Part 27

The extraordinary amount of research and investigation of which Jerusalem has been the subject during the last twenty years, the extent of the excavations which have been made, involving an expenditure of about $100,000, and the conscientious impartiality and profound acquirements of the explorers, have demolished the whole superstructure which early and mediæval Christianity had reared upon the credulity of its votaries; and which the churches of the present day, despite all the evidences to the contrary, find it in their interest to perpetuate. Thus it has now been proved to demonstration that, wherever the tomb in which Christ was laid after his crucifixion may have been, it could not have been in the cave over which the gorgeous edifice called the Church of the Holy Sepulchre now stands; for we now know by recent examination the position of the walls which enclosed the city in the time of Christ, though some still deny the correctness of the latest conclusions which have been arrived at. We also know that Calvary, or Golgotha, where he was crucified, was “nigh at hand” to the sepulchre; that Golgotha was “nigh to the city,” and not in it, and that Jesus “suffered without the gate,” and that all tombs, saving those of David and Huldah and eight Jewish kings, were without the walls, while the cave over which the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is built is within them. As, however, even the churches do not go so far as to maintain that any tradition had been preserved among Christians during the first three centuries after the death of Christ of his place of burial, they have had to resort to inspiration as the means of its discovery. Some of the early writers maintain that it was the Emperor Constantine himself who was divinely inspired to find it; others that it was his mother, the Empress Helena. This is a trifling discrepancy. Whichever it was, the fact of the inspiration remains, and scientific investigation has, ever since the days of Galileo, been bound to give way before ecclesiastical inspiration and infallibility. So, no matter whatever evidences exist to the contrary, crowds of pilgrims will continue to crawl over those sanctified stones, wearing them hollow with their kisses, as long as the sacerdotal organization of which it is the representative remains to impose upon them its authority.

With considerate ingenuity, and possibly with a view to lightening the labors of the pilgrims as much as possible, the early Church crowded as many sacred stones together under the roof of the holy edifice it could with decency. Thus we have the Stone of Unction, on which Christ's body was laid for anointing, but it was getting so worn that the real stone lies below the marble slab, which, however, answers the purpose for the pilgrims. Close by is the Circular Stone, where the Virgin stood while the body was being anointed; also the stone on which Jesus stood when he appeared to Mary Magdalene, and the stone on which she stood, and the column to which he was bound when scourged; and your devout guide will show you, if you have the patience to attend to him, the exact place where Jesus was stripped by the soldiers, the place where the purple robe was put on him, the place where the soldiers cast lots for his raiment, the rent in the rock made by the earthquake, the place where his body was wrapped in linen cloths, the place where he indicated with his own hand the centre of the world, and so on, _ad nauseam_.

Sometimes another Church commits a burglary and steals some of these stones. The Armenians have been especially guilty in this respect. They have stolen from the holy sepulchre the stone on which the angel sat, that had been rolled away from the door of the sepulchre, which they now display in the chapel of the Palace of Caiaphas; also a piece of the true cross, which was originally discovered under inspiration by Helena, as well as that of the penitent thief, who is now canonized under the name of Dimas. I don't know what authority they have for calling him Dimas, whose reputed birthplace is, for political reasons, going to be converted into another holy place. There is something rather appropriate in the idea of the power that is waiting for a chance to despoil the Turkish empire of Syria erecting a shrine in worship of the penitent thief.

The most remarkable sites are those which illustrate the parables. Thus, pilgrims are shown the window which was the post of observation of Dives, and the stone, now worn by the kisses of the faithful, where Lazarus sat when the dog licked his sores. I asked my guide where the dog was, but he said he was dead, and added, with a smile, “I don't believe any of these things.”

I asked him why not.

“Oh,” he replied, “I'm a Jew.”

After that the glibness with which he pattered off all the Christian traditions was very edifying until my patience was exhausted, and I said, “Well, supposing, as we neither of us believe in any of these invented sites, we go and try and find something that is real.”

He had been in the service of some of the recent Jerusalem explorers, and I afterwards found him an intelligent companion.

It is a striking illustration of Moslem religious toleration, as compared with that shown by Christians in Jerusalem towards Jews, that while this man could accompany me into the Mosque of Omar, that most beautiful and sacred of Mohammedan temples, he was not allowed even to enter the street in which stands the Christian Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

So far as Christian rites are concerned, it may, then, be taken as a fact that the interest which attaches to Jerusalem has but a very slender relation to them. The great natural features, of course, must always remain. Bethlehem, Bethany, and the Mount of Olives are as they ever were, but there are two Gardens of Gethsemane, one claimed by the Latins and one by the Greeks. When we descend to more minute details they are either purely mythical or at best only matters of vague conjecture. One of the best illustrations of the purely mythical is Christ's footprint on the rock from which he ascended into heaven, which is a good deal smaller than that of Buddha, which I have also seen on the top of Adam's Peak in Ceylon, or of Jethro, which the Druses showed me in the Neby Schaib.

Among those open to conjecture, the position of Calvary and the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea are points upon which research may still throw light. Every indication goes to show that Golgotha, or Calvary, was a knoll outside the Damascus gate, exactly in the opposite direction to that affixed by Christian tradition, and which would do away with the Via Dolorosa as a sacred thoroughfare, the street shown as that along which Christ bore his cross on his way to execution. It is only probable that Calvary was the ordinary execution ground of Jerusalem, which is called in the Talmud “the House of Stoning” about A.D. 150, and which current tradition among the Jews identifies with this knoll, a tradition borne out by the account of it contained in the Mishnah, or text of the Talmud, which describes a cliff over which the condemned was thrown by the first witness. If he was not killed by the fall, the second witness cast a stone on him, and the crowd on the cliff or beneath it completed his execution. It was outside the gate, at some distance from the Judgment Hall. The knoll in question is just outside the gate, with a cliff about fifty feet high. Moreover, we are informed that sometimes “they sunk a beam in the ground, and a crossbeam extended from it, and they bound his hands, one over the other, and hung him up.” (Sanhedrim vi. 4.) Thus the House of Stoning was a recognized place of crucifixion. It is curious that an early Christian tradition pointed to this site as the place of stoning of Stephen, the proto-martyr. The vicinity has apparently always been considered unlucky. An Arab writer in the Middle Ages pronounces a barren tract adjoining accursed and haunted, so that the traveller should not pass it at night.

The Valley of Judgment (or Jehosaphat), which the Arab calls the Valley of Hell, passes not far east of the knoll, the Arab name of which is Heirimayeh, probably from a cave in the knoll called Jeremiah's grotto. The idea that this was in fact the Place of the Skull was warmly adopted by the late heroic defender of Khartoum, General Gordon, who spent the year before he went on his fatal mission to the Soudan in investigating points bearing on these subjects as tending to uphold theories which he held in regard to them, and which he explained to me at great length. Before leaving England he sent some notes on these to the Palestine Exploration Fund, and in their last quarterly statement these are published. They are full of pathetic interest now. In regard to the Place of the Skull, General Gordon says that “the mention of the Place of the Skull in each of the four Gospels is a call to attention. Whenever a mention of any particular is made frequently we may rely there is something in it. If the skull is mentioned four times, one naturally looks for the body, and if you take Warren's or other contours, with the earth or rubbish removed, showing the natural state of the land, you cannot help seeing that there is a body, that the conduit (discovered by Shick) is the œsophagus, that the quarries are the chest, and if you are venturesome you will carry out the analogy further. You find in the verse in the Psalms, ‘Zion on the sides of the North,’ the word ‘pleura,’ the same as they ‘pierced his pleuron, and there came forth blood and water.’ God took a pleuron from the side of Adam and made woman. Now the Church of Christ is made up of or came from his pleura. The stones of the Temple came from the quarries, or chest of the figure, and so on. So that fixed the figure of the body to the skull.”

This theory led to Gordon's forming a singular and mystical conception of the emblematic character of the city as typifying in actual configuration the New Jerusalem, the divine bride.

The most interesting fact, however, in connection with this knoll is the recent discovery upon it of a tomb, which has excited considerable interest as being, from its position, more likely to be the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, in which never man had been laid before Christ, than any hitherto known. From the knowledge we have now acquired of rock-cut tombs in Palestine we are able to judge from its appearance and construction its probable date, and these all go to prove that it belongs to the later Jewish period, or that which terminated with the destruction of Jerusalem. The appearance of this tomb so near the old place of execution, and so far from the other tombs in the old cemeteries of the city, is very remarkable. A careful plan of the site and tomb has been made by Lieutenant Mantell, R. E., and sent to England, where the subject has lately afforded matter for discussion. The reason why the tomb was not found by the early Christians in their search for it at the time of Constantine is easy to be accounted for by the fact that, about ten years after the crucifixion, the “Women's Towers” were built by Agrippa upon the rock over the tomb, and it must have been hidden beneath or within the new building. Under these circumstances the sepulchre could no longer be visited, and in course of time its existence was forgotten, until the Empress Helena destroyed the temple to Venus which the Romans had built on the present site of the Holy Sepulchre Church, and “beyond all hope” (as Eusebius words it), discovered the rock-cut Jewish tomb, which the faithful accepted as the tomb of Christ.

A peculiar interest does nevertheless attach to these extremely ancient tombs in the Holy Sepulchre Church, one of which is now appropriated to Nicodemus, the nature of which I will discuss in my next letter. It is extremely probable that either Constantine or Helena heard that tombs of a high sanctity stood beneath the Venus temple, and they thought they could not do better than take the most sacred tomb to which tradition of any sort attached, and call it the holy sepulchre. Modern iconoclasticism and love of truth have, however, proved too strong for fourteen hundred years of unfounded tradition. If the churches had only taken half as much trouble to preserve the moral truths which are to be found in the teachings of Christ, as they have to preserve a cave in which he was never buried, the world would have been so much the better instead of so much the worse for their exertions.

TRADITIONAL SITES AT JERUSALEM—_Continued_.

Haifa, August 3.—The discoveries which have been made in Jerusalem during the last few years, and the conclusions at which those who have most deeply studied the subject have arrived in consequence, render it extremely desirable that a new or revised description of the Holy City should be inserted in the tourists' hand-books for Syria and Palestine. Travellers should be warned against dragomans who waste their time taking them to see Christian sites which have no relation to the facts they are supposed to commemorate, and possess no interest of any kind beyond the philosophical one that they illustrate the extraordinary credulity and superstitions which exist among the professors of Christianity in the nineteenth century, and which are certainly not exceeded, even if they are paralleled, by those of any heathen religion.

A Jerusalem hand-book, to be of any interest, should deal with the conclusions resulting from the excavations and researches of Sir Charles Wilson, Sir Charles Warren, Captain Condor, M. Clermont Ganneau, and others, during the last twenty years, and leave the traditions of the Latin and Greek churches almost out of the question altogether. Their researches have settled nearly all the topographical questions connected with ancient Jerusalem, which had previously been the subject of so much controversy and error, the doubts and difficulties connected with them arising from the fact that the city had been more or less destroyed and built over so many times that the original foundations of its walls and Temple could only be determined by extensive and laborious excavations; and in the course of these many collateral discoveries were made.

We learn from the publications of the Palestine Exploration Fund that these excavations were carried on under difficulties of every kind, in face of the opposition of the local government and in spite of continued fevers and lack of funds. The mines were driven to extraordinary depths; one at the southeast angle of the Haram being eighty feet deep, and another, near the northeast angle, being one hundred and twenty feet beneath the surface, where it reaches the solid rock. In consequence of the great depths, the scarcity of the mining frames, and the treacherous character of the débris through which the shafts and galleries were driven, the work was one of unusual danger and difficulty, requiring much courage and determination. Sir Charles Warren and the non-commissioned officers of his staff worked constantly with their lives in their hands, and often undertook operations from which the native workmen recoiled. The prudence and discipline of the party, however, secured valuable discoveries without an accident; and it is generally acknowledged that the results are of an importance which fully repays the labor and difficulty of the operations.

Sir Charles Warren was the officer who so courageously entered the desert of Sinai after the late Egyptian war, when he succeeded in capturing the murderers of Professor Palmer, Captain Gill, and Lieutenant Sharrington, and bringing them to justice. The result of his labors in Jerusalem, and that of his fellow-explorers, is a magnificent atlas, published last year by the Palestine Exploration Fund, containing a most elaborate series of maps, plans, elevations, and engravings, which reproduce the sacred city in all its most striking features, accompanied by a handsome volume of descriptive matter. We are thus able to base an account of the ancient topography of the city on data more exact than any previously acquired, and to read the ancient historic accounts by the light of ascertained facts, instead of guessing at probabilities by the aid of descriptions, which, however carefully written, are still, as all descriptions must be, vague where the student requires most exactitude, and deficient where he most wishes for details.

With the assistance of these publications a guide-book might be compiled which would enable the tourist to order his dragoman to take him straight to the places worth seeing, instead of—following on the track of exploded tradition—going with him like a sheep to those that are not. Much could be done to clear away existing confusion and prevent the perpetuation of error by a change in the received nomenclature, whereby things should be called by their right names so far as they are known, instead of by misleading appellations, derived from the records of early pilgrims or the later crusaders. I will take a few examples as illustrations. Not far from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre the guide shows the traveller an immense reservoir, now being filled up. This, he says, is the Pool of Bethesda, but it has only been thus designated since the fourteenth century. In the twelfth this pool was supposed to be a cistern near the Church of St. Anne, and in the fourth the site of Bethesda was shown at the twin pools, northwest of Antonia. The fact is that there are only two sites which may be regarded as possible for Bethesda, one being the spring of En-Rogel, which has an intermittent ebb and flow, and which is still frequented by the Jews, who bathe in it to cure various diseases. The other is the curious well immediately west of the Temple enclosure, now called Hamman Esh-Shefa, or the Healing Spring, a long reservoir reached by a shaft nearly one hundred feet deep. None of the pools which have at various times been selected by tradition have any supply of living water, and none can well be supposed to have any intermittent rise and fall, such as we understand by the moving of the waters.

Again, take the tombs of Absalom and St. James. There is nothing whatever to connect the first with Absalom. The singular style of its architecture shows that it cannot be the pillar “Absalom reared up for himself during his lifetime in the king's dale.” M. Clermont Ganneau has made excavations uncovering the bases and pedestals of the columns, all of which are purely Greek. Indeed, it is only since the twelfth century that it was called the tomb of Absalom at all. The author of the Jerusalem Itinerary calls it the tomb of Hezekiah, and Adamanus, in the seventh century, calls it the tomb of Jehoshaphat. It is possibly the monument of Alexander Jannæus spoken of by Josephus. So, too, the tomb of St. James has nothing to do with St. James; for there has lately been discovered on the façade an inscription in square Hebrew in so inaccessible a position as to have been only probably cut before the façade was completed, which mentions that the family of the Beni Hezir are buried there. This family of priests is mentioned in the Bible (1 Chron. xxiv. 15). The inscription seems to date from the first century before Christ.

The so-called tomb of David is a vault over which has been built a room, called the chamber in which the Feast of the Passover prior to the crucifixion is supposed to have taken place. Close to it is the Palace of Caiaphas, and in it is shown the spot where Peter stood when he denied his Master. Near it is the rock upon which the cock roosted when he crew. The “rock,” the “spot,” the “palace,” the “Cænaculum,” and the “tomb” all rest upon equally invalid authority. As regards the tomb of David, we know that it was within the walls, together with those of eight other Jewish kings. That the place was apparently well known as late as the time of Christ we gather both from the Acts and Josephus. It is remarkable that one undisputed Jewish tomb still exists in such a position as to have been certainly within the city of David. This is the so-called tomb of Nicodemus, and it is yet more remarkable that in its original condition, before it was partly destroyed, this tomb must have been just made to contain nine bodies, placed in kokim, or graves cut according to the oldest arrangement employed by the Jews. Josephus mentions as a peculiarity of the tombs of the kings that some of the coffins were buried beneath the surface, so as to be unseen even to those standing within the monument. Just such an arrangement exists in the tomb under consideration, the floor of which is sunk so that the graves on one side are on a lower tier. It seems, therefore, quite possible that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre preserves the monument of the nine chief kings of Jerusalem. Of course, tradition, with its usual ignorance, places “the tombs of the kings” on the hill of the upper city, where your guide takes you to see them, and where there are no ancient tombs at all, the tombs there being of a date not earlier than the first century before Christ. A fine sarcophagus, with an Aramaic inscription, stating that it held the body of a certain Queen Sara, was discovered in them. Though called by a wrong name, they are, nevertheless, well worth visiting. As it is supposed by some authorities that Helena, Queen of Adiabene, was also buried here, they might more properly be called the tombs of the queens.