Letter
to Paul Grimage continued:
I
have been told that my last letter was not very cheerful. I’ll have you know
that one of my readers laughed so hard upon reading it that she suffered an
asthma attack. If that’s not funny I don’t know what is! Now on to the next
lighthearted, humorous installment:
Before
Jerusalem was utterly destroyed by the Romans in the year 70 AD, there was no
clear distinction between Jew and Christian; in fact there was no clear
distinction between the Jew and Christian until the complete defeat of the
Jewish nation by the Romans in response to the Bar Kochba revolt around 130 AD.
Before then, Christianity was thought of as a sect of the Hebrew religion.
By
then, there were a number of forms of Christianity. There were the Gnostics who
tried to combine Egyptian and Persian religion with the teachings of Jesus.
There were Israelites who believed Jesus to be the Messiah, but never conceded
His divinity. Then there were His followers, the Twelve and the other
disciples, who taught that Jesus was the Son of Mary and the Son of God, fully
human and fully divine.
One
often hears the question, “Why did the Jews reject Jesus?” Dr. Rodney Stark, a
sociologist, makes the point that, in fact, the Jews didn’t reject Jesus. Many,
perhaps most Greek-speaking Jews in the first centuries after Christ, accepted
Jesus, His divinity, His humanity and His redemptive death. At the time of
Christ there were 6 or 7 million Jews in the Roman Empire. Two hundred or so
years after Christ there were less than a million. There must have been quite a
bit of attrition through war and plague, but not enough to obliterate 6 million
people. Dr. Stark, echoed by Fr. Richard Neuhaus, makes the point that much of
the substantial Samaritan population and the even larger Jewish population of
the Empire probably accepted Jesus as the Messiah (the Christ) and blended in
with the Greek speaking population.
In
this sense Christianity can be thought of as the first Reformed Judaism. One
could eat pork and shrimp and not undergo circumcision but could still be a
member of the House of Israel, reading the Torah and the prophets and singing
the psalms that one had always sung — no worshiping Isis, or some snake-god or
winged thing, and eating cheese on your hamburger. It was all good. Thus,
though Jews were thrown out of Judea and enslaved, and though no Jew could
enter Aelia Capitolina, the rebuilt Roman version of Jerusalem, there were
always Christians there. The lines between Jew and Greek were blurred by
Christianity, so the living memory of the places and events associated with
Jesus were never forgotten. There was always someone on the site who
remembered. In 190 AD, or thereabouts, Sextus Julius Africanus (a Greek
Christian) who had been born in Jerusalem was able to interview the surviving
relatives of Jesus regarding the discrepancies in Jesus’ genealogy. By the year 190 AD, people were very
interested in this Jesus, whether they were Jewish, Christian or somewhere in
between.
I
thought all this bother and brouhaha about the pilgrimage sites was a bunch of
hogwash until I went on a pilgrimage led by one of the very few Arab Catholic
guides in the Holy land. Arab Christians, especially those from Syria, the Holy
Land, Lebanon and like places are most probably descendants of those first
Christians who were among the Jews who accepted Jesus. I personally know a
family that can trace its origin to exiles from the first siege of Jerusalem
around 70 AD. The Holy Land at the time
of Christ was a mix of Greek and Jew and this mestizo culture blended even more
under the reconciling influence of Christ. This Arab Catholic guide was no
small intellect. He was a teacher and a graduate of the University of
Albuquerque. He told me a wonderful story. His father took him to a field and
pointed out a tree and told him, “My great grandfather proposed marriage to my
great grandmother under that very tree.
I took my grandson and showed him that tree.” His point was that small,
personal details are not soon forgotten among the inhabitants of the Holy Land.
I
thought about it. I remember my old pastor telling me when I was a boy that he
had seen the sun dance during the Fatima miracle in 1917. It is now a hundred
years later and I have told the children in my parish who will bring the story
into yet another century. Human memory is longer than we moderns want to
believe. Another factor is the incredible smallness of the Holy Land. Most of
the ministry of Jesus happened in an area called the Gospel Triangle, bounded
at three points by Capernaum, Bethsaida and Chorazin. It is a triangle about 5
miles, by 4 miles by 2 miles. The multiplication of the loaves took place down
the beach from where the sermon on the miraculous catch of fish was made and
just down the hill from where the Sermon on the Mount was preached. Jerusalem
is only a leisurely 3-day hike from Nazareth. For an old man to show his
grandson where Jesus worked unforgettable miracles would take no more than an
afternoon. By the time Christians were
coming to Judea from all over the Roman Empire, these places were well known to
many.
In
the church of the Holy Sepulcher there is an interesting graffito. As I
mentioned above, the emperor Hadrian obliterated what was left of the city of
Jerusalem in 130 AD. Jews were not allowed to enter the city. But Greeks were
allowed and Greek Christians and those Jews who had been Hellenized by their
exposure to Christianity never stopped venerating the shrines associated with
the life of Christ. In order to put a stop to it, Hadrian paved over the
remains of Jewish Jerusalem and built his city, Aelia Capitolina, directly over
the old quarry where the tomb of Christ and Calvary were located, he place a
central plaza and a temple to Aphrodite over the tomb and a statue of Zeus
directly over Golgotha. On the huge stone blocks of the retaining wall of that
plaza, there is a drawing of a Roman ship and a graffito in Latin “Domine, ivimus” or “Lord, we shall
go” Possibly a reference to Psalm 122.
It is thought to have written anytime from 150 AD to 300 AD. It was certainly
written before the church of the Holy Sepulcher was built. Bishop Melito of
Sardis around 150 AD said that the site of Calvary and the Holy Sepulcher were
in the middle of the street, in the middle of the city, right below Hadrian's
temple in honor of Aphrodite.
The story goes
that when the empress Helena, mother of Constantine, came looking for the holy
places in around 325, bishop Macarius of Jerusalem told her right where to dig.
Eusebius the historian, who lived at the time of the first excavation of the
tomb, said that the tomb showed “…clear and visible proof”. People think these
signs must have been supernatural. I don’t. Christians as we have seen, scrawl
graffiti everywhere. The tomb of Peter in Rome is covered with them. The house
of Peter in Capernaum is covered with them, so why not the tomb of Christ,
buried under the rubble of the old Jewish city?
Everyone
knew where the Lord had been buried. It was not on hill far away, it was at one
of the main gates of the city. The Romans reasoned, “Why waste a perfectly good
execution? Have it somewhere where everyone can benefit by it.” And of course,
the Bible says that in the place was also the tomb, and so it was found. The
other tomb, the second tomb which you mentioned, called the Garden Tomb, was
discovered only in the last century. A German scholar named Otto Thenius
decided that a hill north of the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem was the real
Calvary because if you squinted and tilted your head the right way it sort of
looked like a skull. He found a tomb nearby and decided that it must be the
tomb of Christ. Another archaeologist upon hearing of the discovery said, “Ach, du meine Gute! I hope that’s not
the tomb of Christ! I myself took the bones out of there just a few days ago!”
It turns out that the tomb was from the 1st
temple period about seven hundred years before the time of Christ. There is
only one site continuously venerated as the site of Calvary and the tomb and
that is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
The
site of Christ‘s birth was just as well known and commonly pointed out to
pilgrims from the first days. It is only about 5 miles south of Jerusalem. It
was a cave. Emperor Hadrian, (remember him?)
had the place turned into a shrine for Adonis, the Greek god of beauty.
St. Jerome, wrote around 410 AD that the cave had been consecrated to Adonis by
the pagans and that sacred grove had been planted there to wipe out the memory
of the birth of Jesus in that place. Justin Martyr (© 100 – 165 AD) also a
native of the Holy Land wrote in his Dialogue with Trypho that the Holy Family
had taken refuge in a cave just outside of town. “Joseph took up his quarters in a certain
cave near the village; and while they were there Mary brought forth the Christ
and placed Him in a manger, and here the Magi who came from Arabia found Him.”
(chapter LXXVIII). Hadrian, far from obliterating the holy sites, marked them
for posterity!
Why
a cave? Homeowners took advantage of caves. They were pre-dug basements; cool
in summer, warm in winter. They kept livestock in them which kept the place a
little warmer in winter — space heaters on the hoof. The ancestral home of my
family in lower upper-Hessia had a built-in chicken coop on the first floor.
Mmm... chickens... nice, warm chickens.
Where
was I? Yes. That’s the joy of being a Catholic, or for that matter orthodox. We
have long memories. We, like the Blessed Mother have treasured these things in
our hearts for two thousand years. There is a stone manger, a feed trough dug
into the wall of the cave. It is like other feed troughs dug into the stone of
that hard land. I have no doubt that you can go there and touch the very manger
into which Mary laid the Baby Jesus on the first Christmas two thousand years
ago. We have never forgotten where it was.
Merry
Christmas,
The Rev. Know-it-all
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