Jerusalem At The Time Of Jesus

By David Van Biema/Jerusalem

This would have been his path. According to the gospels, it was in the area of Bethany and Bethphage that Jesus would have stayed each evening of the Passover holiday--on the far slope of the Mount of Olives, where his followers Mary and Martha lived and where he raised their brother Lazarus from the dead. During the festival it was a tradition and a necessity for pilgrims to spend the night on the outlying hills. Each morning Jesus would have set out again, over the top of the mount and then down its western slope to the great holy city below.

Today verses from the Koran waft from a dozen open windows in the town of Bethany. Islam regards Jesus as a great prophet, and Bethany's mostly Muslim residents are proud of its 2,000-year-old tradition. Just a few yards down a steep road from the tomb believed to have been Lazarus' is al Ozir Mosque, named for him in Arabic; a few yards up is a Greek Orthodox church honoring Mary and Martha. Jesus, on his way to Jerusalem, would have walked up this hill, a local woman explains, and turned right at the top toward Bethphage.

Next would have come a hike along the hill's crest, which would have led him to a place now occupied by a hotel called the Seven Arches. The view here is stunning. Directly below is an ancient necropolis--an immense graveyard dating back long before Jesus that could cause anyone, not just a religious rebel with a price on his head, to consider his mortality. The ground falls off sharply, dotted with stands of pine and, yes, silvery green olive trees. Jesus--or his donkey--would have picked his way from here down into the Kidron Valley. On the other side, then as now, a great tan wall--the grandiose platform for a place of worship--would have reared up before him. He would have passed through what was known as the Beautiful Gate and entered Jerusalem.

Across from the Seven Arches, five or six colored hens pick for corn, and a herd of sheep grazes among scarlet anemones. Hiba Gaith, an 11-year-old Palestinian girl who lives nearby, is singing a song she and her friends learned at school. She wears jeans, and her long ponytail is done up with a brown butterfly clip. "The sound of the stone/ The blood of usurpers/ The hearts are bleeding in fury/ They carry stones in their small hands/ And challenge the aggressors," she sings. "The martyr Mohammed/ Seen by millions/ Taking refuge in the bosom of his father/ Dying by damned bullets/ His blood is splashing in the sky." The song, by Egyptian pop artist Walid Tawfiq, is about Mohammed al-Durra, the 12-year-old whom the world witnessed dying in his father's arms in cross fire last October during the early stages of the latest Israeli-Palestinian conflagration. The tune, says Hiba, "is implanted in my heart."

Seven-year-old Mahmoud Zomored zooms by on his red-and-black tricycle. He pauses to peer down at the city below. What does he see there? "I see war." Why? "The Arabs throw stones at Jews, and Jews kill Arabs." Does he throw stones? "No. I do not want to die."

It is impossible today to hear the word Jerusalem without thinking about the violence that is again bedeviling the Holy Land. The Palestinians do more than throw stones; and the Israelis are entitled to their own odes to lost children. Like 10-month-old Shalhevet Pass, the daughter of Jewish settlers in the mostly Palestinian city of Hebron, who died last month when a sniper put a bullet, apparently intentionally, through her head. Last week, one-year-old Ariel Yered was critically wounded in a Palestinian mortar attack on the Atzmona settlement in the Gaza Strip. Almost 400 Palestinians and 65 Israelis have died since last fall, when peace negotiations imploded over the question of Jerusalem's status.

The current agony is not atypical of the locale's holy, bloody history. Over the centuries, each of the West's great faiths has coveted the city; each alternately has controlled it, and each has constructed around it a separate sacred history. As the myths have collided, the result has been a play of extremes: physical splendor alternating with utter destruction; moments of pious exultation oscillating with the grossest carnage. Or sometimes carnage and exultation at once. "Men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins," wrote an 11th century Crusader fresh from a massacre of Muslims on the Temple Mount. He added, "Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God."

The years from A.D. 1 to A.D. 33 happened to be a high point for the holy city. It was, says Eric Meyers, professor of Judaic studies at Duke University, "a great, great metropolitan area" and home to the lavishly restored Jewish Temple, a world-renowned wonder. It was prosperous and cosmopolitan. And it was also, unknowingly, the cradle for something else, a way of believing, of seeing, that would change the West and the rest of history. It is worth revisiting Jerusalem during this period not so much in celebration as in curiosity--to know the metropolis that shaped Jesus' last ministry and so wove itself into his great story, and to note, cautiously, the ways in which its vexations foreshadow those of Jerusalem today.

It is the Gospel of Luke that describes Jesus' childhood visit to Jerusalem. Though he had been there before--Luke says his family was visiting "as usual" for Passover--the 12-year-old from Nazareth, 60 miles to the north, must still have been agog walking south down the grand new Roman street toward the Temple's lower entrance. A stretch of that road is visible today, just below the Western Wall, majestically wide but piled high on one side with huge blocks of stone that rained from above during one of the city's many destructions.

There is a debate regarding exactly how citified the young Jesus would have been. Excavations of the city of Sepphoris, near Nazareth, reveal a bustling town, suggesting that he may have been less of a country lad than previous scholarship posited. But his native Galilee certainly had nothing to compare with this. Jerusalem was one of the biggest cities between Alexandria and Damascus, with a permanent population of some 80,000. During Passover, Succoth and Shavuoth, the great festivals during which Jews were obligated to make sacrifices at the Temple, between 100,000 and 250,000 visitors (historians differ) would stream down the long city thoroughfare.

The pilgrims would have shared the road with ox teams hauling huge slabs of limestone. Jerusalem, like today's Chicago, New York City or London, was a huge, ongoing building project. The sounds of construction would have mixed with the bleats and bellows of sacrificial animals for sale in streetside shops. The view to Jesus' left would have been taken up by a wall up to 150 ft. high--a wall not of the Temple itself but of a gargantuan platform atop which it perched. To his right would have been Jerusalem's Upper City, its Gold Coast, where the families of the priests who tended the sacrificial altars lived according to Jewish law but in Roman splendor. Asked to imagine the boy's main impression, Roni Reich, director of Temple Mount excavations for the Israeli Antiquities Authority, says, "Big!"

The city was in a renaissance. Its initial splendor had been snuffed out by Babylonia in 586 B.C. (see box page 52). Within 50 years, Jews had begun rebuilding, but full glory awaited the rule, from 37 B.C. to 4 B.C., of Herod the Great. Herod is one of ancient history's extraordinary figures. Ten times married, a serious drinker and a half-Jew who was half-trusted by his subjects, he played the superpower politics of his day consummately. In 63 B.C., Rome became Judea's ruler, succeeding Babylonia, Persia, Greece and the Jews themselves. Herod, who hailed from the neighboring province of Idumea (which included part of today's West Bank), won and maintained his position as the empire's proxy King of the Jews by allying himself successively with Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and Emperor Augustus, a dance involving very tricky pirouettes.

Herod killed thousands of Jerusalemites in the streets while taking power. But he was also a local who understood Judea's needs and its hard-won privilege of being governed under Jewish law. A builder king, he ordered up huge forts, palaces and indeed whole cities throughout Judea, and he created an artificial harbor at Caesarea Maritima that lasted 600 years.

But it was in Jerusalem, says Meyers, that Herod "undertook to make one of the major wonders of the ancient world." He rebuilt the existing meandering streets on a paved grid and created a moat-ringed palace featuring--in a moisture-starved region--picturesque water gardens. He added an amphitheater and a hippodrome. But the jewel in the crown, the spiritual, economic and social center of Judea and an icon to Jews throughout the region, was the Temple. It was his bid to rival Solomon, biblical builder of the Jews' first great house of worship, which had been razed by the Babylonians some 570 years earlier.

Physical remains of Herod's masterpiece are scarce. But they tend to support descriptions in the four surviving written sources from approximately the same period: the Gospels and the biblical book of Acts; the part of the Jewish Talmud called the Mishnah; and the histories of Flavius Josephus, a Jewish priest and commander turned Roman military aide who lived in the years A.D. 30 to A.D. 100. For instance, a stone found later near the Temple's likely site was inscribed with the words TO THE PLACE OF TRUMPETING, which corroborate Josephus' description of the signal for the beginning of the Sabbath.

Tradition forbade the Temple's enlargement beyond Solomon's original dimensions. So Herod expressed his egomania by adding a 35-acre platform--"the greatest ever heard of," writes Josephus--on which the Temple could sit. The Western Wall where Jews pray today is a small slice of the platform's 16-ft.-thick western side. Some of the stones are 30 ft. long and weigh up to 50 tons. ("Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!" exclaims a disciple in the Gospel of Mark.) As Herod built out over the adjacent valleys, the outline of the mountain on which the compound sat gradually disappeared. The great stone featured in the Dome of the Rock, the Muslim shrine that now occupies Herod's immense pedestal, may be the mountain's peak.

At the time, the platform (Jews call it the Temple Mount) had up to seven entrances. Most experts believe the remains of an expansive, carved-stone stairway on the south side of the mount, perpendicular to the Roman street, were once the main entry for common pilgrims. At the foot of the stairs are the ruins of a series of baths, for ritual purification, and small shops, some of which still have hitches for animals.

Temple worship revolved around sacrifice: a lamb for Passover, a bull for Yom Kippur, two doves--"the poor woman's sacrifice"--to celebrate a child's birth. Before buying an animal, visitors changed their Roman denarii (the dollar of the day) for shekels, or Temple coins, that had no portraits on them and so did not violate the Jewish prohibition of graven images. Herod appears to have allowed the money changers onto the Temple platform, which may have spurred Jesus' scourging of them in "my father's house." Joshua Schwartz, a professor of historical geography at Israel's Bar Ilan University, styles the stairway as a Judean version of London's Hyde Park Corner. There would be "beggars and upper-class Jews and Gentiles from all over," he says. "Scholars would be teaching, and would-be prophets would be preaching. The steps were the experience in Jerusalem."

After the Temple itself, perhaps. Scholars have hypothesized that the southern steps led pilgrims into a tunnel under an administrative building and out again amid a series of courtyards. The outermost was open to curious Gentiles. The remaining enclosures were for Jews only, as indicated by another of the Temple's remaining relics--a sign, in Greek, warning that any non-Jew passing farther "is answerable himself for his ensuing death."

Next came the Court of Women, followed by the Court of Israelites, the Court of the Priests and, above all, the massive sacrificial altar. The Temple's innermost shrine, featuring the holy room that the Bible said had been occupied by the Ark of the Covenant in Solomon's Temple, loomed 80 ft. high, a glistening tower.

The scene must have been spectacular. Whether that spectacle is understood as deeply felt or empty depends on later interpretation. "The place was as vast as a small city. There were literally thousands of priests, attendants, temple soldiers and minions," writes historian Paul Johnson. "Dignity was quite lost amid the smoke of the pyres, the bellows of terrified beasts, the sluices of blood, the abattoir stench, the unconcealed and unconcealable machinery of tribal religion inflated by modern wealth to an industrial scale."

Bruce Chilton, a religion professor at Bard College whose book Rabbi Jesus was published in October, says recent scholarship finds a great deal more meaning and joy in the proceedings. Pilgrimages were festive occasions, with families or friends traveling together and camping overnight in the hills around the city and singing cheerful sacred songs outside the Temple. Although parts of the sacrifice would be immolated for the Lord or consumed by the priests, others would be cooked and shared by the pilgrims, who ate little meat the rest of the year. "Not only would they offer this very scarce protein to the deity," says Chilton, "but actually share a meal of meat with the Lord of Israel. The sense was one of wealth and celebration."

Hollow or hallowed, the Temple was a formidable economic engine. Although only 2 million of the ancient world's 5 million Jews lived in the region, all were expected to pay a yearly half-shekel Temple tax. Historians have not definitively established a shekel's worth, but certainly the total earnings were great. At the three pilgrimage holidays, the economy shifted into overdrive. Jewish law required that sacrificial animals and grain offerings be "unblemished." Rather than risk spoilage along the way, most pilgrims raised the sacrificial goods at home, sold them and used the proceeds to buy fresh items in the holy city, supporting farmers for miles around.

An excavation under what is now the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City reveals the way the town's elite lived. Two-story houses, built around stone-paved inner courts, had separate baths for regular and ritual cleansing. Floors boasted fine mosaics; on the walls were frescoes or trompe l'oeil stucco that mimicked masonry. Archaeologists have uncovered finely crafted glass goblets and delicate perfume flasks. Experts are divided as to whether such prosperity was shared. Says Reich: "There weren't any real poor people in Jerusalem then. There were the rich and the less rich." Argues Fabian Udoh, professor of liberal studies at Notre Dame University: "The high priests, the aristocrats and the administrators would have been very, very rich, but there were also people who were very, very poor." The obvious economic tension in Jesus' preaching may reflect his experience either in Jerusalem or in Galilee.

Those in the middle, the craftsmen (like Jesus) and small businessmen and jewelers and tax collectors, would have got their education at home and at their local synagogue. (The wealthy would have hired tutors for their children, in the Greek style.) Women married in their early teens and would generally undergo seven or eight pregnancies in hopes of having three or four surviving children. They often managed the household and exerted considerable influence in the synagogue. The family would have observed religious laws regarding food and ritual purity, although many aspects of Jewish law were not formalized until later.

Jerusalem was a monoculture, comparable to Washington or Redmond, Wash. (It remains so today, although it is now tourism rather than religion that is the city's dominant business.) Unlike many company towns, however, the city in Jesus' time had a cosmopolitan feel. Its material needs drew caravans from Samaria, Syria, Egypt, Nabatea, Arabia and Persia. Two-thirds of its population were Jews (roughly the same percentage as today), practicing a religion that counted millions of adherents in the Roman Empire and a large group of "God fearers," Gentiles who observed some key precepts without full conversion. At the same time, the city was in its 15th generation of Greco-Roman influence (since the conquests of Alexander the Great in 332 B.C.). Parents gave their children Greek names; intellectuals were conversant in classical philosophy. Greek had become along with Hebrew and Aramaic one of the area's main languages, and one of the most commonly used versions of the Torah was in Greek. (Jesus presumably spoke all three languages.) The interaction of Jewish and classical thought would lend the Christian Bible much of its strength.

This Greco-Roman "modernism" was conflicted, however. A building full of soldiers loomed over the Temple courtyards like a watchtower over a prison. As Jesus and the other pilgrims performed the most sacred rites of their faith, they would never be beyond surveillance. After Herod's initial rise, the Roman yoke was relatively light, consisting mostly of tribute. But the Jews had been independent for a century before the imperial conquest, and many hoped to return to that state. In recognition of this, above the Temple's northwestern corner stood the city's great Roman garrison, the Antonia, named after Herod's patron Mark Antony and housing between 2,000 and 3,000 soldiers.

Their presence in the city's very soul posed a painful conundrum. Beneath its prosperous surface, says Neil Asher Silberman, director of the Ename Center for Public Archaeology in Brussels, Jerusalem was actually "extremely turbulent." To some, "the beautiful Temple of Herod was a horrible betrayal of Israelite tradition. Herod obliterated the original Temple and replaced it with a Roman one." Even the most prosperous citizens must have had some major identity issues.

This led, Silberman suggests, to "movements of desperation where people harked back to a purity of faith and looked for signs of messianic redemption." The city's dominant religious authorities, skewered in the Gospels, were the Sadducees, who made up most of the Temple elite, and the Pharisees, respected for their ongoing explorations of the correct interpretation of religious law. But the city also played host to groups like the Zealots, a militant nationalist group, and the Essenes. The Essenes detested the Temple priests, lived in monastic communities and may have been authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the treasure trove of texts uncovered in the Judean desert in 1947. Josephus assigns the Essenes a membership of 4,000, only 2,000 fewer than his count of Pharisees.

And then there were radical free-lancers like Jesus. Up until 20 years ago, it was left to Jewish analysts to present Jesus' various messages--of inner purity over legal adherence; of baptism; of messianism; of the expectation of God's kingdom on earth--as growing out of various 1st century Jewish beliefs. But lately, says Chilton, more Christian scholars have scuttled the idea that Jesus' Judaism was mere "ethnic happenstance." He argues, "If you were to take the elements of Jesus' position in isolation, each would [recall] the practice of a certain type of Judaism. He is distinctive in the way in which he brings the elements together and is able to mediate the spirit of God to his followers so that they can be part of the revelation."

In any case, Jesus' radical new synthesis--and his dramatic preaching of it--was dangerous, especially in an atmosphere that Schwartz says had turned into "a tinderbox." Herod had managed to keep a lid on anti-Roman sentiment for most of his reign. But starting with his fatal illness in 4 B.C. and continuing over the careers of several less effective successors, a series of bloodily suppressed revolts erupted.

In 4 B.C., angry Jews, protesting the execution of students who had tried to remove a Roman eagle from the Temple decorations, threw stones down on their occupiers from the mount's porches and set off a citywide riot; eventually 2,000 rebels were crucified. In A.D. 26, the Roman governor provocatively ordered his troops to raise flags with Caesar's face within a few hundred feet of the central shrine. A mob marched to his house in Caesarea. His soldiers drew their swords. The Jews, in an extraordinary act of passive resistance, laid bare their necks and said they would rather die than see their religious laws flouted. The governor, a normally hot-tempered newcomer named Pontius Pilate, recalled the flags.

The situations now and then are not analogous. Israel's current Jewish government, unlike the Roman Empire, is not alien to Jerusalem. The Palestinians are not as defenseless as the ancient Jews. And Israeli opposition leader (now Prime Minister) Ariel Sharon's unwelcome stroll last September around the two Islamic shrines that now occupy the Temple platform--a provocation that may have sparked the Holy Land's current strife when Muslims responded by throwing rocks down on Jews at prayer below--has no precise 1st century cognate. Still, the intertwined dynamic of military occupation and religious clash is shockingly familiar.

Two thousand years ago, the man in the middle of this potentially deadly tug-of-war was the high priest. The position, ritually paramount at the Temple, had been politically hobbled by Herod. Nonetheless, as head of the Sanhedrin, a Jewish religious and civic body, and a key participant at city council meetings, the officeholder still had great power and responsibility.

The actions of Caiaphas, high priest from A.D. 18 to A.D. 36, are traditionally attributed to rage over Jesus' challenges to his class's power and his personal standing. But historians have begun to argue for a more nuanced appreciation. Caiaphas knew better than anyone that the doomed Jewish revolts inevitably started at the Temple, frequently during Passover, as keyed-up pilgrims celebrated Israel's liberation from an earlier oppressor. He knew Pilate as a ruler, says Richard Horsley of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, who "shot first and asked questions later." Personal pride notwithstanding, the high priest had reason to act against a Jew who had disrupted the Temple and may have been plotting another grand entrance on the second day of the feast. To Caiaphas, says Lee Levine, professor of Jewish history at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, "Jesus and others like him were just a bad idea. Bad for the Temple, bad for the Romans and bad for the Jews."

Rome reserved crucifixion primarily for capital crimes and discontinued the practice in the 4th century. Historians learned considerably more about its specifics in 1968, when the remains of a man crucified in his mid 30s were discovered north of Jerusalem with a 7-in. iron nail still embedded in the heel. The state of the bones indicated that the condemned man's arms were outstretched and that his feet had been placed sideways, with the nail driven first through a small block of wood and then through both heels into the cross. Later the wood block would prevent the feet from coming free as the wound ripped and enlarged. Contrary to most representations, the knees were bent.

The path of the Via Dolorosa, the Stations of the Cross, through the Old City of Jerusalem is almost certainly inaccurate. It follows a 14th century grid of the city rather than a 1st century plan, and probably reflects the desire of 14th century merchants along the way to get pilgrims' business. But the hill of Golgotha (a.k.a. Calvary) and Jesus' burial cave, both located by tradition in Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulcher, are a different matter.

In Jesus' day executions and burials took place outside the city. Today the church is tucked within the Old City's Christian Quarter, but at the time, the area would have been safely outside town walls. The niche-style grave is consistent with 1st century custom. Written attestations to its authenticity--and that of the Calvary rock a few yards away--date back more than 1,800 years. Tellingly, early rulers who might have been tempted to "adjust" the site's location did not do so. Says Dan Bahat, for many years Jerusalem's district archaeologist: "There's nothing to prove that this is not the site of the Crucifixion." If this sounds weak to a believer, coming from an archaeologist, it carries significant weight.

When the unnamed disciple remarked on the size of the Temple stones, Jesus replied that "not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down." He was right. After one last rebellion, in A.D. 135, the Romans leveled Jerusalem, leaving only the bald platform behind. The city, of course, rose again and fell again, was conquered and reconquered ...

Yousef Abu Ghannam's family holds the key (and the souvenir concession) for the Mosque of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives; it was a Christian shrine until Saladin took Jerusalem back from the Crusaders. Abu Ghannam reports sadly that business is down. "We used to get 700 to 800 people a day," he says. "Now we're lucky to get 150. People are afraid." The few visitors who brave Jerusalem today encounter a metropolis again edgy and turbulent. In the sanctuary of the city's churches, mosques and synagogues, pilgrims can find momentary tranquillity. But the streets bear new pocks from the bullets that flew here late last year. Herod's ancient platform had been closed since last fall to all but Islamic worshippers to avoid further confrontation: Sharon's directive last week to reopen it to non-Muslims may make it a flashpoint again. Travel in the area is the riskiest in a decade, and a U.S. State Department warning against it remains in effect.

At the Ascension Mosque there is at least one optimist, albeit with a long view. The Rev. Frank Booke of Anniston, Ala., has led his tour group to the small off-white domed tower. On its floor is an indentation that pilgrims have thought for centuries is the imprint made by Jesus' right foot as he ascended to heaven.

Booke is an ebullient Pentecostal Christian in an orange Stetson. Consistent with his faith, he takes solace in Christ's expected return to earth and his re-establishment of God's kingdom here, regardless of humankind's errors. Like many, Booke believes his Saviour will arrive at precisely the point from which he left. "This is the place," he says. His flock responds with an explosive "Hallelujah!" and a rendition of The Old Rugged Cross.

But Booke will not simply leave it at that. His joy over the eschatological future does not render him blind to the scandalous present. "We love the Jewish people," he says, then glances at the Muslim gatekeepers and adds, "These are all God's people. When everybody else is afraid, we come to support this land. To support the souvenir sellers. We pray for this land. We pray for the peace of Jerusalem."

--With reporting by Andrea Dorfman and Jonathan Calt Harris/New York and Said Ghazali, Eric Silver and Haim Watzman/Jerusalem

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With reporting by Andrea Dorfman and Jonathan Calt Harris/New York and Said Ghazali, Eric Silver and Haim Watzman/Jerusalem