Jerusalem: The Biography

† Crucifixion originated in the east – Darius the Great crucified Babylonian rebels – and was adopted by the Greeks. As we have seen, Alexander the Great crucified the Tyrians; Antiochus Epiphanes and the Jewish king Alexander Jannaeus crucified rebellious Jerusalemites; the Carthaginians crucified insubordinate generals. In 71 BC the Roman suppression of the Spartacus slave revolt culminated in a mass crucifixion. The wood for the cross is said to have come from the site of the fortified eleventh-century Monastery of the Cross, near today’s Israeli Knesset. The monastery was long the headquarters of the Georgian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem

* The Gospel of Peter, a Gnostic codex dating from the second or third century, discovered in nineteenth-century Egypt, contains a mysterious story about the removal of the body. The oldest Gospel, Mark, written forty years later around AD 70, ends with Jesus being laid in his tomb, never mentioning the Resurrection. Mark’s account of the resurrection was a later addition. Matthew, written about AD 80, and Luke are based on Mark and another unknown source. Hence these three are known as the Synoptics – from the Greek meaning ‘seen together’. Luke minimized the role of Jesus’ family at the Crucifixion, but Mark mentions Mary mother of James, Joses and Jesus’ sister. John, the latest Gospel, written probably at the end of the century, portrays a more divine Jesus than the others but has other sources, giving more detail on Jesus’ earlier visits to Jerusalem.

† Acts of the Apostles tells this story, but Matthew has another version: the remorseful Judas threw away his silver in the Temple at which the high priest (who could not put it into the Temple treasury because it was blood money) invested it in the Potter’s Field ‘to bury strangers in’. Then he hanged himself. The Akeldama – Field of Blood – remained a burial place into the Middle Ages.

* ‘It fell to me’, Agrippa wrote as a Maccabee and a Herodian, ‘to have for my grandparents and ancestors, kings, most of whom had the title High Priest, who considered their kingship inferior to the priesthood. Holding the office of High Priest is as superior in excellence to that of king as God surpasses men. For the office of one is to worship God, of the other to have charge of men. As my lot is cast in such a nation, city and Temple, I beseech you for them all.’

* Claudius was unlucky in his marriages: he killed one wife and the other killed him. He executed his unfaithful teenaged wife Messalina for treason then married his niece, Julia Agrippina, the sister of Caligula, who started to promote Nero, her son by an earlier marriage, as heir. Claudius made Nero joint heir with his own son Britannicus, named to celebrate his conquest of Britain. On his accession, Nero murdered Britannicus.

* James’ head was buried alongside another Jacobite head – that of the St James killed by Agrippa I – in what became the Cathedral of the Armenian Quarter. Hence its name is the very plural St Jameses’ Cathedral.

† Felix and Drusilla had a son who lived in Pompeii. When the town was destroyed by the volcano in 79, the son and his mother Drusilla died in the ash.

* The street that survives right beside the Western Wall was his – and so was another pavement that can be seen on Mount Zion.

* If the Greek form of ‘Nero Caesar’ is transliterated into Hebrew consonants and the consonants are replaced by their numerical equivalent, the resulting figures added together equal 666. Revelation was probably written during the persecutions of Emperor Domitian in 81–96. In 2009, papal archaeologists discovered a hidden tomb beneath the Church of St Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, always reputed to be the place of Paul’s burial. The bones were carbon-dated to the first to third centuries – they could be the remains of Paul.

* As for Vespasian, he is best remembered in Italy for creating public lavatories, which are still known as vespasianos.

* * Vespasian’s coins boasted ‘JUDAEA CAPTA’ with the female figure of Judaea seated, bound, at the foot of a palm tree while Rome leaned on his spear above her. The fate of the Jerusalem treasures is mysterious. In 455, Genseric, King of the Vandals, sacked Rome and tookthe Temple treasures to Carthage, where they were later captured by Emperor Justinian’s general Belisarius, who in turn brought them to Constantinople. Justinian sent the candelabra backto Jerusalem, but it must have been looted by the Persians in 614; at any rate, it vanished. The Arch of Titus, completed by Titus’ brother Domitian, shows the arms of the candelabra lengthened and turned upwards to resemble a trident: it may have been altered or it may be the artist’s mistake. Ironically the Romanized candelabra (except the pagan symbols) became the basis for the modern Jewish menorah, the candelabra used at Hanukkah and as the insignia of Israel.