Constantine’s heirs fought for twenty years, a civil war finally won by his second son Constantius. This turbulence unsettled Palaestina. In 351, an earthquake in Jerusalem led all the Christians to rush to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre ‘seized with awe’. When the Galilean Jews rebelled, led by a messianic king, they were so wantonly slaughtered by the emperor’s cousin Gallus Caesar that even the Romans were sickened. Yet the Jews now found sympathy in a surprising place: the Emperor decided to overturn Christianity – and rebuild the Jewish Temple.2
JULIAN THE APOSTATE: JERUSALEM RESTORED
On 19 July 362, the new emperor, Constantine’s nephew Julian, who was in Antioch on his way to invade Persia, asked a Jewish delegation: ‘Why do you not sacrifice?’
‘We aren’t allowed,’ replied the Jews. ‘Restore us to the city, rebuild the Temple and the Altar.’
‘I shall endeavour with the utmost zeal’, replied Julian, ‘to set up the Temple of the Most High God.’ The emperor’s astonishing reply was greeted with such Jewish enthusiasm that it was ‘as if the days of their kingdom had already arrived’.
Julian reversed the Hadrianic and Constantinian persecutions, restored Jerusalem to the Jews, returned their property, revoked the anti-Jewish taxes and granted power of taxation and the title praetorian prefect to their patriarch Hillel. Jews must have poured into Jerusalem from all over the Roman and Persian worlds to celebrate this miracle. They reclaimed the Temple Mount, probably removing the statues of Hadrian and Antoninus to raise a provisional synagogue, perhaps around the stones that the Bordeaux Pilgrim called the House of King Hezekiah.
Julian was shy, cerebral and awkward. A biased Christian recalled his ‘oddly disjointed neck, hunched and twitching shoulders, wild darting eye, swaying walk, haughty way of breathing down that prominent nose, that nervous and uncontrolled laughter, ever-nodding head and halting speech’. But the bearded, burly emperor was also decisive and single-minded. He restored paganism, favouring the family’s old divine patron, the Sun, encouraging the traditional sacrifices in pagan temples and dismissing Galilean (as he called Christian) teachers in order to diminish their effete, unRoman values.
Julian had never expected to rule the empire. He was just five when Constantius murdered his father and most of his family; only two survived, Gallus and Julian. In 349, Constantius appointed Gallus as Caesar only to behead him, partly for his inept suppression of a Jewish revolt. Yet he needed a Caesar in the West and there was now only one candidate left. Julian, then a student of philosophy in Athens, became Caesar, ruling from Paris. Understandably, he was nervous when the unpredictable emperor summoned him. Inspired by a dream about Zeus, he accepted the imperial crown from his troops. As he marched eastwards, Constantius died and Julian found himself ruler of the entire empire.
Julian’s rebuilding of the Jewish Temple was not just a mark of his tolerance but a nullification of the Christian claim to have inherited the true Israel, a reversal of the fulfilment of the prophecies of Daniel and Jesus that the Temple would fall, and a sign that he was serious in the overturning of his uncle’s work. It would also win the support of the Babylonian Jews during his planned Persian war. Julian saw no contradiction between Greek paganism and Jewish monotheism, believing that the Greeks worshipped the Jewish ‘Most High God’ as Zeus: Yahweh was not unique to the Jews.
Julian appointed Alypius, his representative in Britain, to rebuild the Jewish Temple. The Sanhedrin were nervous: was this too good to be true? To reassure them, Julian, setting off for the Persian front, wrote ‘To the Community of Jews’, repeating his promise. In Jerusalem, exhilarated Jews ‘sought out the most skilled artisans, collected materials, cleared the ground and embarked so earnestly on the task that even women carried heaps of earth and brought their necklaces to defray the expenses’. Building materials were stored in the so-called Stables of Solomon. ‘When they had removed the remains of the former building, they cleared the foundation.’
As the Jews took control of Jerusalem, Julian invaded Persia with 65,000 troops. But on 27 May 363 Jerusalem was struck by an earthquake that somehow ignited the building materials.
The Christians were delighted by this ‘wonderful phenomenon’, though they may well have helped it along with arson. Alypius could have continued the work, but Julian had crossed the Tigris into Iraq. In tense Jerusalem, Alypius decided to await Julian’s return. The emperor, however, was already in retreat. On 26 June in a confused skirmish near Samara, an Arab soldier (possibly a Christian) stabbed him in the side with a spear. Pierced in the liver, Julian tried to pull it out, shredding the sinews of his hand. Christian writers claimed that he died saying, ‘Vicisti, Galilaee!’, ‘Thou has conquered, Galilean!’. He was succeeded by the commander of his guard, who restored Christianity, reversed all Julian’s acts and again banned the Jews from Jerusalem: henceforth there would again be one religion, one truth. In 391–2 Theodosius I made Christianity the empire’s official religion and started to enforce it.*3
JEROME AND PAULA: SAINTHOOD, SEX AND THE CITY
In 384, a splenetic Roman scholar named Jerome arrived in Jerusalem with an entourage of wealthy Christian women. Obsessively pious, they nonetheless travelled under a cloud of sexual scandal.
Now in his late thirties, the Illyrian Jerome had lived as a hermit in the Syrian desert, always tormented with sexual longings: ‘Although my only companions were scorpions, I was mingling with the dances of girls, my mind throbbing with desires.’ Jerome then served as the secretary to Damasus I, the Bishop of Rome, where the nobility had embraced Christianity. Damasus felt confident enough to declare that the bishops of Rome served with divine blessing in direct apostolic succession from St Peter, a big step in their development into the supreme, infallible popes of later times. But now the Church had such patrician support, Damasus and Jerome found themselves entangled in some very worldly scandals: Damasus was accused of adultery, dubbed ‘the tickler of the ears of middle-aged women’, while Jerome was said to be having an affair with the rich widow Paula, one of the many such ladies who had embraced Christianity. Jerome and Paula were exonerated – but they had to leave Rome and so they set out for Jerusalem, accompanied by her daughter Eustochium.
The very presence of this teenaged virgin seemed to inflame Jerome who smelled sex everywhere and spent much of the trip writing tracts warning of its dangers. ‘Lust’, he wrote, ‘tickles the senses and the soft fire of sensual pleasure sheds its pleasing glow.’ Once in Jerusalem, Jerome and his pious millionairesses found a new city that was an entrepot of sanctity, trade, networking and sex. The piety was intense and the richest of these ladies, Melania (who enjoyed an annual income of 120,000 pounds of gold), founded her own monastery on the Mount of Olives. But Jerome was horrified by the sexual opportunities offered by the mixing of so many strange men and women crowded together in this theme park of religious passion and sensory excitement: ‘all temptation is collected here’, he wrote, and all humanity – ‘prostitutes, actors and clowns’. Indeed ‘there is no sort of shameful practices in which they don’t indulge’, observed another saintly but sharp-eyed pilgrim, Gregory of Nyssa. ‘Cheating, adultery, theft, idolatry, poisoning, quarrels and murder are everyday occurrences.’
Imperial patronage, monumental building and the stream of pilgrims now created a new calendar of festivals and rituals around the city, climaxing with Easter, and a new spiritual geography of Jerusalem, based on the sites of Jesus’ Passion. Names were changed,* traditions muddled, but all that matters in Jerusalem is what is believed to be true. Another female pioneer, Egeria, a Spanish nun, who visited in the 380s, described the ever-expanding panoply of relics in the Holy Sepulchre† that now included King Solomon’s ring and the horn of oil that had anointed David. These joined Jesus’ crown of thorns and the lance that pierced his side.