* This Iraqi kingdom remained Jewish well into the next century. Queen Helena and her sons were buried just outside the old city of Jeruslaem under three pyramids; the ornate King’s Tomb survives today, north of the Damascus Gate on the Nablus Road that leads past the American Colony Hotel. In the nineteenth century, a French archaeologist excavated the site and announced it had belonged to King David. Adiabene was not the only Jewish fiefdom in that area: two Jewish rebels against Parthia, Asinaeus and Anilaeus, created an independent Jewish state around Babylon that lasted about fifteen years.
† The Golden Gate is the traditional gate by which Jesus entered the Temple, and in Jewish, Muslim and Christian mysticism, the Messiah will enter Jerusalem there. But Jesus would not have entered this way: the Gate was not built for another 600 years and the nearby Shushan Gate was not open to the public and only rarely used by the high priest himself. Another Christian tradition says Jesus entered through the Beautiful Gate, on the other side, today probably close to the Bab al-Silsila (Gate of the Chain) on the west. This is more likely. But the Beautiful Gate is also the place where Peter and John performed a miracle after Jesus’ death. The very name Golden Gate may be a muddled version of ‘beautiful’ since golden in Latin (aurea) and beautiful in Greek (oreia) are so similar. Jerusalem’s holiness is criss-crossed with such misunderstandings, and multiple legends applied to the same sites to enforce and embellish their sanctity
* Every event in this story was to develop its own geography in Jerusalem, though many of these sites are probably historically wrong. The Upper Room (Cenacle) on Mount Zion is the traditional site of the Last Supper; the real site was maybe closer to the cheaper houses around the Siloam Pool since Mark mentions ‘a man carrying a jar of water’ there. The Last Supper tradition developed later in the fifth century and even more strongly under the Crusaders. A stronger tradition suggests this site was where the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles at Pentecost, after Jesus’ death: this is certainly one of the most ancient Christian shrines. Its holiness was so infectious that Jews and Muslims later revered it too. The traditional but plausible site of Annas’ mansion is under the Church of Holy Archangels in the Armenian Quarter. A stone weight inscribed ‘belonging to the house of Caiaphas’ in Aramaic has been uncovered in Jerusalem and in 1990 builders found a sealed burial case in which one ossuary was inscribed ‘Joseph son of Caiaphas’ – so these are possibly the high priest’s bones. The Gethsemane Garden with its ancient olive grove is believed to be the correct site
* This is a totally different route from the traditional Via Dolorosa. The Gennath Gate, mentioned by Josephus, was identified by the Israeli archaeologist Nahman Avigad in the northern part of the Jewish Quarter in a section of the First Wall. In the Muslim period, Christians wrongly believed that the Antonia Fortress was the Praetorium where Pilate had made his judgements. Medieval Franciscan monks developed the tradition of the Stations of the Cross along the Via Dolorosa, from the Antonia site to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre – almost certainly the wrong route. Golgotha derives from the Aramaic for ‘skull’, Calvary from the Latin for ‘skull’, calva.
† Crucifixion originated in the east – Darius the Great crucified Babylonian rebels – and was adopted by the Greeks. As we have seen, Alexander the Great crucified the Tyrians; Antiochus Epiphanes and the Jewish king Alexander Jannaeus crucified rebellious Jerusalemites; the Carthaginians crucified insubordinate generals. In 71 BC the Roman suppression of the Spartacus slave revolt culminated in a mass crucifixion. The wood for the cross is said to have come from the site of the fortified eleventh-century Monastery of the Cross, near today’s Israeli Knesset. The monastery was long the headquarters of the Georgian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem
* The Gospel of Peter, a Gnostic codex dating from the second or third century, discovered in nineteenth-century Egypt, contains a mysterious story about the removal of the body. The oldest Gospel, Mark, written forty years later around AD 70, ends with Jesus being laid in his tomb, never mentioning the Resurrection. Mark’s account of the resurrection was a later addition. Matthew, written about AD 80, and Luke are based on Mark and another unknown source. Hence these three are known as the Synoptics – from the Greek meaning ‘seen together’. Luke minimized the role of Jesus’ family at the Crucifixion, but Mark mentions Mary mother of James, Joses and Jesus’ sister. John, the latest Gospel, written probably at the end of the century, portrays a more divine Jesus than the others but has other sources, giving more detail on Jesus’ earlier visits to Jerusalem.
† Acts of the Apostles tells this story, but Matthew has another version: the remorseful Judas threw away his silver in the Temple at which the high priest (who could not put it into the Temple treasury because it was blood money) invested it in the Potter’s Field ‘to bury strangers in’. Then he hanged himself. The Akeldama – Field of Blood – remained a burial place into the Middle Ages.
* ‘It fell to me’, Agrippa wrote as a Maccabee and a Herodian, ‘to have for my grandparents and ancestors, kings, most of whom had the title High Priest, who considered their kingship inferior to the priesthood. Holding the office of High Priest is as superior in excellence to that of king as God surpasses men. For the office of one is to worship God, of the other to have charge of men. As my lot is cast in such a nation, city and Temple, I beseech you for them all.’
* Claudius was unlucky in his marriages: he killed one wife and the other killed him. He executed his unfaithful teenaged wife Messalina for treason then married his niece, Julia Agrippina, the sister of Caligula, who started to promote Nero, her son by an earlier marriage, as heir. Claudius made Nero joint heir with his own son Britannicus, named to celebrate his conquest of Britain. On his accession, Nero murdered Britannicus.
* James’ head was buried alongside another Jacobite head – that of the St James killed by Agrippa I – in what became the Cathedral of the Armenian Quarter. Hence its name is the very plural St Jameses’ Cathedral.