgrim, 591.4; CSL, 175, 16, like Jerome,lococit., is describing the lamentations on Tesha ba'Av.

12 Weights and Meas., 14, ed. J. E. Dean (Chicago,1935 = Studies in Ancient OrientalCivilization, II), (54C),30•

13 See Acts 21. 18 and Gal I. 19; Eusebius, Ch. Hist.,7.19.1, ed. Schwartz, 672 f; and Eg. Tr., 183.14 Before 348 C.E. in Cyril, Cat., 16.4; P.G., 33.924; see

also Eusebius, Ch. Hist., 10.2-3, ed. Schwartz, 858-62.


Constantine's policy for Jerusalem and its area, in its positive aspect, was aimed atexpressing the Christian victory. But the fact that this policy came from the Roman emperorhimsel~ and was to signalize a victory which affected all Christians in his dominions, meantthat Jerusalem was once again to assume an international role, this time as a place of pilgrim-age for Christians throughout the world. It so happens that the first two pilgrims whose writingshave survived both came 'right from the other end of the earth' in the words of an easternbishop who welcomed one ofthem,l5 namely from Bordeaux and Spanish Galicia. The messagewhich Jerusalem, under these circumstances, was intended to convey could hardly be otherthan official.

We are told that the Emperor concentrated his efforts on erecting buildings over 'threeholy caves', the one which had formed Jesus' tomb at Golgotha, from which, as Christiansbelieved, he had risen again from the dead, the one of his 'first manifestation' or birth atBethlehem, and the one of his ascension into heaven, which was on the summit of the Mount ofOlives.16 This activity, like the policy for the city plan, has two aspects, a positive, which isrelatively easy to understand, and a negative which raises some difficult questions. We shalldeal with the positive aspect first.

The places of Jesus's birth, death-and-resurrection, and ascension-and-second-cominggave topographical expression to the core of the Christian faith, for when a Christian wasbaptized he was asked questions about these very beliefs, and had to give his assent before hewas admitted to baptism, and thereby to membership of the Church. These are the questionsas they appear in a third-century version, which is very like one of the Christian creeds incurrent use :17 '

Question Dost thou believe in Christ Jesus, the Son of God,(A) who was born of Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary,(B) who was crucified in the days of Pontius Pilate, and died, and rose the third

day living from the dead,(C) and ascended into the heavens, and sat down at the right hand of the Father,

and will come to judge the living and the dead?Answer I believe.

Bethlehem, then, is the place commemorating section (A), the tomb-site in Jerusalem (B), andthe Mount of Olives section (C) in accordance with Acts I. 12, which locates the Ascension onthe Mount of Olives. Positively therefore the sites indicate the opening, the climax, and thefinale of Jesus's revelation of God, and do so in a way which would be instantly recognizable toevery baptized Christian.

But all three sites had already been used for worship, and thus, in the two of them whichhad been pagan, part of Constantine's intention was negative. His new buildings in factsupplanted the sanctuaries which had occupied the sites in the previous period. So Jerome tellsus in his Letter 58 to Paulinus18 that the buildings at the tomb replaced 'a statue of Jupiter',bywhich he surely means the temple of the Capitoline Triad, and that the church at Bethlehemreplaced a sanctuary of Adonis or Thammuz. Probably Constantine's intention in buildingover the cave on the Mount of Olives was purely positive, as we shall suggest later on.

Bethlehem is perhaps the simplest case of the three: its cave had been known to Christianssince at least the time of Justin Martyr, and in all probability he had known it only in the pre-

15 Eg. Tr., 19.5, 115.16 Eusebius, In Praise of Constantine, 9:17, ed. I. A.

HeikeI, 221; Life of Constantine, 3.41, and 26, eols. 1101and 1085.

17 Given in the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus, 2 I. 15;tr. G. Dix in E. C. Whitaker, Documents of the BaptismalLiturgy (London, 1960), 5 f.

18 Letter 58.3, ed. I. Hilberg, CSEL, 54, 53I f.

CHRISTIAN PILGRIMS IN JERUSALEM 83Hadrianic period, since he had already left Samaria for good by about A.D. 130. Constantinetherefore built the Church at Bethlehem on a site which local Christians had believed to be theauthentic birthplace ofJesus in the earliest tradition we can recall. It is possible that in A.D. 135local pagans had taken the opportunity of Hadrian's severe anti-Jewish measures to set up asanctuary for Adonis in the very place which they knew to be revered by their rivals, the localChristians. In such a case the mere fact that Constantine's new church was built to supplant apagan sanctuary would not call in question the authenticity of the site in Christian tradition.

The case ofJerusalem and the site of the tomb is probably similar, though here we have todeal with a disagreement between our sources. Eusebius19 tells us that Constantine's newchurch replaced Hadrian's temple of Venus (or Aphrodite), whereas we can be fairly sure thatthe previous temple on the site was in fact the one shown on the early coinage of Aelia. Thistemple was undoubtedly dedicated to the Capitoline Triad, a group which did not includeVenus. It is therefore valuable to see that Jerome, who had studied Eusebius's writings withcare, contradicts him in the letter we have quoted, since he says that what had stood on the siteof the tomb was a statue of Jupiter, and then adds that a statue of Venus had stood on thenearby 'rock of the Cross'. Eusebius, as an eyewitness is a priori more likely to be right thanJerome, who lived two generations after Hadrian's arrangements had disappeared. But perhapsin this case Jerome -,"Tasmore accurate, especially since what he says seems to agree with theevidence of the coins.

Eusebius's account of the finding of the Tomb20 makes no sense unless we assume that therewas a Christian tradition about its location. Constantine, Eusebius says, 'realised that heought to display the ... place', and then tells us that 'Godless people', in this case Hadrian andhis pagan helpers, 'had gone to great pains to cover up this divine memorial of immortality sothat it should be forgotten'. He then describes how Constantine's workmen removed whatHadrian had erected and, 'as layer after layer of the subsoil came into view, the venerable andmost holy memorial of the Saviour's resurrection, beyond all our hopes, came into view'.Eusebius is saying first that Constantine knew where the tomb was likely to be found and setout to find it, secondly how it came to be hidden, and thirdly how his search and excavationwas successful. The only phrase which jars in this interpretation is 'beyond all our hopes'. Itcould of course mean that no one had ever expected to find the tomb, but this would make ithard to understand why Constantine dug at the spot, at least if Eusebius is right in reportinghis overall intention to 'display' it. Thus it is more consistent to interpret it as a phrasebrought in simply to enliven the narrative and in this sense it might be paraphrased 'justwhen we were least expecting it ... '

If Constantine expected to find the Tomb there, he had to do so by removing the pagantemple. How could he have known what was underneath it? Certainly not because any livingeye had seen it, because the temple had been built almost two centuries before. We can onlysuppose that the Christian community had preserved a tradition that that was the location ofthe tomb, and (what is extremely interesting) that it had therefore preserved the memoryfrom, at the latest, a time only about a century after the crucifixion and burial of Jesus. Acentury is not a very long period for a community to preserve accurately the memory of itsfounder's burial-place, and thus, if the rest of our argument is reasonable, there is a strongpossibility that the tomb rediscovered in the days of Constantine was authentic. Here as in thecase of Bethlehem, Constantine's negative intention to destroy the pagan sanctuary in no waylessens the force of our argument.

19 Life of Constantine, 3.26, col. 1085. 20 Life of Constantine, 3.25-28, cols. 1085-9.


The Mount of Olives presents us with a very different history, first and foremost becausewe know of no time at which its cave was used for pagan worship. Indeed we know it wasalready in use as a place of Christian prayer before the time of Constantine, for soon afterA.D. 314 Eusebius says:

Our Lord and Saviour ... was taken up from the Mount of Olives at the cave which isshown there. Indeed he prayed with his disciples on the summit of the Mount of Olivesand handed on to them the 'mysteries of perfection, and from there went up to heaven, asLuke teaches us in the Acts' of the Apostles, saying 'And when Jesus had said this, as theywere looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of sight. And while they weregazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes and said,"Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken upfrom you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven".'(Dem. Evang. 6.18.23, ed. 1. A. Heikel, GCS (Eus. VI), 278, citing Acts 1. 9-11.)

The first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles underlies almost everything Eusebius says here,though it does not locate any events in a cave. During the forty days between Jesus's resurrec-tion and ascension he appeared to the disciples and spoke to them of the kingdom of God(v. 3) - the writer does not say where - and then, on the Mount of Olives (v. 12) he blessesand commissions the disciples (v. 8) and is taken up (v. 9, cited by Eusebius above): twoheavenly messengers predict that he will return (v. I I above) and most Christian interpreters inJerusalem pictured him as coming back at the end of time to the very Mount of Olives fromwhich he made his departure.

When was all this first commemorated in the cave on the Mount? Our first witness is theviolently unorthodox author of the Acts of John, who was writing early in the third century A.D.He tells a story of John (the beloved disciple) during the crucifixion, who as the earthly Jesuswas dying at Golgotha 'fled to the Mount of Olives ... and my Lord stood in the middle of thecave and gave light to it'. This heavenly Jesus taught John the meaning of salvation and, 'whenhe had said these things to me ... he was taken Up'.21If this passage had not been written acentury before Eusebius we might have thought that it was drawing on the passage justreproduced, for it certainly contains elements which are present in the passage from Eusebiusand not in the Acts of the Apostles. Here then the Acts of John is probably reflecting (in a(}nostic way) a tradition of Christian belief about the cave on the Mount of Olives, which atthe time it was written was already accepted by the Jerusalem Church. The Gnostic authorthus takes this cave as the scene for his particular version of a story of teaching and ascension,because it is already associated with teaching and ascension in the orthodox Christian tradition.In this cave Constantine had no need to supplant the existing cult. Rather by his churchbuilding there he enhanced and confirmed an existing practice of the Christian communityin Jerusalem, and made it available to Christian visitors from Churches from every part ofthe world.

THE EMERGENCE OF PILGRIMAGE

As the news of Constantine's works in the holy places began to spread, the flow of pilgrimsincreased. The first of them whose writings have survived came from Bordeaux in A.D. 333with the express purpose of seeing the Holy City and, no doubt, of describing it for the benefitof his neighbours in Gaul. He reveals to us a stage in pilgrimage when there were as yet hardlyany Christian buildings, and mentions only two, Constantine's basilicas at Golgotha and on

21 Acts of John, 97, 102; in E. Hennecke, New Testament Apocrypha, Vol. 2, 232, 234.

CHRISTIAN PILGRIMS IN JERUSALEM 85the Mount of Olives (see map, Fig. 3). He was shown no church building on Mount Sion,which may imply that the old church there had not yet been rebuilt.

The pilgrim enters the city, surprisingly since he has come up from the Mediterraneancoast, by the east gate (see map 2), where he is shown two pools 'which Solomon made',22namely on his right Birket Hammam Sitti Miriam, and on his left Birket Isra'il. 'Further into'

Bordeaux Pilgrim

••Basilicaon Mountof Olives

N

E9500 metres

a

IS

Tombs\ of Isaiah\ and HezekiahIII

Pinnacle

iflpalm

"Sion ~.H.of:;Caiaphasch urcho n-J:.d,

• uuyrrl 5,,7 0 •• P I:lace,

I,I\

one synagogue?

Fig. 3. Jerusalem in A.D. 333, according to the Bordeaux pilgrim

the city he seesthe 'twin poolswith fiveporches which are called Bethsaida' (589.8), the nameBethsaida being a common variant reading in John 5.2 for the name used byJosephus for thisquarter. 'Bezetha'.23Both versions possibly reflect an original 'Bethzatha'. 'For many years

22 589.7. References to this pilgrim are by pages andlines in the edition of 1735; the best text is that of Geyerand Cuntz in CSL, 175, where we are concerned with

pp. 14-18, and an English translation (now needingrevision) appears in Eg. Tr.J 155-60.

23 Josephus, War, 2.328.

7

86 PALESTINE EXPLORATION QUARTERLY

people have been cured there', he tells us, thus confirming what we have already learned fromthe archaeological evidence. The places of healing in the Holy Land remained in continuoususe, whatever the official religion of the time, but after the Christians came to power, theywere sometimes provided with a Christian explanation or name.24 In this case the pools hadbeen the scene ofa miracle recorded at length inJohn 5. Somewhere near there is a cave 'whereSolomon tortured demons' (589. I I), probably the location of the story we know from Gittin7.68a, about his tying a male and a female demon together to make them tell him how to findAshmoda.i, their prince. So far most of the features pointed out are not specifically Christian oreven religious. Rather they are recognizable places or installations some of which have (or areprovided with) religious associations: thus the Gospel itself tells us about the pools at Bethzatha.In this case therefore the pilgrim is being shown a feature of the city which has never beenforgotten, and formed the location of a biblical event. But the pools on either side of the streetare a different matter: as the pilgrim knew them they were probably Herodian, and thesuggestion that Solomon had built them was a story invented to explain how they could be sohuge. In this case the story has been invented to serve the place, and never had an independentexistence of its own. For the cave we have yet a third type of association between what is toldthe pilgrim and what he is shown. This cave is chosen as a suitable location for an existingstory which (probably) named no definite place.

Next the pilgrim is taken into the ruined enclosure of the Temple, and shown first of alltwo features of special interest to Christians. One is the south-east corner of the Temple, whichwas at this period identified as the 'pinnacle of the Temple' ,at which Jesus was tempted by thedevil (589.11 and Matt. 4. 5-7. This identification was very natural because (as can still beseen today), the great Herodian blocks of stone had at that point been left standing almost tothe complete height of the wall by Titus when he destroyed the Temple. The other feature wasone of the huge corner stones, some of them over thirty feet long, which was identified with the'stone which the builders rejected' (Ps. 118. 22-3), a verse used by Jesus in his teaching (5g0.2and Matt. 21. 42). Both features with their gospel connexions suggest that the guide was aChristian, and we shall find further suggestions of this below. Inside the south-east corner arethe vaults known today as 'Solomon's Stables': to the pilgrim they were pointed out as roomsof Solomon's palace, one of which was his writing-room. Solomon was also regarded as res-ponsible for the construction of the cisterns and pools nearby (5go.4-7).

On the actual site of the Temple the pilgrim saw marks which he was told were thebloodstains of Zechariah (son of Jehoiada,2 Chron. 24.21) whose murder was particularlymentioned by Jesus (591.1 and Matt. 23.35), then the 'two statues of Hadrian' and the'pierced stone' of which we have already spoken. Here there is another clue suggesting that theguide was a Christian, since when he has explained how the Jews come and anoint the piercedstone, he says 'then they go away' (591.6). Only one other feature was pointed out in theTemple area, the 'House of Hezekiah, King of Judah' (591.6).

The phrasing of the pilgrim now implies that he is leaving Jerusalem and going to Sion.This he presumably did by passing through the wall which (see maps, Figs. 2 and 3) ran acrossthe city on a line somewhere to the south of the Temple area. The precise line of this wall is notyet known, but we should not be far wrong to picture it close to the south wall of the presentOld City. Thus the pilgrim passes through it not far from the present Dung Gate. He tells usof the colonnaded Pool of Siloam, and adds that it stops flowing on the sabbath, a story whichexplains its irregular flow (592.2). In this passage he mentions a wall, presumably that of thecity, which passes between this pool and the 'outer' pool, which is now called Birket el Hamra.

24 e.g. the spring of Eg. Tr., P3, 192.

CHRISTIAN PILGRIMS IN JERUSALEM

Nothing here, or in any other Byzantine pilgrim document, is said of Gihon, or Bir Umm elDaraj, and it may well have been buried.

Either on the way up or more probably, in the light of later beliefs, at the top, the pilgrimis now shown where Caiaphas's house had been, and on this site a column to which Jesus hadbeen fastened when he was scourged (592.4 and Mark 15. 15). The column seems to have beenassociated with the scourging not because of its position, for Christ was scourged by Pilate afterhe had left Caiaphas: rather, as we may deduce from a later document, the column wasidentified by marks which suggested that a hand had clutched it, and sunk into the stone 'as ifit had been wax'.25 We are also told that it had been 'moved' to its position on Sion. Thepilgrim was shown perhaps two more sights within the 'wall of Sion' (Le. in the area south ofthe present south wall), the first being the site of the 'Palace of David' (592.6) and the otherperhaps being the last remaining synagogue of the seven which had oncd been there. Un-fortunately we cannot be sure since we do not know whether to translate the words una remansitas 'one synagogue remained' (not implying that it could still be seen) or 'one synagogue hasremained' (which would mean that our pilgrim saw it).

Now the pilgrim returns through the wall from Sion into Jerusalem. First he sees down inthe valley on the right some walls which he was (wrongly) told were those of Pilate's house or'Praetorium'. Fortunately a later pilgrim text shows us that they were somewhere betweenYalley Street and the Western Wall of the Temple enclosure.26 Then, along the street leadingto the Gate of Neapolis (the- north or Damascus Gate on map, Fig. 2) and on the left were thecave where Jesus was buried, and from which it was believed that he rose again, and the 'littlehill of Golgotha where the Lord was crucified'. There also was the fine basilica which had beenbuilt by order of Constantine, with its cisterns and baptistery (593.4-594.4), a complex ofbuildings which we shall be studying below. The pilgrim now goes back to the east gate bywhich he came into the city.

He leaves the walled city and goes down into the Yalley of Jehoshaphat (594.6). He is notshown the Cave ofGethsemane (see map 2) though he must have gone very close to it. Althoughthe cave must certainly have existed in the days of Aelia Capitolina we are not definitely toldthat Christians used it before about A.D. 500,27 and archaeological examination revealed noevidence for Christian use before the fourth century.28 The pilgrim is shown a rock where JudasIscariot betrayed Jesus (594.7), over which the Gethsemane Church was later built, on the sitenow occupied by the Church of All Nations. In the valley is a palm tree from which brancheswere taken, so it was said, to honour Jesus on the occasion of his triumphal entry into Jerusalem(595. I and Mark I I. 8). Nearby are the two monuments known today as the Tombs ofAbsalom and Zechariah, but named to the pilgrim as those of Isaiah the Prophet andKing Hezekiah (595.2). '

On top of the Mount of Olives the pilgrim was shown Constantine's basilica at 'the placewhere the Lord taught the apostles before his Passion' (595.5).29 This is not the teaching whichtook place after the resurrection which we have discussed above, but another occasion ofteaching on the Mount of Olives described, for example, in Mark 13. 3-37. In content thispassage is a Christian apocalypse describing the coming of the Son of Man (vv. 26 and 35) or,in the vocabulary we were using above, the return of Jesus which was predicted in Acts I. I I.

25 Theodosius, De Situ, 7; CSL, 175, 118, a work of theearly sixth century.

26 593.3. The position is better specified by AntoninusPlacentinus, ltin., 23; CSL, 175, 141.

27 In Brev., 7; CSL, 175, 112, line 131.

28 V. Corbo describes his examination of the cave inRicerche Archeologici al Monte degli Ulivi (= PSBF, 16),(Jerusalem, 1965), I-57.

29 Note the similar phrasing of Eg. Tr., 33.1-2 and35·2-3, 133, 135·


Not far away was a hillock which is said to have been the site of the Transfiguration (595.6 andMark 9. 2). Mter seeing it the pilgrim finally leaves the area of the city for Bethany andJericho.

The Bordeaux pilgrim speaks of a Christian topography which existed almost withoutreference to Christian monuments. What he was shown were ruins and other features of thecity which may well have been pointed out for almost two centuries before Constantine. Wherethis topography was based on the passion-narratives in the gospels, for example in its identifica-tions of the Temple are, as a whole, of the pools at Bethzatha and Siloam, and possibly also ofthe Tomb of Christ, it was capable of being accurate, even though in dealing with persons andplaces outside the New Testament it seems vague and legendary. While almost all this funda-mental topography survived until the end of the Byzantine period, it became graduallyobscured and given a new emphasis by the steadily-increasing number of churches which cameto be built.

The general picture provided by the Bordeaux pilgrim is usually confirmed by Cyril, whobecame Bishop of Jerusalem in about A.D. 349. In the baptismal instructions which he composedwhile he was in the city as a priest he mentions a good many holy places, such as the ruins ofthe houses of Caiaphas and Pilate, or the palm tree in the Valley of J ehoshaphat. 30But he alsoshows us that in the fifteen years which had elapsed since the pilgrim came from Bordeauxthings had not stood still in Jerusalem. Thus he speaks of a church on Sion, 'The UpperChurch of the Apostles'31 (see map, Fig. 3), which was later known simply as 'Holy Sion', andbears witness to an important development at the site of Christ's Tomb, as we shall see below.In one matter he enables us to correct what seems to have been a mistake by the Bordeauxpilgrim, for he tells us that Jesus's transfiguration took place on Mount Tabor.32 In this beliefhe agrees with all subsequent writers and visitors, at least with those who believed that theplace of this miracle could be known. In saying that the Transfiguration had taken place onthe Mount of Olives the pilgrim may have taken the 'two men in white robes' who werepresent at the Ascension (see p. 84 above) to be the same as Moses and Elijah, who were seenwith Jesus at the Transfiguration (Matt. 17· 4).

THE BUILDINGS ON GOLGOTHA

Of all the holy places the ones which pilgrims were most eager to visit were those on the sitenow occupied by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The most careful architectural descriptionof the fourth century buildings is to be found in Eusebius's Life ojConstantine, which he wroteafter 337 C.E., and there are many useful details in a work written soon after A.D. 380 by apilgrim called Egeria (otherwise known as Silvia or Aetheria). The site is not only welldocumented, but is now far better known archaeologically owing to the current joint pro-gramme ofrestoration.33 We are thus able to picture the Constantinian buildings with a newdegree of accuracy.

When the Bordeaux pilgrim mentions 'Golgotha' he means the 'little hill' where the crosshad been erected. But, as we learn from recent archaeological work there, this 'hill' was sosmall that it hardly merited the name. It is a rough block of living rock, generally rectangularin shape: it is about five metres square and stands about ten metres above the surrounding rock,which at this point is well below the present floor.34 'Golgotha' in this sense must have been

30 Cyril, Cat., 10.19; P.G., 33, col. 688.31 Cat., 16.4, col. 924.32 Cat., 12.16, col. 744.

33 See C. Coiiasnon, The Church of the Holy Sepulchre inJerusalem (Schweich Lectures, 1972, London, 1974).

34 Coiiasnon, 39-40•

CHRISTIAN PILGRIMS IN JERUSALEM 89small, if the Bordeaux pilgrim can say that it was 'a stone's throw' from the cave where Jesushad been buried (594. I). Cyril was evidently using the name in reflecting a different sensewhen he spoke to his baptismal candidates of 'this blessed Golgotha in which we are nowassembled'.35 He must mean at least the church in which he was speaking, and probably alsothe whole site where Jesus was crucified and buried, and where his followers believed they hadseen him risen from the dead. In this case it would be possible to speak of all the churches builtthere as being on Golgotha.

The most official version of the construction of the buildings is that of Eusebius.36 He hadbeen personally and intimately involved both with the advice given to Constantine when hewas formulating his policy for the Holy Land and with the organization which carried the plansinto effect. Naturally Eusebius misses no opportunity of praising the Emperor. To Eusebius weowe the only authentic account of the uncovering of Christ's Tomb.

What was discovered at the site of Hadrian's temple was a tomb cut in the living rock.The events described in the Gospel (John 20.4-6 being the most circumstantial account) seemto imply that in form it was a chamber containing a shelf on which the body was laid. Constan-tine seems deliberately to have preserved this chamber in its original condition,. since even inthe ninth century A.D. we can read of a visitor who saw the original chisel-marks on the walls. 37But the exterior of the tomb was another matter: first of all it cannot at the time of its discoveryhave been an impressive or beautiful sight. It had rock overhanging the door,38 and thereforelooked much like any other cave. We ought therefore to picture it as a recess in a rocky slope orcliff which had long been buried in soil.39Nothing can have remained there of the garden ofJoseph of Arimathea, and it was probably impossible even to tell where that garden might havebeen. We may thus appreciate the wording of Constantine's plan for the tomb as Eusebiusdescribes it :40 he intended to 'display the most blessed place of the Saviour's resurrection inJerusalem in a worthy and conspicuous manner' or, in other words to do two different things,first to make it conspicuous, and then to decorate it.

Fortunately we have a close analogy with the monolithic monument now known as theTomb of Zechariah and its neighbour, the nearly monolithic 'Tomb of Absalom'. Both are'conspicuous' because they have been isolated from the surrounding rock and both have beenmade 'worthy' of their purpose as memorials by sculptured decoration including mouldingsand pilasters. We may therefore picture Constantine's workmen at the Tomb site as carryingout three distinct processes, which the present writer imagines in some such terms as thoseillustrated in Fig. 4. Stage (a) is that of the tomb immediately after its discovery, when all thesoil around it has been removed. Near the entrance was found a stone which, it was evidentlybelieved at the time, had been used to close the entrance: it would have rolled across from therecess to the left of the entry-passage and blocked the way into the chamber.41 Part of thisstone may well be preserved today in the small glass-topped altar in the Chapel of the Angel,which forms the vestibule of the present tomb. The tomb shelf is to be seen on the right of thetomb chamber, that is, on its north.

Stage (b) shows a preliminary cut in the rock, forming a rough passage which runs allround the original tomb-chamber. The effect of the passage is to turn the chamber into a smallbuilding (or 'edicule', from the Latin aedicula) formed in the living rock, but isolated from the

35 Cat., 4.10, col. 467.36 Text in his Life of Constantine, P.G., 20, 1085-1100,

and English translation in Eg. Tr., 164-71.37 Photius, Question r07 to Amphilochius, most easily

available in L. H. Vincent and F. M. Abel, JerusalemNouvelle (Paris, 1914 fT.), 236.

38 Cyril, Cat., 14.9; P.G., 33, col. 833.39 Life of C., 3.27, col. 1088, Eg. Tr., 165.40 Life of C., 3.25, col. 1085, Eg. Tr., 164.41 As we are told by Cyril, Cat., 14.22, col. 853.

go PALESTINE ~XPLORATION Q,UARTERLY

rock around it in much the same way as the tombs of Absalom and Zechariah. Stage (c) showsthe surrounding rock removed to allow for the laying of a circular level floor round the tomb:here the rock edicule has been shaped and smoothed and an apse-shaped recess has been cut atthe entrance. The 'Stone of the Angel' has also been cut to form a cube.42 Stage (d) shows howthe Emperor (as Eusebius puts it)43may have 'adorned the holy Cave with choice columns andmuch ornament, sparing no art to make it beautiful'. Thus we see where marble columns havebeen added round the living rock core, and a porch attached to the front of it, with a doublegate at the top of the steps, and grills on the left and right.44

a b c d

~

~\

~. \

•5 metres

Fig. 4. The excavation and decoration of the Constantinian tomb-edicule at Golgotha

During the early period of the building this tomb-edicule stood in the open air, in a recesson the west side of a large court.45 Close round it on the west, north and south ran a high wallwhich served as a. mask to prevent pilgrims from seeing the construction site of the rotundawhich was later to enclose the edicule.46 Even before Constantine had begun his buildingoperations we hear that people were 'hurrying from the. ends of the earth to see the famousplace of (Jesus') nativity in Bethlehem',47 and their numbers must have risen as soon as theTomb became visible. The wall was thus a temporary device to allow pilgrims to pray at theTomb even though the builders were at work all around. It served rather longer than had beenintended, for the rotunda was not yet finished either when the other buildings were dedicatedon 14th September A.D. 335, or even when Eusebius wrote his Life of Constantine after theEmperor's death on 22nd May 337, since it is not mentioned in that work. Cyril, however,speaks in a way which shows that it had been finished before A.D. 348, when he gave hisbaptismal instructions,48 and this, combined with the shape of the temporary wall, both go toshow that the rotunda was a part of Constantine's original planning which had been delayedrather than a later addition. The outer wall of this rotunda stands to the present day to a height

42 See Adamnan, Lac. Sanct., 1.3.1, CSL, 175, 18g.43 Life of C., 3,33-4, col. 1096. .U See Levant, IV (1972), 83-97.45 See Eg. Tr., 168, n. I.

46 See Coiiasnon, 21, 22, and PI. VII.47 Eusebius, Dem. Evang., 1.1, GCS (Eus. VI), 3, line 21;

this was written after 314 and before A.D. 320.48 Cat., 18.33, col. 1056.


of more than eleven metres on the south, east and north (see plan, Fig. 5), and around it (inthe area shaded on our plan) are extensive remains of the original houses and stores used bythe bishop and clergy. 49

In the courtyard outside the rotunda at the south east corner stood the rock which theBordeaux pilgrim called Golgotha: but Eusebius strangely makes no mention of it. There is noquestion that it was visible in his time, 50 and it may be that Eusebius regarded it as a visualaid to meditations on the crucifixion rather than as an authentic biblical site like the tomb. Inhis time, and probably at his suggestion, it is likely tohave had a commemorative cross on itssummit. But Eusebius's attitudes belonged to the years of discovery and building, and Cyril,whose experience was based rather on the daily services in the buildings, understandably takes"a different attitude. In descriptions of the liturgy this court was regularly called 'At the Cross'.

From the court the visitor went east up some steps into the Martyrium, an 'enormouslylofty' basilical church 'of generous proportions'.51 It may have been large for Jerusalem, butelsewhere Constantine worked on a larger scale, as in Rome, where his Lateran basilica wasmore than half as long again as "the Martyrium.~2 The derivation of the name 'Martyrium'seems to be the Greek of Zeph. 3. 8; in Hebrew it means: "'Therefore wait for me", says theLord, "for the day when I arise as a witness",' but the Septuagint renders the command'Wait for me on the day of my arising' (anastasis, also meaning resurrection) 'at the place ofwitness' (marryrion). Thus it is that Cyril can explain to US53 that the prophet Zephaniah fore-saw this Martyrium as the place of Jesus's resurrection.

This in turn sheds light on the subject which the church was to commemorate. A churchon Golgotha, as all would understand, commemorated the crucifixion. But the Golgotha ofJohn 19. 17, 41 is also the place of resurrection: the Martyrium church therefore com-memorates both events and not only one of them. Moreover the site contained two distincttypes of architectural arrangement: those of the tomb-edicule (with its later rotunda) and of theGolgotha rock, which we may define as goals of pilgrimage; and that of the Martyrium, whichwas intended for regular congregational worship. The combination of these two types was verymuch that created by Muslims in the Haram esh Shari~ where the Dome of the Rock isessentially a pilgrimage building and EI Aqsa a 'mosque', which means 'literally a place ofcongregation. We may even carry the comparison one stage further and say that the Martyriumwas Jerusalem's 'Sunday Church' rather in the way that el Aqsa is its Friday Mosque.54

Eusebius maintains a tantalizing silence over another subject to which later traditiondirects a great deal of attention. Thus St Ambrose, when he was preaching the funeral sermonon the death of the Emperor Theodosius I in A.D. 395, tells us how the Empress Helena,visiting Jerusalem during the reign of her son, discovered at Golgotha three crosses, the title ofJesus's cross, and two of the nails. 55 But he is the first to mention Helena in this connexion, andit seems that he is combining (or reporting a"combination of) two separate traditions, one,which was perfectly true, that the Empress Helena visited the Holy City, 56and another thatthe wood of the cross had been found.

One sentence from a letter which Cyril is said to have written57 tells us that the Crosswas found in the reign of Constantine. But this is"hard to square with Eusebius's silence, sinceif the Cross had been found, even though it had actually been discovered by some one other

49 See Coiiasnon, PI. VIII.50 Ten years later Cyril also called it Golgotha, Cat.,

13.39, col. 820.51 Life of C., 3.36, col. 1096.52 85 metres long and 57 wide, compared with the

Martyrium's50 and 40 metres.

53 Cat., 14.6, col. 832•54 See Eg. Tr., 25.1,6, 125-6.55 Ambrose in Db. Theod., 46; P.L., 16, col. 1399.56 Eusebius, Life oj C., 3.41-4, cols. 1101-5.57 Cyril, Letter to Constantine, 3; P.G., 33, 1168.

PALESTINE EXPLORATION Q,UARTERL~:

The buildings on Golgotha

-I•••

WNmetres

•10 •• • •• • •• • •20 • • •

• •• •30 • •• •• •40

50

•••••

•••••••••••• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Fig. 5. The Buildings on Golgotha. The shaded area represents associated ecclesiastical buildi.ngs

CHRISTIAN PILGRIMS IN JERUSALEM 93than Helena, Eusebius would surely have regarded it as a miracle comparable with that offinding the holy Tomb. No ~ife of Constantine would then have been complete unless itmentioned so clear a manifestation of God's favour to the Emperor.

A further element which may help us to unravel this apparent contradiction is the wide-spread beliefin the later part of the fourth century that the Wood of the Cross had been found,a belief which was necessary to explain the existence of many pieces of the Wood which werevenerated and worn in lockets by Christians in places all round the Mediterranean.58 Theprincipal piece of the Wood was preserved in Jerusalem itsel~ and Cyril describes the situationas he understood it when he tells us that 'the holy Wood of the Cross ... is seen among us to thisday' and also, because people have been taking pieces away, that it 'has from this place nowalmost filled the whole world'. 59

For Cyril, then, as for his successors, it was an established fact that the Wood had beendiscovered, and one pilgrim document tells us where, for pilgrims were shown the place in theapse of the Martyrium.60 Such a discovery could only have been made in the reign of Constan-tine when the site was being cleared. Therefore we must interpret Eusebius's silence as a signof disbelief not in the fact of some discovery, but in the genuineness of what was found. Herewe may note that the earliest mentions of the discovery never speak of a cross-shaped piece ofwood, and that the relics are called not 'The Cross' (which was a name used for the com-memorative cross set up on the Golgotha rock), but 'The Wood of the Cross'. Now Eusebiusdoes tell us that some wood was removed from the building site,61and it may be that some ofthis timber was popularly taken to have belonged to the Cross. If, as we suggest, Eusebiusdisapproved of this belie~ it is not surprising that he makes no mention of it, and describes theapse of the Martyrium strictly in terms of its decoration. 62

Eusebius also goes into great detail in his description of the basilica and its decoration, buthis wording leaves the reader in doubt about its general arrangement. The plan is not generallytoo hard to restore, and the apse has partly been discovered, and is now visible under thesanctuary of the Catholicon of the Holy Sepulchre Church. The c~ief question which remainsopen is whether the double colonnades he mentions were inside or outside the building.63 Tothe east of the basilica was the entry court, which was certainly more elaborate than what wehave shown in the plan (Fig. 5), since it contained the fa~ade of the Martyrium with 'hugecolumns' and perhaps also some ornamental recesses or exedrae.64

We cannot leave our examination of Constantine's basilica without noting that it is provi-ded with an apse not at the east (as was later the rule) but at the west. Constantine built a goodmany other churches with this orientation, for instance 8t Peter's in Rome, but we should notethat both the basilicas at Bethlehem and on the Mount of Olives had their sanctuaries at theeast end. Ifwe can discern any rule for the Constantinian churches in the Holy Land it is thatthe apse and sanctuary were at the end of the church which included (or was nearest to) theholy place.

Later documents allow us to form some additional notions about the buildings on Gol-gotha, and we know that there was a fire and looting on the site in A.D. 614. But we kno~ of noevidence to suggest any major structural change between Constantine's original constructionand the damage inflicted on the western area by Caliph Hakim in A.D. 100g.

58 See Eg. Tr., 240-41.59 Cyril, Cat., 10.19, col. 685.60 Brev., (a), I, lines 12-14; CSL, 175, 109 (about

A.D. 500).61 Life of C., 3.27, col. 1088.

62 Lift of C., 3.38, coIs. 1097-1100.63 Lift of C., 3.37, coIs. 1096-7.64 Lift of C., 3.37 and 39, cols. 1097 and 1100: note

that the word exedrae occurs only in the title of chapter39, not in the text.


What did these buildings mean to the Christians? When Eusebius describes their construc-tion he says, 'the work began to take shape and over the saving Martyrium was built the newJerusalem, facing the Jerusalem which was famous in old times'.65 He is consciously contrast-ing the 'Martyrium', the site at which Jesus rose from the dead, with the Jewish Temple siteon its great plinth to the east. And in the phrase 'the new Jerusalem' he indicates that for theChristians all the values which had been associated with that Temple are transferred to thefaith and the place of Jesus and his death and resurrection.

Any building where Christians (or Jews after the destruction of the Temple) met forworship was, so to· speak, a 'temple-substitute', where the spiritual sacrifice of prayer wasoffered. Similar thoughts had already been expressed by the sectarians at Qumran, who refusedto accept the validity of the Temple and its sacrifices, and preferred the 'fruit of the lips' andthe 'sacrifice of praise' .66 The same analogy with the Temple underlies the iconography of manysynagogue mosaics, with their curtains, Torah shrines, and menorot. And when Eusebiuspreached at the dedication of the church at Tyre in A.D. 318 he makes two interesting compari-sons. First he compares the people themselves with the Temple, echoing the thought ofSt Paul,67and then he compares the altar of the new church with the Holy of Holies (hidden from viewby its grills), and calls the builder of the church 'our Solomon'. 68Thus in Christian termseither a congregation or a church building could be taken as analogous to the Jewish Temple.But it seems that Christians took the parallel to far greater depth and into much more detail forthe buildings on Golgotha: they were after all in Jerusalem itself, and were (if at the authenticsite) on the scene of one of the most basic and distinctive of the mighty acts of God throughJesus.

Eusebius prepares us for thought along these lines by the way he selects his vocabularywhen describing the discovery of the Tomb, for he tells us that as the Tomb came into view, 'theHoly of Holies, the Cave, was like our Saviour restored to life'. 69 Cyril takes up the same generaltheme when he tells us that Golgotha is the centre of the earth,70 for it was the Je.wish belief thatJerusalem was the centre of the earth (Ezek. 38. 12), and that the Temple was the centre ofJerusalem.71 Some Christians as Jerome tells us, believed that Adam was buried at Golgotha,72as some Jews had believed he was buried on the Temple Mount.73 and Solomon's famous ring,which had been instrumental in building the Temple,74 was already in the fourth centutyamong the relics displayed at Golgotha on the Friday of the Great Week.75 Two furtheranalogies are disclosed by an early sixth-century guidebook, the Breviarius; first that Golgothawas the place where Abraham sacrificed Isaac, which is a deeply theological analogy with thesacrifice of the 'Son of God' on the Cross.76 The same analogy lies behind the choice of thereading Gen. 22. 1-18 at the beginning of the commemoration of Jesus's passion in the fourthcentury Great Week which culminated in Easter.77 The second analogy seems in comparisonto be shallow, for the same guidebook says, probably about the entry court of the buildingcomplex, that it is the place 'where Jesus found the people buying and selling pigeons, and castthem OUt'78or, as is clear from Matt. 2 I. 12, the court of the Temple. To make this comparisonis to remain at a material level which has no theological meaning, at least not in the context inwhich it appears.

65 Life of C., 3.33, col. log3.66 See further the Rule, cols. 8.g, 9.4, and I I. 16 f. in

A. R. C. Leaney, The Rule oj Qumran and its Meaning(London, Ig66), 20g f., and the notes on 21g and 224.67 See I Cor. 3.16, etc., and Eusebius, Ch. Hist.,

10-4.22, ed. Schwartz, 869.68 Ibid., paragraphs 44 and 45, 875 f.69 Life ojConst., 3.28, col. 1088.70 Cat., 13.27, col. 806.

71 TanQ., B. Lev., 78 and Sanh., 37a.72 Lib. loc., ed. E. Klostermann, 7, lines 13-14.73 Gen. R., 14.9.74 B. Gitt., 7.68a.75 Eg. Tr., 37.3, 137.76 Brev., (a) 2, lines 55-8, CSL, 175, 110; see 2 Chr. 3.1.77 Armenian Lectionary, No. 38, in Eg. Tr., 267.78 Brev., (a) 3, lines 82-5, II I.

CHRISTIAN PILGRIMS IN JERUSALEM 95THE GROWTH OF BYZANTINE JERUSALEM

The selection of holy places which was shown to the pilgrim from Bordeaux underlay thetopography of the city throughout the Byzantine period. But the emphasis of pilgrimagechanged, both by the addition of new holy places and by the erection of Christian buildings atholy places and elsewhere. A good many of the new buildings were occupied by monks ornuns. Thus there are no contradictions between the map which shows the known sites from thebeginning of our period (Fig. 3) and the one which shows the city at the time when the periodcloses (Fig. 6). It is true that three of the sights mentioned by the Bordeaux pilgrim and byCyril are not shown to later pilgrims, namely the statues on the site of the Temple, the ruins ofDavid's Palace, and the palm tree in the valley ofJehoshaphat. But all the rest continued to bevisited, and most of them were marked by churches or chapels. Nine had been built by themiddle of the fifth century, and we know of several (such as the buildings at the Tomb ofLazarus, the Place of the Shepherds near Bethlehem, or the Holy Ascension) which wereintended for congregational use.

At this point in the fifth century the situation is summarized for us in the Life of Peter 'theIberian, usually ascribed to John Rufus. When he describes Peter's pilgrimage in the HolyCity soon after A.D. 460, and from his time onwards, the Christian pilgrim to Jerusalem fol-lowed ~hat seems to have been a standard itinerary. This 'Jerusalem circuit' evidently origin-ated at some time before Peter's visit, and of the many authors who speak of 'coming toJerusalem to venerate the holy places' one of the earliest seems to be Jerome.79 The phraseseems to indicate only those holy places which are fairly close to Jerusalem, because we are toldof some visitors who 'venerated the holy plac~s and went-down also to the holy Jordan',Bo adistance of only about eighteen miles. When Peter the Iberian visits Jerusalem he goes to sixplaces, and these are described as 'all the holy places' ~81 The six are later mentioned in theBreviarius in about A.D. 500, and in the notes for a longer guide book compiled about twentyyears later by a certain Theodosius. A full account of the Jerusalem holy places is given by apilgrim who came from Piacenza in about A.D. 570, and the last witness before the Arabconquest is Sophronius, writing at some time between A.D. 600 and 638 during which time hewas first a monk ofJerusalem and later on the Patriarch. Occasionally the foreigners needed tobe shown additional places which are not mentioned by Peter and Sophronius both ofwhom lived in the country. The /'circuit' which they followed seems to have had thispattern.

(I) On entering the city all the pilgrims went straight to the buildings on Golgotha,where they prayed at the Tomb .ofJesus, the Golgotha rock, and in the Basilica of Constantine(not necessarily in this order). .

(2) Next they prayed in the Church of Holy Sion,(3) and then in Holy Wisdom, the church at the place where Pilate had condemned Jesus

and had him s,courged.At this point in the circuit the pilgrims unfamiliar with Jerusalem were shown Jeremiah's

pit,82 which may have been one of the many cisterns south of the Temple enclosure, and weretaken down to Siloam. The latter was visited also by Peter the Iberian, who may have had hisown private reasons for visiting it,83 but not by Sophronius.

79 Letter, 47; CSEL, 54, 346.80 John Moschus, Pratum. Sp., 91; P.G., 87, col. 2949.81 John Rufus, Life of Peter the Iberian, ed. R. Raabe,

Petrus der Iberer (Leipzig, 1895), 99-100.

82 See Jer. 38. 1-13.83 His first celebration of the eucharist after being made

bishop was in the Church at Siloam: Life, ed. Raabe,56.


(4) The pilgrims now visited the Sheep Pool with its Church, apparently commemoratingboth the healing of the paralysed man (John 5, 2-9) and the birth and childhood of Mary.84Then they left the city by the east gate and went down a stepped street into the Valley ofJehoshaphat.

-. Early Seventh Century

Q

G

Tombs ofSimeon,Jamesand Zacharias

500 metres

Fig. 6.A.B.C.

D.E.

Jerusalem in the Early Seventh CenturyChurch of St John Baptist built by AmosMonastery chapel at Dominus Flevit siteChurch of St John Baptist in MuristanSt Menas (now part of Armenian Cathedral)Chapel at site of St Peter in Gallicantu

84 See the legendary account in Protevangelium of James, 5.2-8.1, in E. Hennecke,New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 1(London, 1963), 377-8.

CHRISTIAN PILGRIMS IN JERUSALEM 97(5) There they visited Gethsemane, where they were shown a church containing the

Tomb of Mary and the place where Jesus was betrayed by Judas Iscariot. Visitors from abroadwere also shown the Gethsemane Cave, where, it was said, Jesus had had supper with thedisciples and washed their feet.85This supper was not usually regarded as the same meal whereJesus had spoken of the bread and wine as his body and blood.

(6) Climbing the Mount of Olives the pilgrims prayed at the church which Constantinehad erected over the cave where Jesus had taught the disciples, and also at the nearby site ofJesus's ascension within its circular colonnade.

A complete round of the holy places included also a visit to the Church of Lazarus'sTomb at Bethany and the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem. Peter and Sophronius bothwent to these two places as part of their circuit, but pilgrims from abroad sometimes postponedtheir visits to them and included them in longer journeys, perhaps to Hebron or Jericho ..

Sophronius, who describes the circuit in a poem, mentions only the main places listed, butthe other sources all deal with other holy places, relics, or sights. Thus Pet~r the Iberian, whoentered Jerusalem from the north, paid a visit to St Stephen's Church before reaching the northgate. This was the last church built in Jerusalem by the Empress Eudokia before her death inA.D. 460. The Breviarius (about A.D. 500) is the first to speak of churches at the House ofCaiaphas, which was called St Peter's, and at the Tomb of the Virgin Mary. He is also thefirst to inform us of the Gethsemane cave and of Jeremiah's Pit.

Most of the other church buildings mentioned in the other sources from our period falloutside the scope of this article, but we must mention two of them here, to which we shall needto refer below. One is a chapel dedicated to St Menas, which was founded by an Abbess calledBassa before A.D. 456, and it may well survive as the chapel of St Menas which projects fromthe north wall of the present Armenian Cathedral of St ]ames.86 The other was a church ofSts Cosmas and Damian. Jerusalem contained two churches of this name in the days ofCharlemagne,87 of which one was between Golgotha and Valley Street,88 the street runningfrom the north gate of the city down to Siloam. The last important church building to befounded in our period was the 'Nea', or New 8t Mary, which was erected by order of the·Emperor Justinian, and dedicated in A.D. 543.89 An apse which was probably part of it hasrecently been uncovered by Professor N. Avigad.90

Several of the Christian devotional processions and services commemorate the acts ofJesus in the holy places in a historical order. Such are the ones they came to'hold during the'Great Week' before Easter,'and, after the Crusades, the devotions at the Stations of the Cross.Obviously the Jerusalem circuit of the Byzantine period is different, for the pilgrim who followsit commemorates Jesus's burial before his birth, and his execution before his trial. Neverthelessit was an itinerary which enabled the pilgrim to visit each of the main holy places in a con-venient order, and probably for this reason retained its popularity.

THE MAP OF CHRISTIAN JERUSALEM

The existence of a regular Jerusalem circuit provides a valuable clue for interpreting the cityplan ofJerusalem on the Madaba mosaic map,91 for the map will certainly include all the main

85 SeeJohn 13. 1-17.86 Cyril of Scythopolis, V. Euth., ed. E. Schwartz,

TU,49·2 (1939), 49, line 3.87 Commemoratorium, ed. T. Tobler and A. Molinier,

Itinera Hierosolymitana (Paris, 1879, reprinted Osna-bruck, 1966), 302.

88 See Archives de L'Orient Latin, 2, 390.89 Cyril Sc., Opecit., 71, line 18.

90 See IEJ, 20 (1970), 137.91 For earlier studies see the bibliography in M. Avi-

Yonah, The Madaba Mosaic Map (Jerusalem, 1954),78, andJ. T. Milik, 'La Topographie de Jerusalem versla fin de l'epoque byzantine' in Melanges de l'UniversitiS.-Joseph, 37 (Beirut, 1961), 127-89, and note plates Iand 2.


places which were visited. It was made in about A.D. 600 and, to judge from its presentation ofthe rest of the Holy Land, was specially concerned with holy places likely to be visited by

. pilgrims. Jerusalem formed the centrepiece, and sums up both the main plan of the city as itwas remodelled by Hadrian, and also the main sites and buildings added by the Christians.

The Hadrianic plan of the city is shown in the diagram (Fig. 7) which because it omits allthe churches and religious foundations shown on the map, is hardly different in meaning fromour own map of Aelia Capitolina (Fig. 2). The designer of the mosaic map evidently regardedthe columned streets of the city with pride, since he took such pains to show the columns andthe red tiled roofs which surmounted them. But the streets were also a help in understandingthe map, because churches (as will be seen by a glance at Fig. 8) had to be represented at such a

\'gate of", S~ et Husur

\", street to Holy Sian"David's Tower~

Tower Gate

north rangeof Templearea and siteof Antonia ,,"tower (top incomplete).~. ...!<~.~~.~.~""north part of portal

.., \. ..•..viaduct incorporating··...A.... Wilson's Arch

\ ..,,~·WaUof Sion"··..:k .,...gf ~ Pool of Siloam

East Gate.,"'~

Fig. 7. The Madaba Mosaic Map, its secular topography

small scale that they appear almost as conventional signs, each identical with the others. Thustheir position in relation to the streets was almost the only reliable way to indicate their identity.The surrounding walls of the city as shown in Fig. 7 are those of our previous maps, alwaysassuming that we are there correct in identifying the 'Wall of Sion'. We can only guess at thecontent of the missing part above the dotted line on the right of the map, but if the wall wasrepresented on the right (or south) side of the city in the way it is at the left (or north), we cansee that very little can have been lost.

The streets are in comparison easy to identify since, in all cases but one they still remain inuse. The street leading down from the east gate at the top of the map is Tariq Bab Sitna Mariamwhich meets Valley Street at a T-junction. The median street running straight south from the

CHRISTIAN PILGRIMS IN JERUSALEM 99north (Damascus) gate is Khan ez Zeit Street, and the vertical street running in from thewest (or Jaffa) Gate is evidently David Street and Tariq Bab es Silsila. The only problemconcerns the street turning from David Street to the south, and passing behind the tall towers .

. Tariq Bab Sitna Mariam is not represented as columned for its whole length. Comparisonwith the representation of the same street on Fig. 2 will show that in Hadrianic times thisstreef was interrupted by a large court or forum, which may explain the appropriateness of abreak. The structure to the right of Bab Sitna Mariam itself seems to be the north range ofbuildings on the edge of the Temple Court, and if this is the correct interpretation the tallbuilding attached to the right (and near) end may well be on the site of Herod's old castleAntonia. Probably it was a new construction on the scarp of rock which is still visible there, butthere is just a possibility that some of Herod's building remained on the site, for althoughJosephus tells us twice that the Romans 'undermined the foundations' of the Antonia,92 he alsotells us later on that Titus withdrew 'into' the Antonia. 93

Valley Street, it should be noted, begins at the northern end with an arch, which seems tospan it at the point \vher~ it leaves the open space with the large column in the middle. Abovethis arch the map shows a building which we cannot identify, but imagine to have been somelarge secular building. To the pedestrian walking south along this street today it becomesapparent, soon after thejunction with Tariq Bab Sitna Mariam, that Valley Street is blocked byhigh buildings of some kind which become visible ahead. To the Byzantine pedestrian theeffect would have been somewhat similar, if we are to judge from the Madaba map. The largeobject lying across the street is not, however, impassable, for there is a small door opening offthe end of the street. We should therefore see in this blockage the same basic structure whichdetermines the height and solidity of the modern buildings which block Valley Street, namelythe viaduct which joined the Temple to the western hill of the city. It was made by Herod theGreat, and its first arch has survived beneath the Gate of the Chain as Wilson's Arch. ValleyStreet thus passed underneath it, and through one of its arches. On this interpretation the tallblack line, ending in aT-shape, which rises from the top corner of the blockage is likely to bewhat remains of the representation of the gateway which, like the present Gate of the Chain,allowed people crossing the viaduct to enter the Temple area. A large gate appears in thisposition on maps of the Latin Kingdom period with the title porta speciosa. The black line wouldbe the outline of the northern jamb of this gateway, and the function of the T -shaped projec-tion at the top would be the same as that of the similar projection on the roof of the building onthe proposed Antonia site, a function not, unfortunately, known to the present writer.

At the southern end of the city (see also Fig. 2) is what looks like a four-sided building witha rectangular opening in the roof. This may represent the four colonnades94 round theTetranymphon or, as it was correctly called in Byzantine times, the Pool of Siloam.

Across the middle of the map (though not of the city: see Fig. 2) runs a street which hasoften been called the main street (o~kardo maximus) of Aelia. But the designer of the mosaic maptakes the trouble to show that Valley Street was the more important, as witness the arch at itsnorthern end. We may presume that the median street, which represents Khan ez Zeit Streetand some ancient street running between Suq el Husur and el Munadilin streets, ran througha gate about half way between the present Burj el Kibrit and Sion Gate. An old street whichmust have been its continuation south of the 'Wall of Sion' was found along the upper (west)edge of the property of the Church ofSt Peter in Gallicantu. As is well known the column in theround space at the northern end of the two colonnaded streets, Valley Street and the one we

92 Josephus, War, 6. 93 and 149.93 Josephus, War, 6. 246 and 249.

94 Bordeaux pilgrim, ltin., 592.1; CSL, 175, 16 uses theword quadriporticus.


have just mentioned, has given its name to the Damascus Gate, which in Arabic is called the'Gate of the Column'. The purpose of the column was probably to support a statue of anemperor, and no doubt the first to be represented there was Hadrian.

The Jaffa or Tower Gate got its name from the towers beside it, of which the largerwas known as the Tower of David. In origin it was Herodian, and Josephus tells US95 thatTitus left these towers standing. Numbers of monks lived there by the middle of the fifth cen-tury.96 Behind the towers runs a street which clearly lies some way inside the city and ends atthe side of the church called Holy Sion. This is marked on Fig. 6, and part of it has recentlybeen discovered by Dr Magen Broshi :97its line if extended northwards would join the end ofthe present Christian Street. As it is the mosaic shows an extension to the left which representsan open space. This is likely to be the main forum of Aelia, which occupied roughly the area

Siloam

)-Jew St Mary

StsCosmas&Damian (1)?,, ,, ",

StMaryatthe Sheep Pool'.

~

(3) ?-. _....

Martyrium-Anastasis- -

,'Baptistery

Fig. 8. The Madaba Map, the ecclesiasticalbuildings

now called Muristan. In Fig. 7 we have also included various nondescript buildings whichappear to have been arranged as they are simply to fill spaces. That they are simply fillers is themore likely because they all (in contrast with the church buildings) have flat roofs, and in thelower row the windows fall very neatly indeed in the spaces between the towers of the city wall.

Now let us turn to the ecclesiastical buildings shown on Fig. 8. Of them all the buildings onGolgotha form the centrepiece of the design, just as they did of the theological scheme discussedabove. The Martyrium with its gable roof is easily identifiable, and separated from the domedAnastasis by a space, which is the court 'At the Cross'. Nor is there any difficulty in identifyingthe churches at Siloam and at the Sheep Pool, or New St Mary and Holy Sion. The last twoboth seem to have their north entries displayed, the former with one door (the upper of the

95 War, 7.1•

96 John Rufus, Life of Peter Ib.,ed. Raabe, 45.97 See Broshi's article in Qadmoniot, 5 (1972), especially

the plan on p. 106.


two) and the latter with twO.98 Perhaps the lower of the two doors on New St Mary belonged toone of its associated buildings, such as a hospital.

How many more churches can we identify? The present writer can make no suggestionabout No. I, despite the marks which look like columns on its side. The church in the topright-hand corner may well be- Holy Wisdom. It is shown (if our previous assumptions arecorrect) to the north of the viaduct and 'below' (that is, to the east of) 'the street runningdown to Siloa'.99 It is true that this church might equally well have been to the south ofthe viaduct, in the position conjectured in Figures 3 and 6, but if so it is hard to see how itcould have been shown on the Madaba Map.

The church indicated by the number 2 seems to lie on the west side of Dr Broshi's street(since the artist has taken the trouble to show it upside down), and is therefore likely to beSt Menas. It could of course be St Peter at the House ofCaiaphas if we think ofit as lying southof the 'Wall ofSion', but this is not so likely because St Peter is said to have been located to theeast of Holy Sion.100

South of the main buildings on Golgotha and apparently adjoining them on the north,and the forum on the east is a square building. Unlike Siloam, which is also square, this one hasno hole in its roof, and the shape is not therefore significant in any way we can recognize. But itsposition seems to correspond with that of the southerly projection beside the Anastasis which isshown in shading in Fig. 5, which is also the position of the present baptistery, so it could be thebaptistery of the buildings on Golgotha. To the north of the main buildings are two which areperhaps attached to them (indicated by NO.3). If they are intended to represent churches theyare not positively identifiable, but they may rather represent some of the clergy houses close tothe main buildings, or else the monastery of the monks associated with the Anastasis (theSpoudaei) which was slightly further away. The church indicated by NO.4 has not beenidentified, and since it is hard to be sure where NO.5 is supposed to be in the north east part ofthe city, no sensible choice is possible among three good possibilities.

The Madaba Map as we have it pictures a Jerusalem which was still flourishing, but byA.D. 614 smoke was rising from its burning churches, and its courts and sanctuaries were filledwith unburied dead as the Persians ravaged the city. In spite of the fine work of reconstructionsubsequently carried out by Abbot Modestus the Christian power in the city was shaken: soonafterwards it surrendered and was supplanted by the new and energetic movement calledIslam.

ABBREVIATIONS

Brev.CSELCSLEg. Tr.GCSIEJP.G.P.L.PSBFTU

Breviarius.Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum, Vienna, 1866 if.Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, Turnhout, 1953 ff.J. Wilkinson, Egeria's Travels, London, 1971.Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte, Leipzig, 1897 if.Israel Exploration Journal, Jerusalem, 1950 ff.J. P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca, Paris, 1857-66.J. P. Migne, Patrologia Latina, Paris, 1844-55.Publications' of the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Jerusalem, 194I fr.Texte und Untersuchungen, Leipzig, 1882 fr.

98 One side door appears on the plan made by Arculf:see D. Meehan Adamnan's De Loeis Sanetis (= SeriptoresLatini Hiberniae, 3) (Dublin, 1958), plate facing p. 63.

99 Antoninus Placentinus, ltin., 23,; CSL, 175, 141.

8

100 Daniel (1106 C.E.), Vie et Pil., tr. B. de Khitrovo, in/tin/raires russes en Orient (Paris, 1889, reprintedOsnabrock, 1966), 36; see also Theodosius, de Situterrae sanetae, 7, CSL, 175, 118.