The Rock: A Tale of Seventh-Century Jerusalem (Vintage International)

by Kanan Makiya

  wherein was never a man yet laid.

  The sepulchre was intended for Joseph of Arimathea. Considering its distance from Calvary, it had to have been hewn out of the opposing rock face of the quarry, a stone’s throw away from Calvary. Here, according to the eyewitness of the two Marys, the body of Jesus was hurriedly placed and a large round stone was rolled across the entrance. But deep in the bowels of the earth, underneath the church and the dirt that had collected in the bowl of the quarry, the place of the execution and the burial of Jesus would have been conjoined into a single mass of rock.

  Alas, none of this can be seen today. For the place is not even remotely as Jesus would have known it. The quarry has been turned into a beautiful open courtyard, paved with polished stone. Hundreds of lit candles cast dancing shadows on the ceiling and columns of the arcades that surround it.

  On the far side of the Church of Resurrection lies the Rotunda, which is the building’s beating heart. Day and night it is filled with chanting monks bearing candles that cast a distorting light upon their faces. Their prayers resonate within the tall cylinder and can be heard like a muffled drone from the courtyard outside.

  The tomb of Jesus sits in the center of the Rotunda, just as the Ark sat in the center of the Temple of Solomon. In order to build the tower so that it dominates the city from all angles, the entire vertical face of the quarry had to be cut out. The tomb was thereby freed from the mass of rock of which it once formed an inextricable part until large crowds could walk comfortably around it. Masons must then have hollowed out the interior of the remaining stone block, forming a narrow chamber four arms and two thumbs long, barely tall enough to accommodate a person standing upright.

  Inside this intricately carved chamber, a bench has been cut out of the rock. It is long enough for a body lying at full length. On this, the black-robed guardians of the tomb will tell you, the faithful Joseph laid the body of Jesus. When Umar entered the chamber, fifteen golden bowls stood in the place of that holy body. Filled with oil, they burn day and night, turning the normally light-colored limestone surround pitch black.

  The mouth of the tomb faces east, toward Calvary. The stone that originally sealed this entrance, until it was mysteriously rolled aside, is situated at the western entrance. Bound with copper, it is anointed with holy balsam by the Patriarch once a year. During the week of Umar’s visit, Ka’b told me, the veins at his temple bulging with anger, it served as a Holy Table. Indeed, Ka’b could see that the whole edifice had been conceived with the Jewish Temple in mind—from the great steps off the Cardo to the long walk down the five-aisled Basilica and the Rock of the Cross, from the arcaded court to the beautifully finished triumphal tower of the Risen Christ, which mocked the ruins of the Holy of Holies it had supplanted.

  Since adolescence, I have admired the lines of the New Temple and wondered about those who must have labored so hard to put them in place. No ill that my father could think to say of it diminished my enthusiasm and curiosity. “Idolatry run amok,” he would say of the place, forgetting his own passion for the Rock, which, to some people, also smacked of strange worship.

  “The Church of the Dungheap,” he would call it, changing a letter in the Arabic word for resurrection, qiyama, to qumama. Although my father’s play on words caught on among some of Muhammad’s People, I never use it. The real dungheap at the time was farther east. For one who did not live solely on memories like my father, there was nothing to admire about David’s Sanctuary in those days. It was just a boring expanse of stone that took two decades to properly clean up. In contrast, the Christian areas of the city buzzed with life, variety, beautiful things.

  One day, I don’t remember how, the issue came up of who had commissioned the Church of the Resurrection.

  “Christ raised her from dung to power,” Ka’b blurted in anger. “She was a commoner, and yet the whole empire let her have her way and christianize the world.”

  “Who are you talking about?” I said.

  “The strumpet who founded this Temple of Abomination with which you are so enamored,” replied Ka’b. “She built it upon a relic that she came halfway across the world to find.”

  “You mean Calvary?”

  “No! No! No!” exclaimed Ka’b. “I mean the cross. She stumbled upon Calvary by accident, pursuing a mad search for what Christians call the true cross, the two pieces of wood upon which they claim Jesus was crucified. Just imagine! A harlot who scalded her son’s wife to death in a steam bath, and then decided to relocate the fulcrum of creation from Moriah to the place of her find, which she claimed was Calvary.”

  The woman my father was fulminating against was Flavia Helena Augusta, the mother of Constantine the Great, who had come to Jerusalem on pilgrimage three hundred years before the arrival of the sons of Ishmael. A long and tumultuous life had she, rising from lowly servitude in an inn to mother of the first Christian Roman emperor. She left Rome suspected of collaboration in the murder of her daughter-in-law, Fausta. Maybe finding the cross was her atonement. No one will ever know for sure. Certainly, the guardians of the Church of the Resurrection, who deemed her a saint, would vehemently deny my father’s accusations.

  But Ka’b was right about one thing. Helena had single-handedly reshaped the geography of the Holy City, and with it the fate of the world. She had cut right through to the heart of the matter with a devastatingly simple insight: The actual wood of the cross could bear witness to the story of Jesus in a way that no words could ever do.

  No one had dared to think such a thought before. The empress just brushed aside the objections of her theologians, who thought it unseemly for Christians to revere a relic. They had simply read too many books.

  I can see her driven by an all-consuming desire to see and touch the incontrovertible proof of the suffering of Jesus, and wanting to spread fragments of that proof, the wood of the true cross, until they filled all corners of her son’s empire, touching the common folk with whom she so identified, giving them the opportunity for a magical union with Him, one in which the frail trappings of their miserable existence on earth—an existence her origins made her all too familiar with—could finally be transcended. The beaten and broken body of the Messiah, in Helena’s eyes, was not just a story of suffering—it was one of community through the passion of Jesus. And the bonds of that community were going to be forged through the truth of the cross, a truth that Helena had extracted from the rubble and turned into the magnificent New Temple I grew up in awe of.

  (photo credit 15.1)

  Finding the Cross

  How did she know where to look?” asked an incredulous Umar. The Caliph and the Patriarch had left Adam’s Chapel and were standing beneath the basilica of the church in another underground crypt, this one bearing Helena’s name. Here, Sophronius said, the true cross had been found.

  Sophronius said that Helena had searched high and low for the cross for weeks, and as he recounted her many stratagems to unearth information, it was as though he himself had been there. The indefatigable empress, he said, had checked and crosschecked anecdotes from the locals, visited one holy site after another in the blistering heat of summer, and distributed bags of silver from wagonloads brought all the way from Rome. She followed every lead provided by priests, every clue volunteered by the army of soothsayers and would-be prophets who populate this city. She took to grilling carpenters on the types of wood from which crosses were made in the time of Jesus. She even questioned a blacksmith about the shape of the nails that might have been used by the Romans.

  But it was all to no avail. Any clues that might have survived from the time of Jesus had been erased by the emperor Hadrian’s workmen when they laid a new Jerusalem on top of the ruins of the one the emperor had razed to the ground.

  “Why not build the church anywhere?” asked Umar. “Or use a replica of the original thing? Why go to all this trouble to possess the actual cross?”

  Human beings, Sophronius replied, treasure the mementos of the dead whom
they have loved—the greater the love, the more intense the need. It was inconceivable for the Blessed Virgin and the Apostles to not seek the crown of thorns, the nails, the sponge soaked with the blood that had washed away their sins. There had probably been no need to bribe the centurions, who were, after all, ordinary Romans who had no stake in the murder. But what if they had been required to pay a little something? Surely, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, both men of wealth, would have paid the soldiers’ price. No amount would have been too high when you think of what it meant to fondle such blessed things.

  Nothing but the actual cross would satisfy Helena. She could not bear to continue living in the knowledge that the instruments of His Passion—the Pillar of the Scourging, the Crown of Thorns, the Holy Lance, the nails, and, above all, the cross—were lying buried in some obscure, forgotten place. Helena had come all the way from Rome to a pompous if provincial town of no great commercial or political importance to bring to light the instruments of His agony and the place of His Resurrection, so that all might be able to see and venerate them. God willed that she would not return without them.

  “But she had reached an impasse,” said Umar. “What did she do next?”

  “She realized that the reason she could not find the cross was because it had been hidden so well.”

  “By whom?”

  “By those who were of old the beloved of God, until they showed with their saliva contempt for Him who through His saliva opened the eyes of the blind.”

  “Who?”

  “The Jews.”

  “But I thought they were no longer in the city!” exclaimed Umar. “You yourself said as much when you insisted that we maintain the ban on their presence.”

  “They come to weep,” replied Sophronius. “We gave them permission to enter one day a year in exchange for payment. Just as they purchased the blood of the Messiah, we allow them to purchase their own tears. The day after Jerusalem was taken and destroyed by the Romans, one could see women dressed in rags, and the old bearing their tatters and their years, gather for a time of mourning, proving by their bodies and their dress the meaning of the wrath of the Lord. Every year, on the day of the destruction of the Temple, we let this rabble of the wretched gather on Mount Moriah, and while the wood of the crucifix of the Lord shines and glows and celebrates His Resurrection, and the symbol of the cross is topmost on the Mount of Olives, the children of this wretched nation bemoan the destruction of their former Temple. But they are not worthy of compassion, using as they do the occasion of our generosity to filter back into Jerusalem in ones and twos to live in hiding. It is impossible to police them. A number even now live and work in the city.”

  “Why would the Jews care what happened to the cross?” Umar asked.

  “Because their forefathers had to conceal the proof of their terrible deed. Finding His cross would expose them, and bring down upon their heads the curse written in their own law.”

  “So what did Helena do?” asked Umar.

  “Her soldiers rounded up several hundred infiltrators into the city. These were then forced to choose among themselves twenty with knowledge of the law. When the twenty were brought before her, she asked them to search out the one person most knowledgeable among them. They hesitated, wherupon she ordered all twenty to be burned at the stake. Only then did the oldest man in the group, a rabbi by the name of Judas, get pushed to the fore. It was claimed by his friends that the secret had been handed down to him by his father, who, in turn, had received it from his father. Judas tried at first not to confess. But Helena ordered him thrown into a well. On the seventh day, he relented.”

  “What did he say?” asked Umar, thoroughly absorbed in the story.

  “He asked to be taken to the old Rock, the site of Solomon’s Temple.”

  “Praise be to God!” exclaimed the Caliph.

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  The indomitable Helena, said Sophronius, seated herself on a makeshift platform on the Temple Mount. The empress’s hair, which she wore knotted over the middle of her head, was drawn back severely. Her tight, thin-lipped face suggested a woman accustomed to being obeyed. From where she sat, amid the ruins of the Temple adorned with two desultory statues erected by Hadrian, she would have faced a colonnade of steps descending to the sacred pool in the southern half of the city. The emperor had built a square fountain surrounded by porticoes at this terminus. The steps leading down to the pool continued the cold, classical colonnade of the Cardo, effectively halving the pagan city that he had built.

  “As Mary bore the Lord and gave Him to the world, so I shall uncover His cross and teach His Resurrection,” said Helena. Your ancestors hid this wood, and I, a woman, have come to bring their tricks to naught. Now tell me why have you brought us to this pierced stone that your people come to anoint each year, and before which they rend their garments upon departing? Perhaps it is hidden here, in the cave that lies underneath? Why else would your kind visit here?”

  “We come on the date of the destruction of our Temple,” the old man said. “We come to mourn, the way you would mourn the death of a loved one by visiting the site of his burial. In the year of Jesus’ crucifixion, our Temple was still standing here, centered on this rock; it lay inside the Holy City, whereas your own scriptures say that Jesus was led out of the city to be crucified—which is why the cross cannot be here.”

  “Where is it, then?” said Helena. “The Holy Gospel says that He was crucified at a place called Calvary. You Hebrews call it Golgotha. That is where I will find his sepulchre and the cross. Tell me where Golgotha is. That is all I want from you.”

  “Golgotha,” said Judas, “is known to us as the place of the skull. But I don’t know where it is.”

  “Are you choosing death with severe torments over a good and gracious life?”

  “Would a man in the desert, Your Highness, desire to eat stones when he can eat bread?”

  “Then get on with it!” demanded Helena.

  Judas fell to his knees, prostrated himself upon Moriah’s summit, and, according to my father, who heard it from Sophronius, loudly made this appeal: “O God, who made the earth and meted out its dust with the hollow of His hand. O God, who dwells in the glorious light that no man can withstand. O God, who made the countless Seraphim to continuously praise Him with their voices, saying, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, Mighty Lord whose glory fills the earth.’ You, O God, are the Lord of the Universe. Everything is the work of your hands. If it be your will that the Son of Mary reign, He whose being is derived from you, I beg you, perform this miracle for me and, just as you revealed the bones of Joseph to Moses, reveal to me the treasured wood of your cross. If it is buried somewhere in this Holy City, may the sweet smell of incense ascend from it. Then I too shall believe in Christ who was crucified, He who will reign forever and ever.”

  The sweet smell of incense did not ascend. No sooner had Judas finished his speech than a luminous cross appeared in the sky, extending from its foot over the Mount of Olives, to a place several hundred paces away from where Helena and Judas were standing. According to eyewitnesses, the brilliant light emanating from the cross surpassed the light of the sun and lasted for most of the day. Christian and heathen alike were inspired by a combination of fear and joy. They flocked to the churches to seek their salvation, now that the prophecy had been fulfilled:

  And then will appear in Heaven

  the sign that heralds the Son of man.

  Helena and her entourage, with Judas in tow, hurried to the place indicated by God, and Judas was set to work. The Romans had spared no effort in filling the site with city waste and earth and rubble brought from elsewhere; all this Judas had to uncover. He found the cross at a great depth in a stone cave that had been concealed when the Romans raised the level of the ground and covered it with flagstones in preparation for the construction of a temple to the Goddess of Love. And yet the holy tomb that Judas revealed was remarkably well preserved. Right on top of the Rock of Golgotha, which Helena co
uld finally see, and to which the cross had been fixed throughout the ordeal of Jesus, there stood a statue of Venus, naked, brazenly displaying her charms.”

  Only now was the empress convinced of Judas’s good faith. She showered him with honors, had him baptized, and made him the first bishop of Jerusalem—but not before changing his name from Judas to Cyriacus.

  Sophronius concluded his tour by showing Umar a piece of the actual cross, mounted in a casket of pure gold and precious stones. I found out later that it was not the actual relic, which had been carried to Constantinople for safekeeping in the months preceding Umar’s entry into the city. On Easter Friday, Sophronius said, the casket would be opened in a ceremony to which the Caliph was invited.

  At this ceremony, which Umar did not attend but which many years later I observed, the Patriarch’s chair is placed on the Rock of Calvary. He takes his seat. A table is placed before him with a cloth on it. The deacons stand round the table like sentinels. The casket containing the fake holy wood is then put before him. He opens it, and takes the piece of the cross out, placing it on the table. As long as the holy wood is on the table, the bishop sits with his hands resting on either end of it, holding it down. The deacons round him watch like hawks as now all the faithful, catechumens and communicants alike, come up to the table, one by one, with their hands behind their backs, to kiss the wood and move on. They keep their hands behind their backs, I was told by a monk, because on one occasion one of them bit off a piece of the holy wood and stole it away. That is why the deacons are anxious and wary as they stand guard, and why the worshippers stoop down and touch the holy wood with their foreheads, then with their eyes, and finally with their mouths, but no longer reach out their hands to touch it.