Jerusalem: The Biography

* ‘Speak unto the children of Israel,’ said God to Moses and Aaron in Numbers 19, ‘that they bring thee a red heifer without spot, wherein is no blemish.’ The heifer would be sacrificed on a pyre of cedar and hyssop overlaid with a strand of scarlet thread and its ashes mixed with holy water. According to the Mishnah, this had only happened nine times, and on the tenth, the Messiah would come. Since the millennial excitement of the Israeli conquest of Jerusalem in 1967, fundamentalist Christian evangelists and Jewish redemptionists believe that two of the three essential preconditions for the Apocalypse and coming of the Messiah (or the Second Coming for the Christians) have been met: Israel has been restored and Jerusalem is Jewish. The third precondition is the restoration of the Temple. Some Christian fundamentalists and the tiny factions of redemptionist Orthodox Jews, such as those of the Temple Institute, believe that this is possible only when the Temple Mount is purified with the sacrifice of the red heifer. Therefore even today a Pentecostal preacher from Mississippi named Clyde Lott is, in alliance with Rabbi Richman of the Temple Institute, trying to breed the red heifer from a herd of 500 Red Angus imported from Nebraska to a farm in the Jordan Valley. They believe they will breed the ‘heifer that will change the world’.

* Herod’s family tree is complicated because the family were so endogamous, repeatedly intermarrying and remarrying within the Herodian and Maccabee clans trying to reconcile them: he married his brother Pheroras to Mariamme’s sister and his eldest son Antipater to the daughter of the last King Antigonos (beheaded at his request by Antony). But the marriages were interspersed with executions: Salome’s first two husbands were killed by Herod. Herodians also married into the royal families of Cappadocia, Emesa, Pontus, Nabataea and Cilicia, all Roman allies. At least two marriages were cancelled because the husband would not convert to Judaism and be circumcised.

* Doctors have debated his symptoms ever since. The most likely diagnosis is that Herod suffered hypertension and arteriosclerosis complicated by progressive dementia and by congestive heart and kidney failure. The arteriosclerosis led to venous congestion, aggravated by gravity, so that fluid collected in his feet and genitals, becoming so severe that the fluid bubbled through the skin; the blood flow became so poor that necrosis of the flesh – gangrene – developed. The bad breath and itching were caused by kidney failure. The penile/scrotal gangrene provided ideal material for the laying of eggs by flies that hatched as maggots. It is possible that the genital worms were hostile propaganda, symbolizing divine vengeance on an evil king: Antiochus IV Epiphanes, Herod’s grandson, Agrippa I, and many other sinners including Judas Iscariot, were assigned similar worm-infested, bowel- and scrotum-exploding exits.

* Jesus’ birth is historically challenging, the Gospels contradictory. No one knows the date but it was probably before Herod’s death, in 4 BC which means Jesus died in his early thirties if he was crucified in AD 29–30, forty if it was AD 36. The story of the census summoning the family to Bethlehem is not historical because Quirinius’ census took place after Herod’s successor, Archelaus, was deposed in AD 6, almost ten years after Jesus’ birth. In recounting the journey to Bethlehem and his Davidic genealogy, Matthew’s Gospel provides Jesus with royal birth and fulfilment of prophecy – ‘for thus it is written by the prophet.’ The Massacre of the Innocents and the escape to Egypt are clearly inspired by the Passover story: one of the Ten Plagues was the Killing of the First Born. Wherever Jesus was born, it is likely that the family did travel to the Temple for the sacrifice. Muslim tradition, expanded on by the Crusaders, believes that Jesus was raised in the chapel beneath al-Aqsa Mosque, Jesus’ Cradle. Jesus’ family is mysterious: after the birth, Joseph simply disappears from the Gospels. Matthew and Luke state that Mary remained a virgin and Jesus was fathered by God (an idea familiar in Roman and Greek theology, and also suggested in Isaiah’s prophecy of Emmanuel). But Matthew, Mark and John name Jesus’ brothers: James, Joses, Judas and Simon along with a sister, Salome. When Mary’s virginity became Christian dogma, the existence of these other children became inconvenient. John mentions ‘Mary the wife of Cleophas’. If Joseph died young, Mary may have married this Cleophas and had more children because, after the Crucifixion, Jesus was succeeded as leader first by his brother James then by ‘Simon son of Cleophas’.