Caesarea Marittima is of
incalculable importance in the history of the world and of Christianity. Herod
who professed to be a Jew, built a city dedicated to Greek gods and to the
divine Emperor, Augustus. It was the major port of an area that had no ports to
speak of. The Jewish world looked east to Babylon, but Herod used that most
amazing invention of the Romans, concrete that hardened underwater, to build
one of the most impressive ports in the Mediterranean world. It was like a nail
that held the Holy Land to the west. To get to Aramaic-speaking Babylon with
its large Jewish community one had to travel for months across a dangerous
semi-desert landscape. To get to Rome and Greece one got on a nice ship at
Caesarea and if the winds were right, in a few pleasant weeks one was in Athens
or Rome.
Caesarea
aimed the message of Christ to a cosmopolitan world where it flourished. Peter
and Paul went west. The Gospels were written in Greek, the common language of
the west. Herod thought he was pleasing the Roman upstart generalissimo. He was
creating a springboard for the Gospel of Christ. We read in the Acts of the
Apostles that Philip
the Deacon brought Christianity to Caesarea. St Paul enjoyed the
hospitality of Philip the Deacon’s home.
St. Peter came to Caesarea from the smaller southern port of Joppa down
the coast after having had a vision to baptize Cornelius the
Centurion and his household. It was in Caesarea that the first non-Jewish
Christians were baptized. Remember that Cornelius was part of the Roman
government and that he and his slaves were Greek-speakers. When the new convert
Paul about was about to be killed in Jerusalem, the leaders of the Church
brought him to Caesarea, sent him home to Tarsus, waved him off at the dock
which is still there. I’m sure they shouted “Bon voyage! Don’t call us. We’ll call you!”
Paul's
first missionary journey left from Caesarea and he visited Caesarea numerous
times between missionary journeys. He was a prisoner there for two years before
being shipped off to Rome to be tried before the emperor. St. Paul is buried in
Rome as is St. Peter, but they got there by way of Caesarea. I imagine that
Caesarea was their last glimpse of the Holy Land where they had met Christ and
had seen Him risen from the dead.
Early
Christian traditions hold that the first Bishop of Caesarea was Zacchaeus the Tax collector,
and that at one point Cornelius the Centurion was a bishop of Caesarea. It
could be true. They both worked for the Roman government and the Roman
government was headquartered in Caesarea, not Jerusalem. Great Christian
scholars like Origen and Pamphilus made
Caesarea their home. The theological school of Caesarea was home to largest
Christian library of the time, having 30,000 manuscripts: Gregory Nazianzus,
Basil the Great and Jerome all studied in Caesarea. It is even possible that
the first drafts of the Nicene Creed were written in Caesarea! (At least the
great bishop historian Eusebius of Caesarea seemed to think that).
When
you see Caesarea, you are seeing the springboard of Christianity. Caesarea
flourished as the capital of a Byzantine Christian Holy Land for another 600
years. Invaders from the east conquered and devastated it in 614, and again in
640 when it was captured by the troops of Muawiyah I. The harbor was
allowed to silt up and it was unusable by the around the year 800. The
crusaders took the city in 1101. It was revived as fortress and harbor. Saladin
captured the city in 1187; the Crusaders took it back in 1191. The Mamelukes
finally captured it in 1265. They destroyed it completely so that it could
never be used as a port again. They did the same to all Crusader coastal cities
and harbors. Once again, the Holy Land turned east and its towns withered into
underpopulated ruins on the edge of the desert. Around the year 1500, Jerusalem
herself had shrunk to the size of a large village of around 5,000 inhabitants.
It remained a shabby backwater off the beaten path until more modern times.
Rev.
Know-it-all
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment