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Jerusalem – the gateway to God.

The city of Jerusalem which is smaller than a square mile has been conquered on 40 occasions and been overrun and destroyed 18 separate times. This controversial holy land and ‘city of peace’ (meaning of Jerusalem) has had walls surrounding it to keep off invaders and with its walls comes its gates. The walls of Jerusalem are two and a half miles long and can be walked around briskly in two hour.

Most of the walls of Jerusalem as we see them today go back to the early 1500 when Suleiman the great undertook the urban renewal of Jerusalem. When the Turks took control of it, the city was in poor condition and so Suleiman began to renew the walls. He maintained the holy places and improved the water system

However the work was done quickly and often carelessly. It is obvious that many of the large stones displaced when the Roman destroyed the city of Jerusalem in the first century, were hap hazardly set in place by Suleiman’s workers. Sometimes old Roman engravings can be found upside down or out of place.

The first ones to build a wall around Jerusalem were the Jebusites and they did these 4500 years ago. However they inadvertently left the Gihon springs outside the walls. They then cut an underground secret tunnel to the spring in order to be not cut off from water supply should they be attacked by an enemy. It was near the spring that they also cut the first gate of Jerusalem so that in times of peace the water could be easily carried into the city.

The map indicating the gates of Jerusalem

Over a period of time Jerusalem had more than 50 gates each named for the everyday commerce they allowed, such as the sheep gate or horse gate and even the water gate. There were gates named for prophets and tribes of Israel and there were gates named to the places to which they lived. Over the centuries new gates were cut which later disappeared. The ruins of new entrances are constantly being located in excavations in the city.

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The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is one of the holiest sites in Christendom. It is located in the Christian quarter (there are four quarters) of the old city of Jerusalem. While the Church is famous for the site of the crucifixion, the spot where Jesus was taken down from the cross and embalmed and also the burial spot, it is also famous for several events that took place at the time of the crucifixion and several days after the death of Jesus.

Most visitors to Jerusalem are unaware that the city was razed and rebuilt as a Roman city named Aelia Capitolina by the Emperor Hadrian (after his family name Aelias and the Roman triune gods Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva) sometime after 117 A.D. According to Eusebius, the Roman Emperor Hadrian built a temple dedicated to the Roman goddess Venus in order to bury the cave in which Jesus had been buried and thus prevent Christians from venerating this holy site. Ironically, in doing so he inadvertently preserved the holiest shrine in Christendom.

The Hadrianic temple was completely destroyed by the Emperor Constantine 180 years later. He ordered that the temple be replaced by a Church.  While demolishing the structure, a tomb was discovered that was thought to be the tomb of Jesus. Constantine’s architects designed an imposing series of structures over the site. Covering the tomb itself he built an edicule, meaning a little house. This edicule has been rebuilt each one over the other like four nested Russian dolls, one outside the other, since the first edicule of Constantine in the fourth century till the last one of the 19th century which is seen today; the second and third edicule being built in the eleventh and sixteenth century.

The tomb of Jesus

In 614 the Persians pillaged the city of Jerusalem and sacked it for three days. The true cross of Christ was stolen only to be returned several years later. However the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was torched and Christians who took refuge in it were murdered.

In the year 1009, the fanatic Al-Hakim, the Caliph of Egypt, ordered the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem destroyed.  The demolition of this site, so holy to Christians, began with the empty tomb where Jesus had been buried, and continued with the dome. All of the furnishings were either stolen or destroyed. Destruction however, was not total, because as the high parts fell, rubble blocked the workmen from getting to the lower parts. For close to forty years, Christians were forbidden to visit the site.

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Dominus Flevit

The very name of the Church means ‘the Lord wept’. On the 10th day of Nissan on a Sunday Jesus got on to a donkey and began his triumphant entry in Jerusalem. When he reached the point where he saw the breath-taking view of Temple Mount, which at that time had the Temple of Jerusalem standing across the Kidron valley, he prophecies the destruction of Jerusalem and weeps over the city.

At this point stands today the tear drop Church which was designed by the Italian architect   Antonio Barluzzi (26 September 1884 – 14 December 1960). He was an Italian architect who became known as the “Architect of the Holy Land”. Barluzzi designed the Church in the shape of a Greek cross, where all four arms are of the same length, but shaped its dome to look like a tear.

The four corners of the dome run into four vials similar to those carried by women of antiquity who carried their tears in small vials. These vials are a reminder of the tears of Christ who at this particular spot wept over Jerusalem.

What is unique about this Church is that the apse is facing the west instead of the East as most Churches are built. It overlooks the Western Wall and the Dome of the Rock making for a beautifully captured picture within a frame. When the priest is celebrating the mass he stands in the same direction as Jesus when he mourned the fate of the city.

The present Church stands on the ruins of a seventh century Church with mosaic flooring from that era. Beneath the altar is a mosaic image of hen gathering her chicks in commemoration of the words of Jesus in Luke 13:34

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The Church of Pater Noster is the place where Jesus taught his disciples the Our Father. The Church is located on the top of Mount Olives and is open from 8am-noon, 2-5pm (Sunday closed). It is part of a Carmelite monastery built in 1872 and is also known as the Sanctuary of the Eleona or the Church of the Disciples. The Byzantine ruins of this Church dates back to the 4th century and stands right next to the new Church.

When the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great declared Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire, his mother, Helena, came to Jerusalem in search of sites that were associated with Jesus during his life. Helena was convinced that from here, Jesus ascended to heaven, and thus ordered the construction of the first Byzantine church at this site.

Hence was built one of the first three Churches by Constantine, the others being the Holy Sepulchre and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Today the land on which both churches and the entire monastery stand, formally belongs to France. It was an Italian woman, Aurelia Bossie, who on her second marriage wed a member of the French Royalty and became the Princess de la Tour d’Auvergne. It was Marie Alphonse Ratisbonne, a French Jew who had converted to Christianity, who convinced her to purchase the property in 1868.  

Later in that same century, a pilgrim to the Holy Land named Egeria ( perhaps a nun) who is widely regarded to be the author of a detailed account of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land ( 380 AD) referred to this church as the Church of the Eleona, which means the ‘Mount of Olives’ in Greek. Egeria based her reference on the Second Acts of John, where the existence of a cave on the Mount of Olives associated with the teaching of Jesus, in general, is mentioned. There is no specific documentation to state that the Lord ’s Prayer was taught at this spot.

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Kidron Valley

Mount Scopus in the North East of Jerusalem overlooks the Kidron Valley. The Kidron Valley begins at Mount Scopus and stretches all the way down south and then turns east, 21 miles and spills at the Dead Sea. From Mount Scopus one sees the Old City of Jerusalem and the Golden Dome on which Abraham bound his son Isaac in fulfillment of God’s command to sacrifice his only son on the rock.  It was here that King Solomon’s temple (960 BC) which was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC and the second temple built by the exiles and destroyed by the Romans once stood.

The Kidron valley was a kind of an Eastern border between Jerusalem and the wilderness. Jewish law does not permit the burial of the dead within the city but only outside. It is for this reason the Mount of Olives was the necropolis or the city of the dead.

In the Book of Samuel we read that the young shepherd from the city of David (the original city of David was Bethlehem) had to deal with many challenges after he becomes king, one of them being the rebellion of his son, Absalom.  When Absalom came back from Hebron, he wanted to seize the kingdom from his father David. David was merciful and even though he could have killed his son, he chooses to flee (2 Samuel 15) through the Kidron valley into the wilderness. The people of Israel advised David to take the arc of the covenant with him but he chose to keep it in the city because he believe that the arc of the covenant is not his but God’s.

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