The Christian Appropriation of Jerusalem in the Fourth Century: The Case of the Bordeaux Pilgrim

Abstract

IN THE PAST THREE or so decades there has been a noticeable increase of scholarly interest in the world of Christian pilgrimage in general and that leading to the Holy Land in particular.1 Indeed the birth of Christian pilgrimage to Roman Palestine during the third and fourth decades of the fourth century took place not in the least due to the brilliant Holy Land plan of Constantine, which was, among other matters, aimed at diverting the attention of the Christian masses from what only just recently had been their lot - horrifying persecutions at the hands of the heathen Roman Empire. At the same time it served to invigorate their interest in their recent heroic, historic, and mythic past that took place in the Holy Land and particularly in Jerusalem.2 In addition to its avowed interest in a new Christian self-identity it seems to me that Constantine's plan served too as yet another component in the overall scheme to tilt the political and religious center of gravity from the Occident to the Orient - from Rome the civitaa aeterna to Roma Nova, which he founded in Byzantium on the banks of the Bosphoran straits and renamed Constantinopolis.3In no time the massive construction work carried out predominantly in (the Holy Sepulcher) and around Jerusalem (Mount of Olives, Mamre [near Hebron] and Bethlehem) was being augmented by the creation of yet another configuration of a spiritual nature, the holy Jerusalem liturgy, which no doubt when finally formed merited the title the Fifth Gospel given it by Peter Walker.4 The pilgrims who flocked by the hordes to the holy city were the backbone of the unique religious and cultural transformation that is the Christianization of Jerusalem and of the Holy Land. They captured and disseminated its message as well as its scents. It seems that it must have been to them, as well as to the neophytes gathering in Jerusalem to convert to the new religion, that Cyril the local bishop addressed the following: One should never grow weary of hearing about our crowned Lord, especially on this holy Golgotha. For others merely hear, but we see and touch5The end product, so to say, of the Christian appropriation of the Holy Land in general and of Jerusalem in particular was demonstrated cartographically on the famous mosaic floor of the Madaba Church east of the Jordan River, better known as the Madaba Map.6 This map and possibly other maps7 as well as other components of the Christian Holy Land edifice (relics and tombs) were to an extant a reflection of the circulating verbal accounts of the early pilgrims to Byzantine Palestine. The centrality of these accounts to the understanding of Christian views on pilgrimage and the Holy Land is beyond doubt, but before we take a closer look at segments of the earliest description of the Holy Land known to us, the one written by the anonymous pilgrim from Bordeaux (333 CE.), a short precis of the statua quaestionis of the early Christian pilgrimage to Palestine and its literary accounts is in order.Scholars like David Hunt and Zeev Rubin have scoured the intricate historical terrain of Late Antiquity in order to depict for us the hitherto unknown picture of Christian Palestinian pilgrimage set in the unique political and religious circumstances of the empire and in particular in the province of Roman Palestinian.8 Others, like Peter Walker, Robert Wilken, and Robert Markus as well as Piere Maraval, to mention only a few, immersed themselves in the conceptual world of pilgrimage and in the notion of the Holy Land as portrayed in the writings of the Church fathers.9 Still others like John Wilkinson and Ora Limor, took upon themselves to translate and annotate the pilgrims' accounts.10 In more recent years a more specific venue has been explored, namely, the Jewish component of Christian pilgrimage. Recent studies have looked into the following set of topics. On the one hand, for instance, Ora Limor has explored the role of the Hebraica Veritas (that is, the intrinsic and concealed knowledge of the Jews of local Judeo-Christian traditions) in the construction of Palestinian Christian sacred topography, and others like Elchanan Reiner have been tracing hints of possible Jewish reactions to this rather new religious and cultural intrusion into their land. …