Episode Transcript
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Jerusalem, previously referred to as the City of David,
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was in some ways not a city as we would see it today.
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It was more like a fortress in the Judean Hills.
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Jerusalem, with its rises and falls over time,
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presents us with an opportunity to reflect on its story and its history.
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We hope you enjoy The Navel of the Earth: Jerusalem in time, theology and imagination.
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In these podcasts, we are
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seeking to explore Jerusalem in its many aspects.
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Jerusalem in time and place.
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And we've already traced a journey from
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the conquest of Jerusalem by King David
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to establish a new capital,
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right down through history until the time of the New Testament.
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Now we've only been touching on the mountaintops.
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In fact, the history of Jerusalem, as you might have begun
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to sense, is extraordinarily complex.
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And to go into every detail, we'd be doing podcasts forever.
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And that's not our task.
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So, we are touching upon mountaintops.
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But even that, I think, is worthwhile.
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So last time we came to the point of the New Testament,
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the time of Jesus, and we saw that King Herod really to
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establish his credibility, state his credentials
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among a people who were at least sceptical in his regard,
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built this magnificent new temple.
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And that was the temple that Jesus
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knew and in which he spent considerable time.
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We know that for certain.
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There was much about Jesus that we do not know, but we know
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that when he came to Jerusalem
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from the north,
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from Galilee, which was his home turf.
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When he came to Jerusalem, often on pilgrimage, he went to the temple.
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As any pious Jew would have done.
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He didn't stay in the city of Jerusalem, we know that too, that he stayed
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up on the Mount of Olives and around the ridge a bit to the town
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of Bethany, where his friends Martha, Mary, and Lazarus lived.
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He stayed with them.
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And that's why in the Gospels, you’ll find Jesus coming down
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the Mount of Olives into Jerusalem and into the temple.
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Or leaving Jerusalem and the temple, therefore,
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and going down into the Kidron Valley and up the Mount of Olives,
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and around the ridge to Bethany, where he would have stayed the night.
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We know that for certain.
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Now, I mentioned pilgrimage
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with regard to the temple.
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Way back in the time of the prophet Jeremiah in the six hundreds.
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In other words, before the exile.
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There was that great reform movement that we've seen in an earlier podcast
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that we often called the Deuteronomic Reform.
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Deuteronomic just means the second law, a kind of new beginning.
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When Jerusalem and the Jewish state knew that they were in big trouble
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with the emergence of Babylonian power in the region.
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And what the prophets were saying, prophets like Jeremiah was,
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you're doomed unless you turn to the law with a new kind of commitment.
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It will be your disobedience of God's law that will be your downfall.
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Not so much the Babylonian army, but your disobedience
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of the divinely given law, which is a royal road of liberation.
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And you will find the exact opposite of liberation
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if you turn away from that God given royal road to freedom.
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Now, one of the things in that time of reform that happened was
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they closed all the other shrines except the temple in Jerusalem.
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So, the only place where you could worship
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the living God was where it was believed,
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God had himself made a home
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in Jerusalem.
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So, all the other shrines, were closed.
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And from that moment on, you had to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
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And that's why pilgrimage to Jerusalem became such a fundamental element
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of Judaism at this time and beyond of course.
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It would be a bit like in a diocese like the Archdiocese of Brisbane
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if I decided, and I won't, but if I did decide
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to close all the parish churches and all the chapels and say,
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there's only one place where you can come to Mass, and that's the Cathedral.
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Now you can imagine
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the effect that that would have if I tried it.
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But it was similar in the sixth century before Christ.
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When this decree went forth from Jerusalem,
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that Jerusalem and the temple were the only place that you could
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worship the living God.
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And that was the situation that applied in the time of Jesus.
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So, for instance, when his parents bring him to Jerusalem,
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as we're told in the gospel on pilgrimage, when he's about twelve.
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Now, twelve in those days was older than it is now.
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They would have been doing what, again, any pious Jew would have done,
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making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in order to sacrifice,
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according to the law, sacrifice to the one true God.
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So right from his childhood,
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right through his life, Jesus is in and out of the temple.
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Not just on pilgrimage, because
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one of the things that he certainly did in the temple was to teach in the temple.
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And the temple wasn't just a place of worship,
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it was a place of meeting, it was a place of teaching,
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all kinds of things went on in the temple complex, which was enormous by the way.
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So, he certainly taught in the temple
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and became a controversial figure.
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Particularly when he starts cleansing the temple.
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The story where he drives all the merchants,
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the money makers out of the temple.
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Mind you, he only uses, a whip of cord,
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you know, string, some rope, so it's not particularly violent.
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But again, this only stirs greater controversy.
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Tell us by what authority you do this,
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is what the religious leaders put to Jesus.
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And it’s a fair question.
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And in his reply,
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he talks about not so much the building of the temple,
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because one of the things that emerges in his preaching
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is the prophecy of the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem.
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This was an extraordinary, and an extraordinarily
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subversive thing to say.
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That this temple, which took forty-six years
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to build, will be destroyed.
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Jesus says, not one stone will be left on another.
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And in fact, in Jerusalem now the only stones left
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are what we call the Western Wall.
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That was the retaining wall of Herod's Temple.
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And Jewish belief is, and this is why they worship there now,
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that if there is some spark of the divine glory left,
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it's left somehow in those stones.
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The glory left the temple, but there might be some tiny
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trace of the divine glory
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attaching to those great stones
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that that compose the Western Wall.
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So, Jesus says, destroy this temple.
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And he has prophesied its destruction.
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Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.
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Well, of course, you can imagine the reaction.
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It's taken us nearly fifty years to build this temple, and you're saying
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you're going to destroy it and then build it up again in three days?
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But this is the Gospel of John, and the evangelist says,
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but he was talking about the temple that was his Body.
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So, the body of Jesus
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becomes the new temple.
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Once the old temple, the temple of Herod is destroyed,
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the temple becomes the body of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen.
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This is fundamental to John's Gospel,
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but it is fundamental to the kind of shift
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that marks Christianity from the New Testament onwards.
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In other words, the temple, the building in Jerusalem,
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in all its magnificence was really only foreshadowing,
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a kind of fulfillment that would come in the body of Christ.
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So, where
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is the glory of God to be found now?
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In the body of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen.
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This is an incredible claim.
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To think that a body of someone executed as a criminal,
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could be the epicentre of the divine glory is turning the world on its head.
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But that's the kind of claim that Christianity makes.
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And again, in John's Gospel, we're told that when Jesus dies, one of the soldiers
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came to deliver the coup de grâce to make sure he was dead.
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Or to break his legs if he wasn't dead, to make sure that he died quickly.
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But he saw that he was dead, and we’re told he pierced his side
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with a lance and immediately there flowed forth blood and water.
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Now, this is all the language of symbol.
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It's symbolic language that looks back to a great passage
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in the prophet Ezekiel,
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where the prophet is taken to Jerusalem,
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and he stands on the eastern side of the temple, and he sees coming
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from the side of the temple, a tiny little trickle.
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And the trickle becomes a little river.
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And that river becomes a great torrent flowing down from the side
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of the temple, down through the desert and hitting the Dead Sea.
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And everywhere it goes, it turns the desert to a garden.
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And even the Dead Sea teems with life.
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In other words, this is the stream coming from
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the side of the temple that turns death to life.
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Now on Calvary,
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not the Temple Mount, but Calvary, the dark mountain.
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What we find in John's Gospel is from the side
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of the new temple, the body of the dead Christ, who could believe that?
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There comes another river,
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just as in the prophet Ezekiel.
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From the side of Christ there comes a river, not just of water,
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but of blood and water now, his lifeblood.
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And that river from his side flows
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out into the deserts of the cosmos and turns all death to life.
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That's the way the symbolism works.
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So that again, the passage, the great passage in Ezekiel, chapter 47,
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foreshadows the great passage of John chapter 19.
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So that transfer of meaning from the temple building
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to the body of Christ.
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The temple building which can be destroyed and was destroyed, again.
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The body of Christ, which can never be destroyed,
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this is the temple that no one can now destroy.
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The temple that is forever.
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Now Jesus
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foretells the destruction of the temple.
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Keeping in mind, just by the way, that the Gospels,
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well certainly three of the four canonical gospels
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Matthew, Luke, and John,
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are written after the destruction of the temple in 70 AD.
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Mark is almost certainly written before.
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But by that stage
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the end was foreseeable.
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Now, what happened was this.
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The first century of the Common Era was a
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profoundly unsettled time in this part of the Roman Empire, for all kinds of reasons.
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Not only the Roman occupation, but there had been famines, and there was a sense
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that the end had to be near, because things had reached such a pitch of horror
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that they could hardly get worse.
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The sense that God must intervene for the sake of His people.
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That the kingdom of God must come.
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Which meant the destruction of the Roman kingdom, for some.
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Now, there were those
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who said that the only way
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to react to this crisis situation that had emerged
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was to take up arms against the occupying force, the Romans.
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And by violent struggle to create a new order.
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And this again is a theme through history, is it not?
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So, in 66 AD,
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66 of the first century of the Common Era.
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The Jewish War breaks out.
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And it's a revolt against Roman power.
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In what was a very unstable part of the empire,
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and Rome was very sensitive to trouble in this part of the empire.
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So, 66 breaks out, the Jewish War breaks out.
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Now, Rome expected to be able to crush the Jewish War very quickly.
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And they don't.
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The reason for that was no one could beat Rome at a pitched battle.
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But this wasn't a pitched battle, because the Jewish War was a war
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in which the rebels fought a guerilla war.
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Not unlike the kind of tactics used by the Viet Cong in Vietnam against the Americans
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who had massive military power.
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But they weren't used to fighting guerrilla warfare.
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Now, similarly with Rome.
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It took them,
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eventually they had to send in their crack legion, the 10th Legion,
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to try and bring the thing to an end because it became acutely embarrassing
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for the Empire, that it had taken them years
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to seize Jerusalem.
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Which doesn't happen until 70.
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So, it's taken them four years
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to seize Jerusalem.
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And once they do, the revenge they take
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is in proportion to the embarrassment they had suffered.
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They flattened the city, they destroy the temple, put it to the torch.
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And this magnificent temple that had stood for
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only a few years, really,
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is down in the dust, never to rise again.
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The only thing left, as I have said, is the retaining wall
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with those magnificent limestone blocks that you see in Jerusalem still today.
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So that's the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in 70 AD
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which is a fundamentally important moment
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in the life not only of Judaism, because all the leadership pretty well
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was wiped out, but also in Christianity, because up until then,
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the Mother Church unquestionably had been the Church in Jerusalem.
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It was there that you went for
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a decisive judgment in matters of controversy.
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And again, you see this in the New Testament.
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And what happened at that point was that
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the centre of gravity of Christianity moved across the Mediterranean,
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moved from Jerusalem to Rome.
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And that's when eventually the bishop of Rome acquires
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an unusual kind of authority in the Church,
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because the centre of gravity has moved across the Mediterranean
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after the destruction of Jerusalem from Jerusalem to Rome.
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So, this had fateful consequences.
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And really, it's the catastrophe of 70
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that gives us the New Testament as we now have it.
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Just as the catastrophe of the Babylonian exile
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gave us more or less the Old Testament as we as we now have it.
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So, in that sense, again,
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the Bible is the product of the two catastrophes, we could say.
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Beyond the destruction
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of 70, and by the way, they didn't
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finally conclude the Jewish War until something like 73.
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Because the last to hold out against the Roman power
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were the refugees who took shelter
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in the fortress of Masada, the desert fortress of King Herod.
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So, it was the fall of Masada in 73
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that finally brought the Jewish War to an end.
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Now, at that point,
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the Romans took this part of the empire by the scruff of the neck.
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And you would have thought that that was the end of any attempt
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to fight against the Roman domination.
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But it wasn't.
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Because in 135,
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so we're looking, you know, sixty-five years later.
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You have yet another rebellion.
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And this time it's called the Bar Kokhba rebellion.
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And, Bar Kokhba just means the son of the star,
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who seems to have been the leader of the rebellion.
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And it again, it wasn't as embarrassing
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to the Romans as had been the Jewish War.
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But it was embarrassing enough
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so that finally, when they crushed the rebellion,
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what Rome decided to do was to build over the ruins of Jerusalem,
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to build a Roman city,
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to cancel the name of Jerusalem forever, they thought.
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And they called it Aelia Capitolina,
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a Latin, a Roman name.
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And so that's what you had from 135 onwards.
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You had this Roman city, Aelia Capitolina, from which Jews were forbidden.
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They couldn't live there.
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They were expelled from the city.
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Now, beyond that,
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you have eventually
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the arrival
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of the imperium, in other words, the emperor.
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Constantine appears on the scene in the early three hundreds.
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And this is again a decisive turning point in the history of Jerusalem.
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Because
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Constantine, under the influence in part of his pious mother,
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who's known as Saint Helena.
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He becomes Christian.
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It's again quite a complex story.
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He wasn't baptised until his deathbed, but he decides that Christianity
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is to be the religion of the empire.
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And he builds in Jerusalem, again
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under the influence of his mother and others, but certainly his mother.
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He builds magnificent
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Christian churches, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,
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the Church of the Nativity and so on.
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Various magnificent churches, fragments of which still remain.
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But these in time were destroyed, again keeping in mind
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Jerusalem seventeen times destroyed, eighteen times rebuilt.
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So, the arrival of Constantine does
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mark a turning point in the history of Jerusalem
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and Byzantine power.
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In other words, the Roman power which now had its capital in Constantinople.
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The capital under Constantine, had moved from Rome to Constantinople.
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So, it was Rome based in Constantinople,
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that now controlled not only Jerusalem, but the region.
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And it's referred to as Byzantine power because
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the original name of the town, Constantine, turned into Constantinople,
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named after himself was, Byzantium.
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So, the power that dominates in Jerusalem
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up until, the Islamic invasions or the Arab conquest
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that comes in about the 630’s.
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So, you have the Byzantines, the Romans,
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up until the seventh century.
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And then the Arab presence, which is Islamic,
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dominates Jerusalem until the Crusades,
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until 1099, when the First Crusade, astonishingly in some ways,
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succeeds in taking Jerusalem.
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So that once again Jerusalem is made a Christian city.
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And the Arab conquest of the seventh century had destroyed
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much of what Constantine had built.
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So, on the ruins of Constantine's Church of the Holy Sepulchre,
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the crusaders build
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another church of the Holy Sepulchre, not as big and not as magnificent.
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But that's the Basilica that you see in Jerusalem when you go now.
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And it has all the shapes of crusader architecture.
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It's medieval essentially, in its forms.
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So, the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem,
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as it was called, lasts from 1099 until the
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destruction, well the victory of the
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Arab armies, the Islamic armies over the Crusaders
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in the twelfth century.
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And something like 1187.
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So that's the end of the Christian domination of the city.
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Once Saladin and his troops
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win the battle and take the city, therefore.
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So that
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through a period of centuries
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you had Islamic rulers in the city,
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really until 1918.
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Because you had a people known as the Mamluks,
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who were the dominant power in Jerusalem
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from about 1200 to 1500.
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And then after that, the Ottomans.
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A name which is more familiar to us, perhaps, and they retain control
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of Jerusalem and of the region
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until the end of the First World War.
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And at that point you have the British then come in
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with the British Mandate in 1917.
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And that holds good, the British Mandate,
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until 1948.
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When you have the establishment of the State of Israel.
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The whole history of Zionism itself is a very fascinating story.
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But the roots of what happened in 1948, go back a very long way.
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Zionism, in other words, establishing, a Jewish state in the Middle East
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was not a new idea at all.
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But it was given a unique kind of impetus by the Holocaust.
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Because what became, what the Holocaust made abundantly clear was that
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Judaism, Jews had nowhere to go.
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Europe had made that abundantly clear through centuries.
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So that their only hope, in one sense,
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beyond the Holocaust, was to establish a Jewish state.
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And for many, obviously, the natural place
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for that to be was the so-called Holy Land in the Middle East.
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So that was 1948.
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However, the Jewish state did not have control of Jerusalem
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until 1967.
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And it was the
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00:24:24,440 --> 00:24:26,960
Israeli victory in 1967
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which allowed, the state of Israel to take control of Jerusalem.
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So that for the first time for many, many, many centuries,
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you had Jerusalem in Jewish hands.
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And the State of Israel declared at the time that Jerusalem
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was the eternal and undivided capital of the Jewish state.
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And that, of course, drew lots of,
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a fire and still does.
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So that's where we are more or less at the moment.
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Again, it's a little more complex than that makes it sound, because
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the Jordan controls the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
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00:25:12,560 --> 00:25:16,080
This, again, is a source of controversy.
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But the state of Jordan,
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00:25:19,320 --> 00:25:22,080
and not the state of Israel, controls
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00:25:22,080 --> 00:25:25,280
the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
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00:25:25,280 --> 00:25:30,920
Which remains essentially in Islamic hands, therefore.
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00:25:30,920 --> 00:25:37,440
Because on the Temple Mount, you have not only,
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00:25:37,440 --> 00:25:41,080
the Dome of the Rock, which was the first great Islamic building.
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Really built to contend
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00:25:42,280 --> 00:25:46,240
with the great buildings of Christianity, and it is magnificent.
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00:25:46,240 --> 00:25:50,200
And you also have the Al-Aqsa Mosque,
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00:25:50,200 --> 00:25:55,160
which in fact goes back to, crusader times.
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00:25:55,160 --> 00:25:58,480
But it became a mosque and
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00:25:58,480 --> 00:26:05,840
is venerated by Islam, far and wide.
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Because Jerusalem is, Mecca, Medina and then Jerusalem.
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They’re the three holiest cities of Islam.
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And that's one of the reasons why
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00:26:18,960 --> 00:26:21,560
the story and the status of Jerusalem is so complex,
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00:26:21,560 --> 00:26:26,920
because it is regarded as the holy city, or certainly one of the holy cities
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00:26:26,920 --> 00:26:32,040
of Judaism, obviously, but also of Christianity and also of Islam.
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00:26:32,040 --> 00:26:43,200
And once you're talking about holy ground, you are talking potential trouble.
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That then, is a thumbnail sketch at best
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of an extraordinary story.
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And there are many wonderful books that tell the story
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in far greater detail than I have in these podcasts.
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So, if you wish to know more, and it's certainly worth the effort.
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There is a book that I could recommend by,
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00:27:08,120 --> 00:27:12,560
Simon Sebag Montefiore, who is a well-known writer.
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And it's called Jerusalem: The Biography.
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Now, I’ll warn you, it's a big fat book, but it is a great read.
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Even when you know the history more or less as I do.
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He tells a great story, and it is an extraordinary story.
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And it's not just about Judaism or Christianity or Islam.
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00:27:30,360 --> 00:27:33,880
It really is a story about the human being.
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00:27:33,880 --> 00:27:36,880
And I have said before, and I say again,
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that we are talking of a city
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that is holy, certainly, its holy ground.
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But there you encounter the best
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00:27:47,280 --> 00:27:50,600
and the worst, of the human being.
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Which gives the place the most extraordinary human intensity.
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And makes it, and it did for me make it,
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one of the most exhausting, but exhilarating places,
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00:28:03,520 --> 00:28:05,960
in the world in which to live.
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Thank you for listening to this episode of The Navel of the Earth: Jerusalem in time, theology and imagination.
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A new episode is released weekly.
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You can find more podcasts from the Archdiocese of Brisbane from most major podcast providers
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or from our website: brisbanecatholic.org.au
