Innocence and War

by Ian Strathcarron

  An amusing aside, pointed out by every Ferguson on the way in, is the story of the ladder. As one enters the main doors up high on the right there is a small six-rung wooden ladder resting on a high level ledge under a window. It has been there since 1852. Why so? Because responsibility for cleaning the ledge was not specified in the Status Quo and none of the sects wants to take on the burden of owning it and upsetting the apple cart. A less amusing aside is that, as our Christian guide Saed points out: “the Status Quo has ruined the church as a place of worship. There are so many compromises on the services, what’s in them, how long they take, how big can be the procession, which way the procession must wend, how noisy can they be. Now they are all show, but no good even as a show.”

  The Easter weekend sums up how it works, and how it doesn’t work. Each of the top three sects has been given a day - Good Friday, Easter Sunday and Easter Monday - when each has supremacy for the day in turn. But the Status Quo forgot to apportion the Saturday and so all three started barging in on each other’s services, and worse. The Israelis have now banned all services on Easter Saturday due to the unruly behavior of the rival sects. Worse for Saed as a practicing minority Christian is that his own religion in its highest place of veneration is a laughing stock among all his majority Muslim friends who worship with dignity as a united faith - at least here in Jerusalem and Palestine.

  Mark Twain visited all the usual attractions in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and with an increasing degree of cynicism. This is a fine section of The Innocents Abroad, as if he had recovered from the dreariness of the endless desert, had had a good lazy loaf around at the hotel and, refreshed and recovered, finally had something meaty to get his teeth into.

  On entering “before you is a marble slab, which covers the Stone of Unction, whereon the Saviour’s body was laid to prepare it for burial. It was found necessary to conceal the real stone in this way in order to save it from destruction. Pilgrims were too much given to chipping off pieces of it to carry home.

  “Entering the great Rotunda, we stand before the most sacred locality in Christendom - the grave of Jesus. Stooping low, we enter the vault - the Sepulcher itself. It is only about six feet by seven, and the stone couch on which the dead Saviour lay extends from end to end of the apartment and occupies half its width. It is covered with a marble slab which has been much worn by the lips of pilgrims. This slab serves as an altar, now. Over it hang some fifty gold and silver lamps, which are kept always burning, and the place is otherwise scandalized by trumpery, gewgaws, and tawdry ornamentation.” He then touched upon two interesting stories with more recent developments - and once more they are stories he would have loved retelling: “The chapel of the Syrians is not handsome; that of the Copts is the humblest of them all. It is nothing but a dismal cavern, roughly hewn in the living rock of the Hill of Calvary.” The Syrian Orthodox chapel is indeed in a sorry state. The Syrians were generally discouraged by the Jordanians in the inter-Arab fallout after the Six Day War and could not even get past the first hurdle - permission to restore it. The Israelis gave them permission straight away but then the Syrians came up against the Armenians. Under the terms of the Status Quo the Syrian Orthodox chapel falls under the Armenian Orthodox remit. The Syrian Orthodox now have the funds to restore their chapel but the Armenians won’t allow them to do so, as the Status Quo says all repairs must be approved and carried out by the Armenians and can be charged back to the Syrians. This the Syrians refuse to do and so they have to pray every Sunday on the dirt floor in front of a charred altar surrounded by bare and damp walls.

  Mark Twain touched on the Copts: here is what happened to them. The ancient Egyptian sect, itself one of the earliest Christian sects, is one of the longest standing in Jerusalem but has always been the poorest and, as Twain said, the humblest. In Easter 1970, while they were praying on the Sunday, the Israeli army arrived and cleared out half their space by evicting their monks from the adjoining convent and installing Ethiopian monks in their stead. Why so? Well, firstly Egypt had been the ringleader of the Arabs in the Six Day War just three years previously and the Copts were an easy revenge target, and secondly Israel had already welcomed boatloads of Ethiopian Jews, many rumored to be of dubious Jewish provenance, and saw the strengthening of the Ethiopian community as a whole as a positive development. Of course, the Israelis and Ethiopians deny the whole fandango but the fact is that the last chapel you pass through on the southern entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is solidly Ethiopian.

  Now the Copts aren’t giving up without a fight. On a still disputed part of the roof a Copt monk has to sit at all times to maintain the claim. One blistering hot summer afternoon in 2002 a Copt monk moved his chair some eight inches towards the Ethiopian side to find better shade. An Ethiopian saw the transgression, rounded up his brother monks and a full-scale fistfight between the competing sects over the insult left eleven monks hospitalized and the Jews and Muslims stupefied all over again.

  Back to Mark Twain’s visit: “We were shown the place where our Lord appeared to His mother after the Resurrection. Here, also, a marble slab marks the place where St. Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, found the crosses about three hundred years after the Crucifixion. According to the legend, this great discovery elicited extravagant demonstrations of joy. But they were of short duration. The question intruded itself: ‘Which bore the blessed Saviour, and which the thieves?’ To be in doubt, in so mighty a matter as this - to be uncertain which one to adore - was a grievous misfortune. It turned the public joy to sorrow.

  “But when lived there a holy priest who could not set to simple a trouble as this at rest? One of these soon hit upon a plan that would be a certain test. A noble lady lay very ill in Jerusalem. The wise priests ordered that the three crosses be taken to her bedside one at a time. It was done. When her eyes fell upon the first one, she uttered a scream that was heard beyond the Damascus Gate, and even upon the Mount of Olives, it was said, and then fell back in a deadly swoon. They recovered her and brought the second cross. Instantly she went into fearful convulsions, and it was with the greatest difficulty that six strong men could hold her. They were afraid, now, to bring in the third cross. They began to fear that possibly they had fallen upon the wrong crosses, and that the true cross was not with this number at all. However, as the woman seemed likely to die with the convulsions that were tearing her, they concluded that the third could do no more than put her out of her misery with a happy dispatch. So they brought it, and behold, a miracle! The woman sprang from her bed, smiling and joyful, and perfectly restored to health.

  “When we listen to evidence like this, we cannot but believe. We would be ashamed to doubt, and properly, too. Even the very part of Jerusalem where this all occurred is there yet. So there is really no room for doubt.”

  They continued their tour of the sham relics - the Pillar of Flagellation, where they had to push a stick through a curtain to feel it: “He cannot have any excuse to doubt it, for he can feel it with the stick. He can feel it as distinctly as he could feel anything” - and the piece of the True Cross: “The Latin priests say it was stolen away, long ago, by priests of another sect. That seems like a hard statement to make, but we know very well that it was stolen, because we have seen it ourselves in several of the cathedrals of Italy and France.” They inspected the Prison of Our Lord with its stone stocks and the Tomb of Adam40, where Twain was pleased “here in a land of strangers, far away from home, thus to discover the grave of a blood relation. True, a distant one, but still a relation. The fountain of my filial affection was stirred to its profoundest depths, and I gave way to tumultuous emotion. I leaned upon a pillar and burst into tears. I deem it no shame to have wept over the grave of my poor dead relative. Noble old man - he did not live to see me - he did not live to see his child. And I - I - alas, I did not live to see him. Weighed down by sorrow and disappointment, he died before I was born - six thousand brief summers
before I was born. But let us try to bear it with fortitude. Let us trust that he is better off where he is. Let us take comfort in the thought that his loss is our eternal gain.” They saw, too, the altar for the Roman Soldier who declared “Surely this was the Son of God” and where “in this self-same spot the priests of the Temple beheaded him for those blasphemous words he had spoken.”

  Twain was particularly fond of St. Helena, the first Christian emperor Constantine’s mother, and of her tireless exploits. In the grotto which is the Chapel of St. Helena he saw where “Helena blasted it out when she was searching for the true Cross. She had a laborious piece of work, here, but it was richly rewarded. Out of this place she got the crown of thorns, the nails of the cross, the true Cross itself, and the cross of the penitent thief. When she thought she had found everything and was about to stop, she was told in a dream to continue a day longer. It was very fortunate. She did so, and found the cross of the other thief.” Then they visited the Chapel of the Invention of the Cross – “a name which is unfortunate, because it leads the ignorant to imagine that a tacit acknowledgment is thus made that the tradition that Helena found the true Cross here is a fiction - an invention. It is a happiness to know, however, that intelligent people do not doubt the story in any of its particulars.” Nor did they overlook the column that marks the center of the earth where “Christ said that that particular column stood upon the center of the world. If the center of the world changes, the column changes its position accordingly. To satisfy himself that this spot was really the center of the earth, a skeptic once paid well for the privilege of ascending to the dome of the church to see if the sun gave him a shadow at noon. He came down perfectly convinced. The day was very cloudy and the sun threw no shadows at all; but the man was satisfied that if the sun had come out and made shadows it could not have made any for him. Proofs like these are not to be set aside by the idle tongues of cavilers. To such as are not bigoted, and are willing to be convinced, they carry a conviction that nothing can ever shake.”

  He continued to marvel at St. Helena and her industry: “She traveled all over Palestine, and was always fortunate. Whenever the good old enthusiast found a thing mentioned in her Bible, Old or New, she would go and search for that thing, and never stop until she found it. If it was Adam, she would find Adam; if it was the Ark, she would find the Ark; if it was Goliath, or Joshua, she would find them.”

  But Twain’s mood changed when he saw the altar in the Greek Orthodox chapel which traditionally represents the place where Jesus was crucified - the point at which the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith meet. Now he dismisses all he has already seen: “One is grave and thoughtful when he stands in the little Tomb of the Saviour - he could not well be otherwise in such a place - but he has not the slightest possible belief that ever the Lord lay there, and so the interest he feels in the spot is very, very greatly marred by that reflection. He looks at the place where Mary stood, in another part of the church, and where John stood, and Mary Magdalene; where the mob derided the Lord; where the angel sat; where the crown of thorns was found, and the true Cross; where the risen Saviour appeared - he looks at all these places with interest, but with the same conviction he felt in the case of the Sepulcher, that there is nothing genuine about them, and that they are imaginary holy places created by the monks.”

  But here at the Greek altar the pilgrim “fully believes that he is looking upon the very spot where the Saviour gave up his life. He remembers that Christ was very celebrated, long before he came to Jerusalem; he knows that his fame was so great that crowds followed him all the time; he is aware that his entry into the city produced a stirring sensation, and that his reception was a kind of ovation; he cannot overlook the fact that when he was crucified there were very many in Jerusalem who believed that he was the true Son of God. To publicly execute such a personage was sufficient in itself to make the locality of the execution a memorable place for ages.

  “It is not possible that there can be any mistake about the locality of the Crucifixion. Not half a dozen persons knew where they buried the Saviour, perhaps, and a burial is not a startling event, anyhow; therefore, we can be pardoned for unbelief in the Sepulcher, but not in the place of the Crucifixion. The crucifixion of Christ was too notable an event in Jerusalem, and the Hill of Calvary made too celebrated by it, to be forgotten in the short space of three hundred years.

  “I climbed the stairway in the church which brings one to the top of the small enclosed pinnacle of rock, and looked upon the place where the true cross once stood, with a far more absorbing interest than I had ever felt in anything earthly before. When one stands where the Saviour was crucified, he finds it all he can do to keep it strictly before his mind that Christ was not crucified in a Catholic Church. He must remind himself every now and then that the great event transpired in the open air, and not in a gloomy, candle- lighted cell in a little corner of a vast church, up-stairs - a small cell all bejeweled and bespangled with flashy ornamentation, in execrable taste.”

  ***

  Sorry Sam, I know this one was from the heart, and you are certainly right about the “small cell all bejeweled and bespangled with flashy ornamentation, in execrable taste”, but more recent developments have suggested - I nearly said “proved” but only charlatans do that around here - that the crucifixion was probably nearby but not where it seemed to you back then. Of course “probably” is the word because as with so much of Jesus’ life we can only be imprecise about His death. It is beyond the scope of this book retracing your footsteps to attempt a treatise on all the latest biblical and archaeological research but considered opinion now places the crucifixion next to the most likely place of burial, in a space nearby now called the Garden of the Tomb. It is fair to say this theory is roundly disputed by interests vested in keeping the two at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

  Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of the case, and the only certainty about the case is its uncertainty, the Garden of the Tomb is a wonderful sanctuary from the intensity of the religious claims and counter-claims and tawdry commercialism of the Old City of Jerusalem. Situated just beyond the walls and close to Damascus Gate, it is a walled garden, a cross between an English country garden and a Japanese ceremonial garden. Apart from whichever space has the better claim to the crucifixion and tomb it has by far the better claim as a place of spiritual serenity; it is in fact the very opposite of the schoolboy squabble that is the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Tour groups are few and thoughtful, the Fergusons more knowledgeable, the entrance is free with payment by gift box and the volunteers - all on secondment from the softer side of England - tend the garden and tomb.

  Sitting there doing nothing one afternoon I hear the following from the leader of an American group. She is wearing a flowery frock and straw hat and is a double, or treble I suppose, for the tennis playing Williams sisters but with a northern East Coast accent: “As we leave the likely tomb questions arise. The tomb is empty now; was it empty three days after the crucifixion? Was it Jesus who died here and did His bones remain - did He really die just a man? Or was it Christ who died here and did His body leave the tomb with his spirit - did He die the Son of God? If the Christ died here - and we here today all believe He did - did His body really leave? This is, you might say, the coalface of Christian belief41. The go/no-go area. If his body left, where did It go? To heaven, yes, so is heaven a place, or a state of mind - a state of bliss, timeless bliss? If it’s a place where is it? Up in the sky? When the gospels were written what did the sky mean? Was there a beyond-the-sky if you will? Christ said “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you” - did He mean heaven is right here and right now and not somewhere else? If so, is it of this world or the next? It must be this world. Perhaps this is the main question for us, for us here and now. Heaven in this world. And the gospellers, were they writers of facts of time and place as we would expect a correspondent to be, or were they writing in parables and allegories as
folk then would expect a scribe to be? I say to you: faith42 is stronger than belief. We can’t know what happened back here when Jesus died so there is nothing real to believe, but we can have faith that Christ lives in us now.” I write it down immediately and I’m sure it’s accurate in spirit but cannot capture the timbre of sincerity and joy. What remains is the silence of the group when she finishes, a theophany they share in stillness next to their Christ’s last home on earth.

  ***

  Mark Twain finished his chapter on the Church of the Holy Sepulcher with: “History is full of this old Church of the Holy Sepulcher - full of blood that was shed because of the respect and the veneration in which men held the last resting-place of the meek and lowly, the mild and gentle, Prince of Peace!”

  The next day the New Pilgrims continued their tour of Jerusalem, as do most tourists today, with a walk along the Sorrowful Way, now more commonly known as the Via Dolorosa. The route is a harmless enough invention by the Franciscans in the thirteenth century as a way of incorporating all the major sites in the Old City into a coherent one-way route. It purports to follow the path that Jesus took as He carried His cross from Pontius Pilate’s court to Golgotha, but even the most enthusiastic Biblicist would doubt that Jesus’ route was quite so scenic as portrayed. A further spanner has been thrown in the Via Dolorosa’s works by recent discoveries which seem to suggest that Pontius Pilate actually stayed that year in the Jaffa Gate citadel on the opposite side of the Old City rather than Antonio’s Fortress where the Via Dolorosa starts.