Holy Seulcher Significance
The significance of the modern day Jerusalem as a religious capital cannot be established without the sacred sites of different religions in the city, including the Western Wall of the ancient Jewish Temple and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher of the Christians. After the complete destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 CE by the Roman forces, Jerusalem was stripped of its spiritual axis and left desolated with the Jews banned from the city. Consequently, when the Church of the Holy Sepulcher was built on the Western Hill, the city of Jerusalem was invigorated with a new religious passion, but the rivalry between Judaism and Christianity was also intensified. Despite of the fact that these two establishments were centers of two different religions,
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the Jewish Temple and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher are intricately connected through resemblances in architectural elements, relating religious traditions, and the liturgical celebrations that are performed in them. However, the Holy Sepulcher is also a representation of the theological differences between Judaism and Christianity by embodying the Christian belief concerning the dynamic transformation from the Old Covenant into the New Covenant. Therefore, rather than a continuation of the Jewish Temple on the Western Hill, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is a construction representing not only the Christian foundation based on Judaism, but also its deviation from the older religion. The disparity between Jewish and Christian beliefs is discernible through their different perspectives on the Jewish Temple. The religious center of Judaism had always been the Jewish Temple, which also represented the core of the faith, and thus the Jews were devastated after its obliteration following the disastrous failure of the First Jewish Revolt (Armstrong 152). However, the Christians were more or less apathetic toward the loss, and provided a completely different interpretation of the edifice. Not only was the city in which the Temple resided in condemned as the “Guilty City” because of its rejection and crucifixion of Jesus by the apostle Matthew (Armstrong 160), but the Temple Mount where the Temple stood was also considered hopelessly corrupted due to paganism in the city by Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea (Armstrong 185). Therefore, the Jewish Temple was of no significant status on the spiritual map of Christianity. In fact, according to the disciple John, the divine presence was transferred from the Temple to the body of Jesus, a transformation of the Old Covenant to the New Testament (Armstrong 161). John imagined Jesus rejecting the Temple cult by recording his statement: “Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up”, in which John explains that he was referring to “the Temple of his [Jesus’s] body” (John 2:19-21). In addition, Christian theologies differed from Judaism in their emphasis on the spiritual essence of religion detached from any particularly sacred location, allowing the divine to be accessed anywhere by anyone with a true and pure heart (Armstrong 177-178). As Matthew described in his gospel, when Jesus died on the hills of Golgotha, the curtain of the Temple separating the Hekhal and the Devir was torn into two (Matthew 27:51), and thus the divine became accessible to all people everywhere. Eusebius also pointed out that the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob worshipped God without a temple or a complex Torah, but rather in simple spirit and truth wherever they found themselves (Proof of Gospel 1:6:42). It is evident from these Christian imaginations that the Christians perceived the destruction of the Second Temple as God’s intention to replace the ostentatious sacrificial rituals with the pure spiritual religion that was independent sacred architectures and unhindered by time and space (Armstrong 175). Therefore, the Jewish legacy of the Temple for the Christians was no more than the remnant of an obsolete religion located in the contaminated Roman city of Aelia Capitolina. In spite of the Christian renunciation of Judaism and the Jewish Temple, Christianity itself was not recognized as one of the official religions of the Roman Empire, and remained marginalized while suffering from severe persecutions until it was legitimized by Constantine the Great in 313 CE through the publication of the Edict of Milan (Armstrong 173). Constantine showed great respect to Christianity by attributing his victory at the battle of Milvian Bridge as well as his rise to power to the Christian God, and Christianity had developed quickly both in size and significance under his promotion (Armstrong 174). However, the development of Christianity was threatened by a doctrinal controversy formed around this time. On the one hand, Eusebius sided with Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria, who argued that Jesus was another prophet sent by God and was not divine in the same sense that God was (Armstrong 176-177). On the other hand, Makarios, bishop of Aelia, supported the theory of Athanasius, young assistant of Arius’s bishop, who claimed that Jesus was God in human flesh and shared the same divinity (Armstrong 177). Infuriated by the dichotomy which was threatening to destroy his Christian empire, Constantine attempted to obtain a consensus in the church through the Council of Nicaea, where Makarios proposed the project of unearthing the Holy Sepulcher located in Aelia, intending to raise the status of his city and securing a triumph of his advocated theology over that of Eusebius (Armstrong 178-179). This proposal appealed immediately to Constantine, who was still a pagan at heart, and firmly held pagan perceptions of the power of symbols and monuments without sharing Eusebius’s contempt for holy spaces (Armstrong 179). Furthermore, after experiencing decades of relentless persecutions, the Christian community at large also approved Makarios’s proposal, sharing Constantine’s attitude toward the necessity of a monument to establish the roots of Christianity in a venerated past, in order to validate the authenticity of the religion (Armstrong 175). And thus began the construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, as well as the initiation of Jerusalem’s conversion into a sacred space for the Christians. According to literary evidence and archaeological results, the present Church of the Holy Sepulcher is the combined result of three distinct construction periods (Ousterhout, “Architecture as Relic” 6). Initiated by Constantine the Great in 326 CE, the first of the three stages of construction established a building complex that isolated and glorified the Rock of Calvary and the Tomb of Anastasis, the most grandiose holy sites on the hills of Golgotha (Ousterhout, “Architecture as Relic” 6-7). To examine a sacred site of great religious significance such as Golgotha—where Jesus was crucified, entombed, and resurrected—Thomas Tweed introduces a model in his short essay “Space”, which defines the characteristics of religious space as interrelated and kinetic (117). Specifically, spaces are interrelated in the sense that they are experienced through relationships with other spaces, marking a religious site as “translocative” and “transtemporal” (Tweed 120-121). For the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the liturgical rites that are performed in it closely resemble the rituals that once took place inside the Jewish Temple. As Ousterhout points out, both the Jewish Morning Whole-Offering at the Temple and the Christian Weekday Morning Hymns at the Holy Sepulcher were begun at daylight, followed by blessings to the people from the Jewish High Priest and Christian Bishop after the ceremonies (“The Temple” 45). These cultic similarities between the two buildings, as Tweed’s model suggests, interrelates the later-constructed Holy Sepulcher with the religious traditions practiced in the ancient Temple as well as the sacred events that took place there. By associating itself with an ancient religion of a venerable past, Christianity sought to justify and consolidate the new status of the religion after many years of persecutions. Such an attempt to build the roots of Christianity in Judaism is also a reflection of the original motivation for the construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which became a new Christian identity. While the liturgical celebrations at the Holy Sepulcher were “considered to have been structured after a model of the ceremonies at the Temple” (Wilkins 347-359), there were also interrelating architectural features between the two edifices. In particular, the counterparts to specific religious elements in the Holy Sepulcher can be found in the Temple. While the Tomb of Christ assumes the place of the Holy of Holies in the Temple, the Rock of Crucifixion is connected to the altar of sacrifice on the Temple Mount, and the ever-burning lamp in the Tomb is associated with the menorah in the Temple (Ousterhout, “The Temple” 45-46). Additionally, from modern reconstruction of the original building plans, it is clear that the orientations of the two constructions are both facing the east despite the contrast in their overall structures (Ousterhout, “The Temple” 45). Such resemblances between the Holy Sepulcher and the Temple allowed Christians to transfer ancient Jewish-Christian traditions from the Temple Mount area to the Western Hill, where the church stood. For instance, the old story that Abraham had almost sacrificed his son Isaac on Mount Moriah was evolved into a holy event that took place at Golgotha in Christian imagination, whereas Mount Moriah was previously regarded as the Temple Mount (Armstrong 183). Such a dynamic shift in traditions exemplifies the kinetic aspect of Tweed’s model for inspecting a sacred space, which suggests that spaces as “processes…[that are] propelled along by natural cultural flows…[and] change over time and space” (Tweed 120). Through the kinetic process of conveying ancient Jewish stories to Christian holy ground, Christianity established a religious foundation on the beliefs of the Old Covenant. As Robert Ousterhout mentions, fourth-century Christian writers like Eusebius were inclined to ground the recently accepted faith of Christianity on the signs and prophesy of the Old Covenant (“The Temple” 46). By building itself on ancient foundations through its interrelations to the Temple, Christianity validated the authenticity of this new religion and consolidated the theologies of the New Testament. While the concept of Christianity originating from Judaism was widely supported, rather than a continuation of the older religion, Christianity is a redefinition of Judaism in reality. Therefore, as the religious representation of Christianity, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is also an embodiment of the deviation of Christianity from Judaism, aside from its interrelations with the Jewish Temple. Different from the Temple, which was essentially the only sanctioned prayer house for Jews to access the divine, the Holy Sepulcher was a commemorative shrine that provided a complete experience of the Passion of Christ for the Christian pilgrims. After the destruction of the Constantinian complex by Caliph Al-Hakim in 1009 CE, the Holy Sepulcher remained in ruins until the Byzantine Emperor Constantine IX Monomachus provided sufficient funds (Ousterhout, “Constantine Monomachus” 69-70). The resulting eleventh-century Byzantine building complex from this construction period, the second out of the three stages, consisted of a network of multiple small chapels, each dedicated to an event of Christ’s earthly life (Vincent and Abel 255-256). Moreover, in the last stage of construction, the Crusaders had demolished the separating walls between the small Byzantine chapels, housing all the holy sites under one roof for the first time (Ousterhout, “Architecture as Relic” 12-13). Due to its possession of all the essential elements, the Holy Sepulcher provided a complete portrayal of the Passion for Christian pilgrims. By walking down the very same path that Jesus took before his death, the pilgrims were able to visualize the events of Christ’s life with vivid details, leading to a better comprehension of the beliefs of the New Testament and a stronger connection to the divine in even the most mundane spaces. Consequently, in the imagination of the worshippers, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher became identified not only as the monument that housed the sacred space, but also as interchangeable with the space itself (Ousterhout, “Architecture as Relic” 5). In the same sense, the Temple was not only the building that accommodated the Ark of the Covenant, but it also became recognized as the divine construction on the Temple Mount by the Jews. Therefore, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher had become the Christian version of the Temple, or from Eusebius’ perspective, it was the “New Jerusalem” on the Western Hill, towering above the desecrated Temple Mount (Armstrong 185). Eusebius extended his notion by referring to the prophet Haggai in his sermon, emphasizing that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is a fulfillment of Haggai’s prophecy “the latter glory of this house shall be greater than the former” (Wilkins 553-561). As a result, the practical differences between the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the Jewish Temple is a reflection of the Christian deviation from Judaism. Over the course of history, through the reconstruction and constant renovations, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher has maintained its religious significance in Christianity from the day the Tomb of Anastasis was first unearthed.By interrelating the liturgy,architectural characteristics, and religious traditions of the Holy Sepulcher to those at the Temple, the Christians were able to establish a religious foundation on the Old Covenant and thereby validating the newly-accepted religion as authentic.
However, the Holy Sepulcher differed from the Temple in the sense that the former was a commemoration of Christ with the intention of supporting the comprehension of the New Testament, while the latter was the only verified sanctuary for the Jews to access the divine. While the Christians presumptuously celebrated the superiority of Christianity over Judaism through the construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the truth was that Judaism had maintained its religious significance throughout history, and thus Christianity should be interpreted as a redefinition of Judaism rather than a triumph over the older religion. Therefore, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is a religious construction representing not only the Christian foundation in Judaism, but also the deviation of Christianity from
Judaism.
the Jewish Temple and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher are intricately connected through resemblances in architectural elements, relating religious traditions, and the liturgical celebrations that are performed in them. However, the Holy Sepulcher is also a representation of the theological differences between Judaism and Christianity by embodying the Christian belief concerning the dynamic transformation from the Old Covenant into the New Covenant. Therefore, rather than a continuation of the Jewish Temple on the Western Hill, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is a construction representing not only the Christian foundation based on Judaism, but also its deviation from the older religion. The disparity between Jewish and Christian beliefs is discernible through their different perspectives on the Jewish Temple. The religious center of Judaism had always been the Jewish Temple, which also represented the core of the faith, and thus the Jews were devastated after its obliteration following the disastrous failure of the First Jewish Revolt (Armstrong 152). However, the Christians were more or less apathetic toward the loss, and provided a completely different interpretation of the edifice. Not only was the city in which the Temple resided in condemned as the “Guilty City” because of its rejection and crucifixion of Jesus by the apostle Matthew (Armstrong 160), but the Temple Mount where the Temple stood was also considered hopelessly corrupted due to paganism in the city by Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea (Armstrong 185). Therefore, the Jewish Temple was of no significant status on the spiritual map of Christianity. In fact, according to the disciple John, the divine presence was transferred from the Temple to the body of Jesus, a transformation of the Old Covenant to the New Testament (Armstrong 161). John imagined Jesus rejecting the Temple cult by recording his statement: “Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up”, in which John explains that he was referring to “the Temple of his [Jesus’s] body” (John 2:19-21). In addition, Christian theologies differed from Judaism in their emphasis on the spiritual essence of religion detached from any particularly sacred location, allowing the divine to be accessed anywhere by anyone with a true and pure heart (Armstrong 177-178). As Matthew described in his gospel, when Jesus died on the hills of Golgotha, the curtain of the Temple separating the Hekhal and the Devir was torn into two (Matthew 27:51), and thus the divine became accessible to all people everywhere. Eusebius also pointed out that the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob worshipped God without a temple or a complex Torah, but rather in simple spirit and truth wherever they found themselves (Proof of Gospel 1:6:42). It is evident from these Christian imaginations that the Christians perceived the destruction of the Second Temple as God’s intention to replace the ostentatious sacrificial rituals with the pure spiritual religion that was independent sacred architectures and unhindered by time and space (Armstrong 175). Therefore, the Jewish legacy of the Temple for the Christians was no more than the remnant of an obsolete religion located in the contaminated Roman city of Aelia Capitolina. In spite of the Christian renunciation of Judaism and the Jewish Temple, Christianity itself was not recognized as one of the official religions of the Roman Empire, and remained marginalized while suffering from severe persecutions until it was legitimized by Constantine the Great in 313 CE through the publication of the Edict of Milan (Armstrong 173). Constantine showed great respect to Christianity by attributing his victory at the battle of Milvian Bridge as well as his rise to power to the Christian God, and Christianity had developed quickly both in size and significance under his promotion (Armstrong 174). However, the development of Christianity was threatened by a doctrinal controversy formed around this time. On the one hand, Eusebius sided with Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria, who argued that Jesus was another prophet sent by God and was not divine in the same sense that God was (Armstrong 176-177). On the other hand, Makarios, bishop of Aelia, supported the theory of Athanasius, young assistant of Arius’s bishop, who claimed that Jesus was God in human flesh and shared the same divinity (Armstrong 177). Infuriated by the dichotomy which was threatening to destroy his Christian empire, Constantine attempted to obtain a consensus in the church through the Council of Nicaea, where Makarios proposed the project of unearthing the Holy Sepulcher located in Aelia, intending to raise the status of his city and securing a triumph of his advocated theology over that of Eusebius (Armstrong 178-179). This proposal appealed immediately to Constantine, who was still a pagan at heart, and firmly held pagan perceptions of the power of symbols and monuments without sharing Eusebius’s contempt for holy spaces (Armstrong 179). Furthermore, after experiencing decades of relentless persecutions, the Christian community at large also approved Makarios’s proposal, sharing Constantine’s attitude toward the necessity of a monument to establish the roots of Christianity in a venerated past, in order to validate the authenticity of the religion (Armstrong 175). And thus began the construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, as well as the initiation of Jerusalem’s conversion into a sacred space for the Christians. According to literary evidence and archaeological results, the present Church of the Holy Sepulcher is the combined result of three distinct construction periods (Ousterhout, “Architecture as Relic” 6). Initiated by Constantine the Great in 326 CE, the first of the three stages of construction established a building complex that isolated and glorified the Rock of Calvary and the Tomb of Anastasis, the most grandiose holy sites on the hills of Golgotha (Ousterhout, “Architecture as Relic” 6-7). To examine a sacred site of great religious significance such as Golgotha—where Jesus was crucified, entombed, and resurrected—Thomas Tweed introduces a model in his short essay “Space”, which defines the characteristics of religious space as interrelated and kinetic (117). Specifically, spaces are interrelated in the sense that they are experienced through relationships with other spaces, marking a religious site as “translocative” and “transtemporal” (Tweed 120-121). For the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the liturgical rites that are performed in it closely resemble the rituals that once took place inside the Jewish Temple. As Ousterhout points out, both the Jewish Morning Whole-Offering at the Temple and the Christian Weekday Morning Hymns at the Holy Sepulcher were begun at daylight, followed by blessings to the people from the Jewish High Priest and Christian Bishop after the ceremonies (“The Temple” 45). These cultic similarities between the two buildings, as Tweed’s model suggests, interrelates the later-constructed Holy Sepulcher with the religious traditions practiced in the ancient Temple as well as the sacred events that took place there. By associating itself with an ancient religion of a venerable past, Christianity sought to justify and consolidate the new status of the religion after many years of persecutions. Such an attempt to build the roots of Christianity in Judaism is also a reflection of the original motivation for the construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which became a new Christian identity. While the liturgical celebrations at the Holy Sepulcher were “considered to have been structured after a model of the ceremonies at the Temple” (Wilkins 347-359), there were also interrelating architectural features between the two edifices. In particular, the counterparts to specific religious elements in the Holy Sepulcher can be found in the Temple. While the Tomb of Christ assumes the place of the Holy of Holies in the Temple, the Rock of Crucifixion is connected to the altar of sacrifice on the Temple Mount, and the ever-burning lamp in the Tomb is associated with the menorah in the Temple (Ousterhout, “The Temple” 45-46). Additionally, from modern reconstruction of the original building plans, it is clear that the orientations of the two constructions are both facing the east despite the contrast in their overall structures (Ousterhout, “The Temple” 45). Such resemblances between the Holy Sepulcher and the Temple allowed Christians to transfer ancient Jewish-Christian traditions from the Temple Mount area to the Western Hill, where the church stood. For instance, the old story that Abraham had almost sacrificed his son Isaac on Mount Moriah was evolved into a holy event that took place at Golgotha in Christian imagination, whereas Mount Moriah was previously regarded as the Temple Mount (Armstrong 183). Such a dynamic shift in traditions exemplifies the kinetic aspect of Tweed’s model for inspecting a sacred space, which suggests that spaces as “processes…[that are] propelled along by natural cultural flows…[and] change over time and space” (Tweed 120). Through the kinetic process of conveying ancient Jewish stories to Christian holy ground, Christianity established a religious foundation on the beliefs of the Old Covenant. As Robert Ousterhout mentions, fourth-century Christian writers like Eusebius were inclined to ground the recently accepted faith of Christianity on the signs and prophesy of the Old Covenant (“The Temple” 46). By building itself on ancient foundations through its interrelations to the Temple, Christianity validated the authenticity of this new religion and consolidated the theologies of the New Testament. While the concept of Christianity originating from Judaism was widely supported, rather than a continuation of the older religion, Christianity is a redefinition of Judaism in reality. Therefore, as the religious representation of Christianity, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is also an embodiment of the deviation of Christianity from Judaism, aside from its interrelations with the Jewish Temple. Different from the Temple, which was essentially the only sanctioned prayer house for Jews to access the divine, the Holy Sepulcher was a commemorative shrine that provided a complete experience of the Passion of Christ for the Christian pilgrims. After the destruction of the Constantinian complex by Caliph Al-Hakim in 1009 CE, the Holy Sepulcher remained in ruins until the Byzantine Emperor Constantine IX Monomachus provided sufficient funds (Ousterhout, “Constantine Monomachus” 69-70). The resulting eleventh-century Byzantine building complex from this construction period, the second out of the three stages, consisted of a network of multiple small chapels, each dedicated to an event of Christ’s earthly life (Vincent and Abel 255-256). Moreover, in the last stage of construction, the Crusaders had demolished the separating walls between the small Byzantine chapels, housing all the holy sites under one roof for the first time (Ousterhout, “Architecture as Relic” 12-13). Due to its possession of all the essential elements, the Holy Sepulcher provided a complete portrayal of the Passion for Christian pilgrims. By walking down the very same path that Jesus took before his death, the pilgrims were able to visualize the events of Christ’s life with vivid details, leading to a better comprehension of the beliefs of the New Testament and a stronger connection to the divine in even the most mundane spaces. Consequently, in the imagination of the worshippers, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher became identified not only as the monument that housed the sacred space, but also as interchangeable with the space itself (Ousterhout, “Architecture as Relic” 5). In the same sense, the Temple was not only the building that accommodated the Ark of the Covenant, but it also became recognized as the divine construction on the Temple Mount by the Jews. Therefore, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher had become the Christian version of the Temple, or from Eusebius’ perspective, it was the “New Jerusalem” on the Western Hill, towering above the desecrated Temple Mount (Armstrong 185). Eusebius extended his notion by referring to the prophet Haggai in his sermon, emphasizing that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is a fulfillment of Haggai’s prophecy “the latter glory of this house shall be greater than the former” (Wilkins 553-561). As a result, the practical differences between the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the Jewish Temple is a reflection of the Christian deviation from Judaism. Over the course of history, through the reconstruction and constant renovations, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher has maintained its religious significance in Christianity from the day the Tomb of Anastasis was first unearthed.By interrelating the liturgy,architectural characteristics, and religious traditions of the Holy Sepulcher to those at the Temple, the Christians were able to establish a religious foundation on the Old Covenant and thereby validating the newly-accepted religion as authentic.
However, the Holy Sepulcher differed from the Temple in the sense that the former was a commemoration of Christ with the intention of supporting the comprehension of the New Testament, while the latter was the only verified sanctuary for the Jews to access the divine. While the Christians presumptuously celebrated the superiority of Christianity over Judaism through the construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the truth was that Judaism had maintained its religious significance throughout history, and thus Christianity should be interpreted as a redefinition of Judaism rather than a triumph over the older religion. Therefore, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is a religious construction representing not only the Christian foundation in Judaism, but also the deviation of Christianity from
Judaism.