When
Jerusalem Wept
THE HOLY CITY FELL FIRST TO THE PERSIANS AND FINALLY TO THE MUSLIMS. BUT
CHRISTIANITY IN THE HOLY LAND LIVED ON.
By Robert Louis Wilken
IN 614, THE ARMIES
OF CHOSROE II, king of the Sassanids, who had ruled the Persian Empire since
the third century, entered Jerusalem, occupied the city, and captured the relic
of the holy cross. For centuries the Sassanids and Romans had fought with each
other for control of the vast area between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean.
But this was the first time the Persians had penetrated Palestine and taken, in
the words of a Christian eyewitness, "that great city, the city of the
Christians, Jerusalem, the city of Jesus Christ."
Nothing better shows
the transformation of the land of Israel since A.D. 70 than the fact that when
Jerusalem was captured by the Persians it was the Christians, not the Jews, who
sang a lament over the Holy City. As the Sassanid forces made their way through
the cities and towns of Palestine, a new wave of messianic fervor broke out
among the Jews, who welcomed the invaders and offered them support. But by the
seventh century, Christians throughout the Roman Empire identified with
Jerusalem and its fate. When John the Almsgiver, patriarch of Alexandria in
Egypt, heard that the Persians had ravaged the Holy City, "He sat down and
made lament just as though he had been an inhabitant of the city."
Jerusalem's fall reverberated across the Christian world.
Laments for the
Holy City
Strategos, a monk of
the monastery of Sabas, wrote an eyewitness account of the Persian invasion. He
described the seizure of the holy cross, the capture and deportation of the
patriarch Zachariah, and the sack of the city. He also related stories of
valiant Christians who stood firm in the face of adversity, such as a deacon
who saw his two daughters cut down by the Persians because they would not
"worship fire." The Persians pillaged and killed women, children, and
priests. "And the Jerusalem above wept over the Jerusalem below,"
Strategos wrote. Strategos drew parallels between the destruction of Christian
Jerusalem and the ancient Israelites being [33] taken away by the Babylonians.
As Zachariah and the other captives were led out of the city, Zachariah
extended his hands toward the city and said as he wept, "Peace be with
you, O Jerusalem, peace be with you, O Holy Land, peace on the whole land;
Christ who chose you will deliver you."
Sophronius, who
became patriarch of Jerusalem after Zachariah, composed another lament over
Jerusalem. It begins.
Holy City of
God,
Home of the most valiant saints.
Great Jerusalem,
What kind of lament should I offer you?
Children of the blessed Christians,
Come to mourn high-crested Jerusalem
Home of the most valiant saints.
Great Jerusalem,
What kind of lament should I offer you?
Children of the blessed Christians,
Come to mourn high-crested Jerusalem
For Sophronius, as
for other Christians of his time, the earthly Jerusalem had taken on the
qualities of the heavenly city. "Zion," Sophronius wrote, was "the
radiant sun of the universe." These laments over Jerusalem sum up the
beliefs and attitudes that had been developing for centuries. That "holy
Jerusalem" would be "laid waste" brought to the surface feelings
[34] that few Christians fully understood.
The Sassanid
occupation of Jerusalem was a temporary interruption of Christian rule. The
Byzantine emperor Heraclius launched an unexpected counteroffensive through
Armenia and northern Syria directed at Persia itself. Chosroe II had just died,
and the Sassanids sued for peace. By the spring of 629, Heraclius reached
Palestine, returning the most sacred relic of Christianity, the holy cross. In
March of that year he entered Jerusalem in triumph. Yet the victory, through
real, was short-lived. In less than a decade, Muslim armies would be at the gates
of the city.
The patriarch and
the caliph
When the Muslim
armies streamed into Palestine in the summer of 634, they struck first in the
vicinity of Gaza on the Mediterranean coast. Once they had gained the loyalty
of local Arabic-speaking tribesmen living in the deserts, they began to lay
siege to the cities. Again and again, the emperor's troops were forced to
retreat. Though the Byzantines outnumbered the Muslim forces by as much as four
to one, the Roman armies were no match for these fervent warriors from the
desert. When the Muslims routed the emperor's legions at the Yarmuk River, a small
tributary that runs into the Jordan River south of the Sea of Galilee, the way
was open to Jerusalem and Caesarea.
It had long been the
custom (and still is today) for the Christians in Jerusalem to celebrate the
Feast of the Nativity with a solemn procession from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. In
638, with the invaders camped outside Jerusalem, the aged Sophronius and the
rest of the faithful celebrated Christmas huddled behind the walls of the city.
Only two decades
after Zachariah was taken captive by the Sassanids, Sophronius watched
helplessly as invaders again swept across the Holy Land. To him was assigned
the unhappy task of negotiating a treaty with Caliph Umar, the Muslim conquerer
of Jerusalem. The meeting between the representative of the Christian Roman civilization
and the general of the new religion from Arabia was so filled with drama and
historical significance that several detailed accounts have come down to us.
According to a
Christian chronicler writing in Egypt in the 10th century, the caliph and his
companions sat in the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. When it
came time for prayer, he said to Sophronius, "I wish to pray."
Sophronius led him into the church and laid a mat down for him, but Umar
refused to pray there and instead went out and prayed alone on the eastern
steps of the church. He said, "Do you understand, O patriarch, why I did
not pray within the church? . . . If I had prayed in the church it would be
ruined for you. For it would be taken from your hands and after I am gone the
Muslims would [35] seize it saying, 'Umar prayed here.'" Umar then wrote a
document forbidding the Muslims to pray in that church. In return, he asked
Sophronius for a place to build a mosque, and Sophronius led him to a rock on
the Temple Mount where God had spoken to Jacob, and which Jews had called the
"holy of holies." Because of Jesus' prophecies about the destruction
of the Temple, Christians had never built a church there.
According to Muslim
accounts of this story, Umar wanted a mosque to be built on the site of
Solomon's Temple, which had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar. The Muslims
venerated Jerusalem as the city of Abraham, Jesus, and other prophets mentioned
in the Quran. The Arab conquerors of the Holy Land were not simply
belligerents; they were the vanguard of a new religion that made a spiritual as
well as a political claim on Jerusalem. The commanders of their armies were
harbingers of a new civilization that would displace the language, transform
the institutions, remake the architecture, and convert much of the population
in a region that had been dominated for a thousand years by the cultures of
Israel, Greece, Rome, and Christianity.
In his Christmas
sermon in 638, Sophronius cast the Muslim invasion in the same terms that
Christians had used to interpret the Persians: The Arabs were God's instruments
to chastise Christians for their sins, and in time the invaders would be driven
from the Holy Land. But with the arrival of Muhammad's armies and the swift
establishment of Arab hegemony in the region, Christian rule in Jerusalem came
to end, decisively and definitively.
The country of
the Christians
Like the Jews before
them, some Christians began to hope for a Messiah-like deliverer who would
drive out the "godless Saracens" and restore the "kingdom of the
Christians" to Jerusalem. His aiming would inaugurate a great age of peace
and prosperity in Palestine and prepare the way for the final triumph over evil
and for the reign of Christ. Though such hopes were disappointed, the idea of a
Christian Holy Land did not perish. In the generations immediately after the
Muslim conquest, seeds were already sown that would sprout 400 years later in
the Crusades.
The arrival of the
Muslims did not mean the displacement of the Christia
ns any more than the
coming of Roman rule had meant the end of Jewish life in the kind. Must
Christians in Palestine and greater Syria were native to the region and had no
other place to go. Furthermore, it appears that the destruction during the
conquest was relatively minor, and in many places life went on without interruption.
Christians built new churches and repaired old ones. In the early eighth century,
the Muslim caliph Al-Walid called Syria (which included Palestine) the
"country of the Christians," a place where one could find "beautiful
churches whose adornments were a temptation and [36] whose fame was
widespread." The Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem was
intended to rival the great domed churches of the Christians. Two centuries
later, a Muslims visitor observed, "Everywhere the Christians and the Jews
are in the majority; and the mosque is empty of the faithful and of
scholars."
Christianity was not
a passing phenomenon in the history of the Holy Land. Christians began to adopt
Arabic, the language of the conquerors, as a language for Christian worship and scholarship. They
began to make the slow transition to a new culture and society shaped by the
religion of Muhammad.
Witnesses of the
gospel
In the early eighth
century, several generations after the Muslim conquest, John of Damascus, a monk
from Mar Saba, reflected on the significance of the holy places in Christian
life and memory. John was defending the use of icons (images painted on wood)
in Christian worship, and he observed that there were other kinds of material
images. Among these were "places in which God had accomplished our salvation."
By means of such images, he said, "things which have taken place in the
past are remembered." Places like Mount Sinai, the cave at Bethlehem, and
the garden of Gethsemane were palpable signs of God's continuing presence on
earth: "Christ has given us . . . traces of himself and holy places in this world as an inheritance and
a pledge of the kingdom
of heaven." They are "witnesses that confirm what is written in the
book of the Gospel."
Stones, however, do
not speak, as this wise monk knew well. His little treatise is not simply a
list of places, it is a catalog of churches—a testimony to the perseverance
of Christian life in the Holy Land. Only people, not stones and earth and
marble, can bear an authentic
witness.
For Christians, the
Holy Land is not simply an illustrious chapter in the Christian past. As Jerome
wrote to his friend Paula in Rome, urging her to come and live in the Holy
Land, "The whole mystery of our faith is native to this country and
city." No matter how many centuries have passed, no matter where the
Christian religion has set down roots, Christians are wedded to the land that gave
birth to Christ.
ROBERT LOUIS WILKEN
is professor of the history of Christianity at the University of Virginia. This
article was adapted from The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian
History and Thought (Yale, 1992).
Reproduced by permission of Yale
University Press. All rights reserved. ($37)
Christian History & Biography, Winter 2008, Issue 97, pp. 32-36.
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