by Kanan Makiya
“What is this?” asked Umar.
“The summit of Calvary, upon which our Lord died,” replied Sophronius.
“A slot has been cut into the tip,” Umar remarked, pointing at a rounded protuberance like a skull cap which marked the rock’s highest elevation.
“It was cut by the Romans in order to prop up the cross upon which our Savior offered Himself,” replied Sophronius.
“You make it sound like a sacrifice, not an execution.”
“Because it was,” said Sophronius. “Jesus died during Passover, at the very hour of the Paschal offering. Like Isaac, who carried the wood for his own sacrifice to this rock, Christ carried his cross.”
The leader of Christendom dropped to his ancient knees, genuflected, and kissed the sinuous protrusion neatly framed by marble moldings set into the floor. “Thus do we touch Jesus,” Sophronius said, speaking so softly he could barely be heard, “at the moment at which he endured the agony that redeemed us.” Then to Umar and Ka’b’s evident discomfort, he began to intone words of mourning and praise as though they were not there.
Tears were in the old man’s eyes by the time he had finished. Umar looked away. No one said anything—except Ka’b.
“Did you say that the son of Abraham was sacrificed on the rock of Jesus’ crucifixion?” Ka’b asked, breaking the silence.
“I did,” replied the Patriarch. “Unlike your forefather Ishaq, however, the Son of God died on the cross, slowly and terribly. At the moment of His greatest agony, he cried out, ‘I have overcome the world.’ By which the Son of God meant that He had offered Himself up for those sins that the blood of bulls, goats, and sheep cannot wash away. His death is the true Passover, fulfilling and terminating all the forms of sacrifice that used to take place in the old Temple.”
“How can an offering meant to expiate the sins of the world,” exclaimed Ka’b, “originate in one who called for the destruction of God’s House? Did not Jesus say,
I will destroy this temple that is made with hands,
and in three days I will build another not made with hands.
“Three days! If he were truly God, then it would be over and done with in the blink of an eye. And if he were not God, his purpose would have been to delude men. If the blood of such a man was indeed spilled on this rock, then it is wasted blood.”
“You are lying, Jew, confirming the curse that was laid upon your entire race!” Sophronius retorted, having regained his composure. “Your own most holy Isaiah recognized this curse when he declared how his own children, raised and exalted by their father, had sinned against him. He said:
An ox knows his owner, and an ass the manger of his master,
but my people did not know me. Israel did not recognize me.”
“It was your prophets who first spoke about our Messiah. Yet you did not understand the words that foretold the coming of Him who wondrously shows His steadfast love and who is our rock of refuge. Jesus foretold the destruction of which you speak, but He never called for it. Your kind bore false witness against Him then, as they continue to bear false witness against Him now. Not one stone will be left upon another, were the actual words of Christ; all will be thrown down. And so it came to pass that the old Temple was destroyed, and a new one has arisen in its place.”
“You mean this building,” interjected Umar in an attempt to calm things down but keep his distance.
“I do,” said Sophronius.
“And what is it founded on?”
“The body of Christ.”
“I take it you mean his burial place.”
“The Holy Sepulchre is empty,” Sophronius patiently explained. “I mean His body, literally. When God came to dwell among us in the person of Jesus, the Word became flesh, the Father became the Son. The Apostles were witnesses to Him speaking of the temple of His body. True believers rallied around Jesus. They believed in Him, and by so doing became a community. Thus did His body become a Church, which is our Temple; the stone spurned by the old builders became a new cornerstone.”
“However you want to put it,” exclaimed Umar, “the point is you worship at the site of the death and burial of Jesus.”
“And His resurrection, on the third day,” Sophronius added. “You mustn’t leave that out. For only at that moment did the New Temple come into existence—after the body had risen. We worship at an empty tomb, not a full one. God’s people were judged, destroyed, and restored in the shape of the Risen Body of Christ. The New Temple may not be what the Jews expected at the time of Jesus, but it is the long-awaited Temple nonetheless. And it owes its existence to His agony and death, and, above all, to His resurrection.”
“So that is what Jesus meant when he said he would build another Temple not made with hands!” exclaimed Ka’b, thinking he had found Sophronius out. “He meant he would personally replace the Temple he wanted to see destroyed. Those whom you have so unjustly accused of bearing false witness said as much!”
“This is not the time for bickering,” Umar said in an aside to Ka’b. He looked confused and irritable as he turned to address Sophronius. “In simple terms, exactly how was your church, or temple, or whatever you wish to call this building, built?”
“From the stones of the ruined Temple,” replied Sophronius.
“The same stones!” exclaimed Umar.
“The very ones,” said Sophronius. “We have traditions to that effect.”
“So you wanted to keep a connection with the old Temple?” Umar asked.
“Not any longer,” replied Sophronius.
“But I am told,” Umar went on, gesturing in the direction of Ka’b, “that you celebrate the consecration of your Church on the same day that Solomon consecrated his Temple. Also, that in this very Church you have put on display the ring of Solomon and the horn that Jewish priests used to anoint the kings of Israel. Why?”
“The priests who tried and crucified our Lord Jesus on this spot forfeited their right to offer new sacrifices in the old Temple,” said Sophronius. “Their hands were thus forever defiled. The holy artifacts that you mentioned, and many others besides that I could show you, had to be transferred to that place sanctified by His blood.”
“But what about the Rock that was the first direction of prayer of true Believers?”
“That,” replied Sophronius, “could not be moved. And besides, it no longer had a purpose after our Savior sacrificed Himself. From Calvary, where the head of the human race was held and death itself was destroyed, there began to stream the water that was the source of a new salvation. The Rock upon which the old altar rested used to mark the spot where the world’s thirst was quenched. On the evening of the final day of the Feast of the Tabernacles, priests would so signify by pouring a golden flagon of holy water down the shaft at the side of the altar. But it is no longer that spot. Not after God revealed that Out of His heart shall flow rivers of living water. Henceforth the center and source of life was no longer a place, but the person of Jesus himself. His flesh became our Temple.”
(photo credit 13.1)
Adam’s Tomb
Sophronius told Umar that Calvary contained “the head of the human race,” and by that he meant that our father Adam, the first man, was buried underneath the protrusion of exposed rock in the Basilica, in an underground crypt that the Christians call Adam’s Chapel. The three men were standing there.
“As in Adam all die,” said the old man, citing his Holy Book, “even so in Christ shall all be made alive.”
“But I thought our angel ancestor was buried under a different Rock, the Rock of Foundation,” Umar said, expressing his confusion.
Whereupon the Patriarch made the strange remark that it could not be otherwise, seeing as how “the origin of death was destroyed” in the place where Jesus had suffered. The sacrifice of Jesus, he was trying to say, had somehow overcome Adam’s death, changing the essential nature of sin.
None of this made any sense to the Caliph. To illustrate his meaning, Sophronius tur
ned to a mosaic that depicted Adam rising from his grave at the foot of the cross, holding a chalice to catch the precious blood of Jesus. The blood, having fallen upon Calvary and then run down its face to his grave, had recalled him to life. “The blood of Jesus, the new Adam,” Sophronius explained, “is in this cross overcoming death even as it washes away the old Adam’s sin.” Then he sang these words:
We think that Paradise and Calvarie,
Christ’s Cross and Adam’s tree,
Stood in one place;
Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me;
As the first Adam’s sweat surrounds my face,
May the last Adam’s blood my soul embrace.
Such smooth words! Even my father had to admit they were inspired. The old man, he said, was full of such words; was it any wonder men called him honey-tongued? But were they true? And if they were, what about what Ka’b had said to Umar in Medina, about Adam’s fall and burial underneath the summit of Moriah?
During Umar’s week in Jerusalem, Sophronius and Ka’b could find nothing on which to agree other than that the first man was originally buried on Moriah. This, remarkably, Sophronius took for granted. How then did the body get moved from Moriah to Calvary, some six hundred paces away?
Sophronius told Umar a story that began more or less where my father’s story of the first man and his fall from the Garden had left off.
A tradition handed down to the Church Fathers, Sophronius said, told of Solomon finding Adam’s skull in the cleft of a small rocky knoll that rose bare amidst a lush garden of palms, olive trees, and flowering plants. Solomon called the delightful place, including the bald protuberance of rock in its midst, Golgotha—the name by which the People of the Torah referred to Calvary.
Ka’b agreed that the word Golgotha meant “place of the skull.” But, he immediately added, the skull was not that of Adam but rather had been found among the bleached heads of the condemned left lying about in what was, after all, a public place of execution.
Sophronius brushed this aside, insisting that the name referred to a single skull—the skull of the first man, our father Adam. Some monks, Sophronius went on to say, claimed that the rock itself had taken on the shape of the skull it entombed.
Adam was buried under Calvary, and the proof, according to Sophronius, lay in certain details that Ka’b had omitted from his version of the story of Adam and the Rock.
One day, said the Patriarch, Adam called his son Seth and said: “Go to the gates of the Garden and ask the guardian of the Tree of Life to give me the oil of mercy that God promised when he thrust me out of Paradise.”
“Father, I am ready,” said Seth, “but I know not the way.”
“Go by that valley which lieth eastward. There you will find a green path blackened by footprints left by my feet and your mother’s when we were turned away from the Garden. No grass has grown to cover them since.”
Following his father’s instructions, Seth reached the gates of the Garden, which he found guarded by an angel barring his entry. He was allowed but a glimpse of the Tree of Life. Its crown reached into Heaven, and its branches were covered with foliage and flowers and all kinds of fruit. Its trunk was gigantic and bare, with a terrible serpent wrapped around it, consuming everything within reach. The tree’s roots descended into a precipitous chasm that reached into the very depths of Hell. There they became the tree that the People of Muhammad call Zaqqum. The only inhabitant of Hell was Seth’s brother Cain, who was striving vainly to climb upwards. The roots of the Zaqqum were like live tentacles wrapped around him, pinning him down, their ends piercing his flesh.
Seth begged the angel for mercy. But the angel refused to give him the oil of mercy, saying that it could not be bestowed upon his father’s race until many more years had passed. In token of future mercy, however, the angel gave Seth three seeds from the heavenly tree, and suggested that he bury them with Adam.
Adam died shortly after Seth’s return, and Seth put the three seeds under his tongue before burying him under the Rock of Moriah, the site of the old Temple.
Adam’s body, Sophronius said, did not lie undisturbed. On the authority of a blessed chain of transmission, it is known that Noah dug up Adam’s body from under Mount Moriah’s summit to protect it from the flood. He placed it in a teakwood coffin on his ark, and gave strict orders that it not be opened. When the raging waters of the flood had subsided, and the ark had reached its resting place, Noah ordered his son Shem to place the coffin on an oxcart pulled by a bull. Shem was to follow in the steps of the bull, and wherever the beast came to a stop, there he was to bury the coffin.
But Shem was greedy; he convinced himself that there were riches in the coffin. While awaiting the arrival of the cart, he opened the lid and there beheld Adam, beautifully preserved, all sixty cubits of him wrapped in a white shroud, whereupon he was consumed with regret at the terrible thing he had done.
When the bull arrived pulling the oxcart, as his father had said it would, Shem loaded the coffin and walked behind the cart. The bull stopped somewhere in Palestine, and there Shem reburied Adam. The three seeds from the Tree of Life germinated and produced three saplings. In time, these became one tree, with each component preserving its distinct nature. The tree was at once palm, cypress, and cedar, symbolizing, Sophronius said, Victory, Death, and Eternity.
Moses made his wondrous rod from this marvelous wood, the rod that drew forth sweet water from a rock in the Sinai. David replanted the tree in Jerusalem. Solomon attempted to cut columns out of its trunk for his Temple. But these kept growing even after they were cut and were therefore not suitable for construction.
Then the tree was stolen. A spring welled up to cover the place where it had been hidden, forming pools, the very same healing pools of the Church of the Paralyzed Man to which Umar had been taken by Sophronius. There the wood remained until the time of Jesus, when it miraculously floated up to the surface, and was unwittingly selected by the Romans to make the cross upon which Jesus died.
But where exactly in Palestine did the bull stop, Adam get reburied, and the three seeds from the Tree of Life begin to grow?
Now the story grew complicated. Sophronius maintained that the meaning of the name Golgotha, preserved in holy scripture, confirmed that the place had to be Calvary. Ka’b continued to disagree, saying that he knew Christians to disagree with one another over the matter. Some said the Tree of Life first grew in Mount Lebanon and was planted by Noah, not his son. Seeing as how Muslims and Jews deny that Jesus was crucified, Ka’b said he himself held no opinions on the Tree.
Umar said that Arab sages had told him that the torso of Adam was buried with his limbs in Hebron, while only his head was buried under the Rock in Jerusalem. Others, he said, were of the opposite opinion: Adam’s head was buried in Hebron, beneath the sanctuary of Abraham, whereas his torso and feet were buried in the vicinity of the Rock. No one knows how the parts got separated from one another. Nonetheless, all agreed that they had.
Throughout this exchange, Sophronius remained adamant about the skull, insisting that it was buried in the place where Jesus was crucified, but open to suggestion regarding the other body parts.
Did Noah’s bull really stop where Sophronius said it did, and was the head later transported to Calvary? I myself am of the opinion that our Father Adam’s burial place is a subject fraught with confusion. Wise men had better drop the subject. God does not want us to know everything.
One thing, however, that He does want us to know, and that all Peoples of the Book agree upon: On the Day of Resurrection, on top of the old Rock, not the new one, God will restore the first man’s head to his body. And He will set him upright, and say:
O Adam! Unto thee I assemble thy seed;
and all of them are assembled to do thee honor.
(photo credit 14.1)
The Rock of the Cross
The raw rock of Calvary has been elaborately dressed up in masonry to the point of merging into the walls of the mem
orial intended to do it honor. Only the summit is venerated from the Basilica. And even it is not visible at first sight, being at floor level and dominated by a large new cross.
I see no reason to doubt that this was the site of the crucifixion. But it could not possibly have been the site of Abraham’s sacrifice. For if you inspect the foundations of the apse and the base of the rock from the underground crypts of the church, namely, from Adam’s Chapel, whose story I have just recounted, a reasonable man will realize that nowhere was Calvary flat enough to lay Ishaq across it. The old Patriarch saddled Calvary with too great a burden for common sense to carry.
I surmise that the rock upon which the Son of Mary, or another who looked like him, died (or was snatched away before he died, as some Meccan sages argue) was a tall, vertical block rising out of the corner of an ancient quarry.
By the time of Jesus, the quarry had been filled in. The earth accumulated around it, forming a mound out of which emerged the rock and the cleft tip that attracted Umar’s attention. Perhaps it resembled a hillock ideally shaped to support and display the wooden instrument of torture beloved by the Romans. The Temple, further east, was the center of Jerusalem in the days of Jesus. Calvary would then have been just outside the city walls, in a visible place that the Romans would have used over and over again for public executions. At some point, the quarry must have become a garden cemetery, for it is written,
In the place where He was crucified,
there was a garden,
and in the garden a new sepulchre,