From the mouth of the IBEX: A walk through the Old City of Jerusalem

Take a walk inside the walls of Jerusalem, tracing the first steps of the Master's College student through the Old City.

By DANILLO A. SANTOS
Stone, dust, sweat, scents, food, wall, hill, crowds, dates, faces, temples, drawings, windows, busy, bustle, scribble, scrabble. And somewhere in the middle of all that, I believe I might have learned something. The beginning was stone and walls. Big, slanting stones in a semi-pyramidal shape that led to a tower of big stones, topped off with smaller stones that seemed to have been plopped on, like a cherry on a sundae. It was the Citadel, "built" (because nothing in Jerusalem seems to have been originally built by anyone-you can always trace a building a little farther back to some other person or people group) by Herod the Great shortly before Jesus' birth. When Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 AD by the Romans, it was left alone, according to Josephus, as a sign for what the glory of Jerusalem used to be like. Along come the Byzantines, little less than 300 years later, and built a little more on top of it, to restore it, and after them, the Turks, who added the walls and that cherry-topping allotment of small stones to it. Finally, the Crusaders come, 400 years later, and add a moat to the Citadel, making this tower a true blend of… well, stone and walls. We walked up to the top of it and from there saw the Mount of Olives, the Temple Mount (where we looked at the Dome on the Rock and Al Aksa Mosque). From there we also saw the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which was in fact the next site we visited: dust, crowd, and this nauseating plethora of scents. The place reeked religion, and the odor was in the darkness of the temple, the arms stretching for a slab of stone on the floor, crowds awaiting their turn to enter a box where Jesus' body supposedly was buried, metal sounds calling for a priest, etc. The place of death of Jesus, although preserved by the construction of the temple by the mother of Constantine, lost all relevance as the physical location of Christ's resurrection, to gain this sort of super-imposed veil of religiosity. Like the citadel, it had been so built upon that, after so many layers, one does not know where it began and what it was for in the first place. Despite that, we do know, by the graves beneath it as well as other evidence, that it used to be outside the city walls in the times of Jesus-an abandoned rock quarry, and the most possible location for the atoning death of the Messiah. We walked along more until we came to the site of the Bethesda pool, where Jesus healed a lame man on the Sabbath. The reason the man might have been waiting by the pool is the possibility of the existence of a temple to Asclepius, the Greek god of healing. Considering the common association of Asclepius, healing, and water, the pools might have been thought of as having medicinal powers. When Jesus (in John 5) came to the man and healed him, he was making a statement of the power of the true God, as opposed to the Greek/Roman gods. Through sweat, food, faces, temples and windows we trampled on, and found ourselves in front of the Ecce Homo Arch, on the Via Dolorosa. Herod the Great had built a fortress which he named in homage to Mark Anthony-the Antonia Fortress. A thousand years later, the Crusaders designated that fortress as the place where Pilate formed a defense on Jesus' behalf before the priests. Tradition goes on to say that the final words that permitted the crucifixion of Jesus were given on the Ecce Homo Arch. From there, we left through the Lions Gate, and came, on our right, to a Moslem cemetery on the eastern side of Jerusalem. We walked until we reached a gate, the Beautiful Gate, closed as it was, in the middle of the cemetery. Built in the late Byzantine or Early Islamic Period, it hasn't been used for around two centuries. There is a false tradition that Messiah is supposed to come through this gate. But Messiah's return has nothing to do with this gate. When He returns it will be with power and no deliberation as to His identity. Then began the busy bustle of the scribble and scrabble, when we turned back around to look at the Mount of Olives. I took notes and drew a few churches that were landmarks, but stopped to look at the bottom of the mount, where the garden of Gethsemane was. To the right of the garden were tombs from the Hasmonean period, which Jesus probably referred to as he spoke to the Pharisees, the "white-washed tombs." To see all of this chronology hopelessly scrambled in the same geographical location was encouraging. God works in linear time, in the plane of space, and yet at the same time, He is outside of it all, and we who are farther along in the chronological line can see a glimpse of this glory. This report was written by a student studying with The Master's College Israel Bible Extension Program or IBEX