2/22/11 Lecture 15

This post is for the lecture from last Tuesday that I missed on Byzantine Jerusalem. This period takes place between 312 CE – 637 CE. Jesus himself was Jewish and the first Christians were actually a branch of Jewish followers. They rejected the temple as a fixed holy place and started the idea of the Holy Spirit that walks with us. Faith became something that you were, that was in your mind, not something that you physically had to go do at a temple. This is all rooted in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. Once the Jews were exiled from Jerusalem the Romans renamed the city Aelia Capitolia. In 285 CE the Roman Empire was split into 2 parts with two emperors in each kingdom. What ends up happening is that Constantine the Great takes over the entire kingdom and unites the Holy Roman Empire under one emperor again. Constantine the Great used Christianity politically to unite the entire kingdom. In 313 CE he issues the Edict of Milan that legalizes Christianity and fundamentally changes the way Christianity was to be practiced. Christianity was split up into many different sects with varying beliefs so Constantine had to bring them all together under one set of orthodox beliefs at the Council of Nicaea in 324 CE. This is where they came up with the doctrine of the trinity. This was the belief in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit and that Jesus and the Father were both fully human and fully God. Constantine’s mom, Helena, comes to Jerusalem in 324 CE and destroys the pagan temple to Venus to find the place where Jesus was crucified. She then builds a new church over the spot where she though Jesus was crucified and this became the new center of Jerusalem. There is also record of Julian “the Apostate” trying to rebuild the Jewish temple in Jerusalem but he could not complete it, as he faced much resistance. Just like the Jews, the new Christians begin making their own Pilgrimages to Jerusalem. They recognize Jerusalem as a sacred place because it was the place where Jesus walked.

The Madaba Map, which is dated to the 6^th century CE, depicts the holy land and Jerusalem and is located on the floor of a church in Madaba. This mosaic helps shed some light on the geography of the city of Jerusalem during that time period. We see the temple mount depicted off on the side of the map and it is no longer the center or most important part of the city. The center of the map is actually the Cardo and Church of the Holy Sepulcher. This shows how much weight they placed on Jesus. All of the religious myths associated with Jerusalem turned away from the temple to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.