The Riddle and the Knight Page 17
I, too, entered the enormous church and looked around for the prayer group. I had been speaking to Wajeeh for so long that I was sure the tour would have finished, but I soon heard the southern drawl of Father Angelo over the noise of the builders restoring the church. As I caught up with him, a mechanical digger spun around the slab on which Christ's body was supposedly anointed, narrowly missing an elderly lady. A pneumatic drill joined the cacophony of noise as it bored into the stone floor. High above us, workmen called to each other across the scaffolding.
We moved slowly towards Calvary, scene of the Crucifixion, which is reached by climbing a series of steps. There was a great crowd of us
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following the monks, and we jostled up a steep and narrow stone staircase before finding ourselves at the twelfth station of the cross, the site where the crucifix had once stood. There was a moment's pause in the drilling as we sang hymns, said prayers, and contemplated the site. Two chapels stand on this venerated spot—one Catholic and one Orthodox—and as the ever-jovial Father Angelo read from the Bible ("Here Jeeesus was cruuiici^ied . . ."), I looked across to the Orthodox altar, where a bearded Greek monk stood motionless and in prayer.
After our prayers, a few people stuck their hands in the hole in the rock where the crucifix was supposed to have stood. From here, it is possible to look through a glass panel in the floor to the chapel directly beneath Calvary. The rock wall below is fractured by a massive split; the Bible records that this crack occurred during the earthquake that followed the Crucifixion. More cynical guides will tell you it was caused by workmen quarrying the rock thousands of years before Christ.
We shuffled back downstairs, making way for a troupe of American Franciscans weighed down with cameras and camcorders. I watched them posing before the tomb and filming themselves with their friends, while all the time the Orthodox monk looked on—a bemused expression on his face.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre has a peculiarly unplanned appearance quite unlike the great European cathedrals. It looks as if a vast pile of stones have grown organically into the building that exists today. The interior is marked by the same disorder as the exterior, partly because the church is built over the last five stations of the cross, with each station boasting its own chapel and altar. Nothing remains of the Byzantine church built by the Emperor Constantine: that was completely destroyed by an Egyptian warrior—the fanatically anti-Christian Caliph Hakim—whose hobby was torture and whose passion for darkness was such that he spent the night-time hours riding through the streets of Cairo in order to spy on his people. His eccentricities often bordered on the insane: at one point he banned honey from his territories.
In 1009 he instructed his army commander to raze the Holy Sepulchre to the ground, "until all traces of it have disappeared, and to en-
The Riddle and the Knight
deavour to uproot its foundations." His workman did a good job. Within a few weeks, nothing—not even the foundations—was left of the building. But ninety years later the crusaders arrived in Jerusalem and rebuilt the church that stands today.
The Holy Sepulchre is shared between five Christian churches who for centuries have argued over who owns what. The Greek Orthodox have come out best, for they own the site of Golgotha. The rest is shared among the Armenian Orthodox, the Syrian Orthodox, the Roman Catholics, and the Copts. The Ethiopians, who have been in Jerusalem since the fourth century, lost their documents of possession in a fire in 1808 and, no longer able to prove their rights, were evicted as if they had been illegal squatters. They now live in mud huts on the roof.
The anointing slab of marble graphically illustrates the bitter infighting that dominates the life of the church. Though commonly owned by all the churches, each insists on having its own lamp burning over the rectangular block of stone. It is only after decades of bickering about who is responsible for which column and flagstone that the church is finally being restored.
Some pilgrims are overwhelmed when they come face to face with the site of the Crucifixion, and for a few, the experience turns their minds. Every year, some two hundred foreigners—usually American— fall prey to a psychiatric disorder known as Jerusalem Syndrome, which frequently strikes at the Holy Sepulchre. Victims, overwhelmed by the religious experience, suddenly believe themselves to be either God, the Devil, Christ, or one of the disciples. Sometimes less mainstream biblical figures surface in their minds: two years ago, a strong Canadian man was overcome with the certainty that he was Samson. All are carted off to Jerusalem's psychiatric clinic and make a full recovery on returning home.
Nothing so dramatic happened in our group, although I did spot two men wandering around the church dressed as Jesus (one of whom I had seen from the window of Father Baratto's office). Both were American, and both dressed in long cotton robes. They studiously ignored each other
A final prayer brought us to the fourteenth and final station of the cross—the site of the tomb of Christ. "The tabernacle," explains Sir John, "is eight feet long, five wide, and eleven high. Not long ago, the
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Sepulchre was quite open, so that men could kiss it and touch it. But because some men who went there used to try to break bits of the stone off to take it away with them, the Sultan had a wall built around the Tomb so that nobody could touch it . . . The tabernacle has no windows, but inside there are many lamps burning."
The tomb has changed greatly since Sir John's day. The great fire of 1808—begun by an intoxicated monk who attempted to extinguish the flames with eau-de-vie —destroyed the eleventh-century tomb that Sir John would have seen. Even that wasn't the original: the earUest Byzantine sepulchre was smashed on the orders of Caliph Hakim.
The present tomb is a clumsy, box-like room that resembles a walk-in wardrobe. There is a long queue to enter, for it is so small inside that there is space for no more than three people at a time. As I awaited my turn, I wondered what I should do at this holiest of holy sites. Should I cross myself or fall to my knees in veneration? Medieval pilgrims would have flung themselves to the ground in prostration, and many wept freely before the tomb.
Slowly the queue shuffled forward until at last I was at the front. A Greek Orthodox monk pointed at me, then pointed into the tomb. Finally it was my turn.
It was tiny inside but quite bright, for there were dozens of candles burning and scores of silver oil lamps hanging from the ceiling. On the right-hand side was a slab of greenish marble where Christ's body was laid out to rest. Suddenly the woman to my left sank to the floor. I thought she had fainted—overcome with emotion or the heat of the room—and I went to pick her up. But I realized she was whispering prayers and quietly weeping to herself. As I stood there, I found myself continually questioning whether this really could be the tomb of Christ and asking how anyone could be so sure after all these centuries. Who could trust the Empress Helena and her Byzantine "archaeologists"? And if it wasn't the real tomb, then surely it was a little ridiculous to be standing in awe beside a simple slab of marble.
I was mulling such thoughts through my mind when the Greek monk pointed at me. Out. Now. I had used up my allotted time. I had stood before the tomb.
The woman got up from the floor as I left the room and slowly wiped the tears from her eyes.
The Riddle and the Knight
The following day I walked along the ancient walls to get a view of the new city that surrounds them. But when I reached Damascus Gate, I was stopped by a group of teenage Israeli soldiers who casually pointed their machine guns in my direction and refused to let me go any farther, even when I showed them the ticket that gave me access to the walkway. Damascus Gate was as far as I could go, they said. It was too dangerous to walk any farther.
This, in fact, was the point I was looking for. It was here, just a stone's throw from Damascus Gate, that General Gordon (of Khartoum fame) had stayed when he visited Jerusalem in the i88os. He rented a room built into the old city wall near Damascus Gate, its windows fac
ing outwards, and in the warm evenings, Gordon liked to sit on the roof and look at the rounded hill opposite.
He had come here as a pilgrim—to visit the sites of his faith and pursue his interest in biblical studies—for Gordon, like Mandeville, was a deeply religious man. And one day, while he sat on the rooftop relaxing as the sun went down, he was suddenly struck by how much the hilltop in front of him resembled the shape of a skull. And it was not just the shape: the more he looked at it, the more he became convinced he was looking at the skull of a long-dead person. There were two deep sockets where the eyes would once have been, and although the rock had crumbled over the years, the cheekbones were still clearly visible. The more Gordon studied the cliff-face, the more he felt sure he had stumbled upon something of great importance.
"You have the ordnance map of Jerusalem," he wrote excitedly to a friend in 1883. "Look at the shape of the contour Number 2459—Jeremiah's Grotto, near Damascus Gate. It is the shape of a skull; near it are gardens and caves, and close to it are the shambles of Jerusalem ... To me, this Jeremiah Grotto area was the site of the crucifixion."
He was not the first to question the site of the Holy Sepulchre; for many years people had become increasingly sceptical about both the site of the church and the problem of the Crucifixion site and tomb being so close to one another. Even Mandeville felt it necessary to explain that the city walls had been rebuilt since the time of Christ and that the site would, at one time, have been outside the city, as was the custom with Roman executions.
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But one of Gordon's principal reasons for believing this new place—and not the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—to be the site of Christ's crucifixion was the fact that the word Golgotha means "Place of the Skull," and this hill clearly looked like a skull. Closer investigation only increased his excitement, for the cliff, concealed by undergrowth, was found to contain a rock-hewn tomb that appeared to date from the first century. Surely this was no coincidence? The skull-like face. The tomb. The garden. They all pointed towards one thing: that this was the true site of Christ's burial and resurrection, and the Empress Helena had got it wrong after all. Millions of pilgrims throughout the centuries had prayed at the wrong place.
Excited archaeologists flocked to the site to examine it in greater detail. Many agreed with Gordon, and it was decided to attempt to buy the site with money raised by public subscription: an advertisement was immediately placed in The Times. Yet even at the time, people had their doubts, and the new "garden tomb" caused great controversy, sparking off a series of hostile letters from experts who had serious doubts about the veracity of the site. The Times itself concluded in an editorial that the garden tomb was nothing more than the figment of an overly religious imagination. Yet despite the adverse publicity, the money was raised, the site was bought, and within a few months, it had been established as a place of pilgrimage. The alternative garden tomb was born.
The officials at the tomb are certainly armed with impressive evidence to support their case. The garden borders the main Damascus-to-Jericho road, which fits the biblical account of Golgotha. There is a huge and ancient cistern under the garden, which suggests that this site was once cultivated land. Moreover, in 1924 they found an ancient grape press here: further evidence that this was a garden—and one that fitted the description of the garden that had belonged to Joseph of Ari-mathea.
Today thousands of pilgrims are drawn to the garden tomb every year. Perhaps it has become so popular because it fulfils all the expectations of modern pilgrims who long ago lost the blind faith of their medieval forebears. In an age where seeing is believing, this lush plot of land, shaded by trees and sprinkled with flowers, looks exactly how a garden tomb ought to look.
The Riddle and the Knight
"So many people come to Jerusalem expecting to find what they have heard in hymns," explained John, my guide to the tomb. "They hope to see a green hill tar away, and all that. When they get to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, they are often bitterly disapjx)inted, for it has a strange and often unholy atmosphere, and the monks can be incredibly rude. Our tomb comes as a pleasant surprise. This is more what they have been expecting."
Wherever the real site of the Crucifixion was, it certainly would not have been a green hill. Roman executions were noted for their bni-tahty and cruelty, and criminals were usually executed by the sides of roads so that people could jeer at them and throw stones as they died. The fact that there is an ancient road running alongside the ^Anglican site was further proof—according to General Gordon—that this was the true site of Golgotha. But not everyone is so coninced.
"The Orthodox dismiss us as an irrelevance," said the guide. "To them we are upstarts who have been here for less than a hundred and fifty years. But Catholics tend to be less critical. They often say that if this isn't the real tomb, then it ought to hav^e been."
The tomb comes complete with a grooved channel where the rolling stone would once have been. John slowly pushed open the door and we entered the tomb in silence. It was a small, box-like room with a low ceiling rough-hewn from the rock. The walls felt dr' but smelled musty, as if damp had permeated the rock for the last two thousand winters. On the right-hand side was the tomb itself—a raised stone platform chiselled from the rock. This was much more like it: there was even a Byzantine cross painted on the wall.
As I stood here in front of a tomb that fitted the biblical description almost exactly I wondered who was right. Could it be possible that it was here, and not at the Holy Sepulchre, that the disciples once stood marvelling that the body of Christ had disappeared?
"I personally find it difficult to believe that the site of the Crucifixion and sepulchre would have been so close together, as they are in the Holy Sepulchre," said John. "And don't forget, the Empress Helena found the site more than three centuries after the event. The Christians had been expelled from the city for much of that time. How on earth could the tradition have been kept alive after all those years?"
As we left the tomb and entered the garden, again the rain began to
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fall. The sky had darkened to the colour of old pewter, and the wet weather was settling in for the day. The garden looked more beautiful than ever, for the trees and shrubs had lost their thick coats of dust: as I wandered alone along the narrow, overgrown paths, the silence was in marked contrast to the noise of the Holy Sepulchre.
Possession of the garden tomb enabled the Anglican Church to claim ownership of its own holy place. For centuries all the sites on the pilgrim trail had been contained within the old city walls and owned by the ancient churches, and even Sir John seems surprised at how many churches and shrines belonged to the Greek Orthodox. But Gordon of Khartoum's surprise discovery changed all that, for one of the upstart newcomers at last had a convincing claim of its own.
St. George's Anglican church is two hundred yards up the road from the garden tomb and looks as if it has been plucked from a picturesque English village and planted in Jerusalem. There is a cloistered courtyard surrounded by Victorian Gothic arches, and behind this courtyard stands a squat, stone tower with the flag of St. George fluttering in the light breeze. It's the sort of place where you expect to hear hymns ancient and modern, bump into Anthony Trollope, and drink tea with the vicar. But appearances can be deceptive, and the church of St. George is not as English as it seems. True, the Dean, the Very Reverend John Tidy, invited me for tea in his book-lined study. But that was the point where the English illusion came to an end.
"Our congregation is almost completely comprised of Palestinians," he said. "They are Christians who were converted during the flurry of missionary activity in the last century. But their families have lived in the city for centuries. In fact, they are descendants of the Christians your knight would have met all those hundreds of years ago."
The first Anghcans had come to Jerusalem in 1841, but they didn't make their presence felt until the end of the century when they built the church of St. G
eorge and embarked on an ambitious missionary programme.
"The Victorians weren't simply content with living with the status quo," said the Reverend Tidy, "they wanted to change it. In those days the Church Missionary Society sent hundreds of missionaries to the Middle East and built churches, schools, and hospitals all over the region in order to convert as many native people as possible."
The Riddle and the Knight
Andaman Islands: "... they have no mouth, but instead a httle hole, and so when they must eat they suck their food through a reed."
Andaman Islands: "There are people who walk on their hands . . . they are hairy and climb up trees as readily as apes."
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Andaman Islands: "There is another island where the people are hermaphrodite, having the parts of each sex."
Indo-China: "There grows a kind of fruit as big as gourds, and when it is ripe men open it and find inside an animal . . . like a little lamb."
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The Riddle and the Knight
India: "... in the wilderness are many wild men with horns on their heads; they dwell in woods and speak not."
Valley of the Ganges: "In the middle of the valley under a rock one can clearly see the head and face of a devil, very hideous and dreadful . . ."
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India: "Men had died in that land in deflowering maidens, for the latter had snakes inside them, which stung the husbands on their penises."
Tibet: "When any man's father is dead . . . the priest strikes off the dead man's head and lays it on a great platter of silver."
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