Jerusalem, Patriarchate of

JOHN A. MCGUCKIN

The ancient see of Jerusalem ranks fourth in the precedence of honor of the autoce­phalous Orthodox churches today. At the time of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 it was raised to the status of a patriar­chate, although in ancient times it was the Romano-Palestinian see of Caesarea Maritima which held the jurisdictional position of superiority over all churches in Palestine (then including Israel and Jordan) and Arabia. After the era of Constantine, however, Caesarea Maritima (once a lead­ing Christian university city, and home of Origen the exegete, Pamphilus the philoso­pher martyr, and Eusebius the historian) fell into terminal decline, and Jerusalem emerged as a significant see with (by the 4th century onwards) a vibrant and power­ful monastic movement surrounding it in the Judean desert. Mar Saba is a striking reminder of that history, but there are also numerous ancient sites still preserved, such as St. George the Chozebite off the Jericho-Jerusalem road, or the Monastery of the Forty Days (of Christ’s temptation) at Jericho itself. Stories from this era are known throughout the Orthodox world today in the form of the paranetic tale of St. Mary the Harlot, whose feast is celebrated every Lent in Orthodox services as a model of repentance.

Plate 36 Pilgrim carrying Orthodox cross. Hanan Isachar/Corbis.

Even in Antiquity Jerusalem was never a large church with a significant sphere of political influence, but it always had a different kind of symbolic influence, and importance, for the universal Christian imagination, chiefly as the site of the holy places where the Lord taught, suffered, and rose again. In its most important patristic phase it was the center of an internationally influential liturgical revival, which followed after Constantine’s building of the Church of the Resurrection (Anastasis) which in the West is more commonly called by its medieval name: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The story of St. Helena’s discov­ery of the true cross in Jerusalem was added to by several other major discoveries (by aristocrats, founders, and archbishops) of the relics of New Testament saints such as John the Forerunner or Stephen the Protomartyr; these were stories of visions and findings that electrified not only Jerusalem itself but Christian cities from Constantinople to Rome and Syria, and which led to a massive movement of the building of pilgrimage churches in the Holy Land (many of which are still being excavated – the finding of an octagonal site being the give-away evidence of it as a Byzantine place of pilgrimage). From the late 4th to the 6th centuries, Roman Pales­tine, with Jerusalem at its center, was renowned throughout the Christian world as a thriving church based around such pilgrim traffic. Its liturgical traditions thus spread because of this to influence many of the rites celebrated in Orthodoxy today. The influence can especially be seen in festivals such as the blessing of the waters on The- ophany (formerly a pilgrimage rite peculiar to Jerusalem, when the clergy and people would make the journey from the holy city to the Jordan river) and the ritual of the Exaltation of the Cross (September 14), which was based around the acts of venera­tion celebrated in the courtyard of the Anastasis church buildings where a great cross was raised containing relics of the Lord’s own cross. The current festival com­memorates the loss ofthese relics from Jeru­salem to Persian raiders and their eventual reclamation by the Byzantine emperor. Jerusalem also seems to have adopted the common Orthodox liturgical practice of having the multinational congregation respond to complex prayer-petitions with a simple responsorial “Lord have mercy,” easily learned, in Greek, as Kyrie Eleison. The beautiful Liturgy of St. James is still in use in the Orthodox Church today, though rarely witnessed in the course of a year. It remains as the standard liturgical rite of Jerusalem.

Pilgrimage continued throughout ancient times. The Jerusalem Church’s moment of glory really came at the time of the Council of Chalcedon, when Bishop

Juvenal managed to secure from the concil­iar fathers the admission of its right to be regarded as the primary see of Palestine (by virtue of its ancient status and contempo­rary importance) and they also gave to it the status and title of a patriarchate (though without extending its territorial jurisdic­tion). After the 7th-century Islamic occupa­tion of the holy city a long decline set in concerning its Christian vitality, but the pilgrimage movement still continued, even if abated. The Byzantine emperors often secured the agreement ofthe Islamic caliphs to allow Christians passage, and there were many times when the Byzantine emperors regained control of the land routes. Even when the emperors lost the upper hand in negotiations, they still could easily negotiate pilgrim access by means of treaty. So it was that, until the massive disruptions of the first three Crusades, the church centered round Jerusalem continued as a fairly lively nexus of pilgrim sites, sustained by the city clergy with high ceremonial liturgies funded by visitors and aristocratic patrons, along with numerous monasteries in the desert regions of Judea and modern Jordan, reaching down to Gaza and Sinai. The fame of these Judean monasteries rivaled that of the earlier settlements of Christian Egypt, which by this stage had themselves fallen into a degree of obscurity following barbar­ian devastations of the ancient desert settle­ments. In the 5th century the instability of the churches wracked by the christological controversy following in the aftermath of the Council of Chalcedon (451) was acutely felt in Jerusalem and the surrounding regions. Accounts from this time, such as the Lives of the Fathers by Cyril of Scythopolis (which narrates the hagiogra­phies of some of the Judean hermits), show significant tensions within the same houses between pro- and anti-Origenist monks; and between pro- and anti-Chalcedonian spiritual leaders. St. Saba and his fraught battles to secure control of the Judean monasteries witnesses to the same tensions. It was a time when one bishop, preaching a christological message that was un­acceptable to his monastic hearers, was surrounded in church, his wooden raised pulpit wrenched from the walls with him still in it, and bishop and furniture alike taken outside and thrown into a ditch. Such theological and cultural tensions clearly weakened Christian life in the city during this time.

The 7th century, however, was definitely to throw a curtain over any further expan­sion of the patriarchate, as it soon found itself thereafter in the unenviable position of a city that was not only sacred to the Jews and the Christians alike, but had now also become a holy site for the new politically ascendant religion of Islam. Even so, with a few exceptions, the Christian holy places were allowed to operate in reduced numbers for most of the time. Islam attrib­uted to Jerusalem a role as the site of Mohammed’s ascent from the earth, and commissioned Byzantine craftsmen to build the exquisite shrine of the Dome of the Rock over the place where it declared Abraham’s sacrifice had taken place.

In hard times, Mar Saba, the great forti­fied monastery near Bethlehem, emerged as a strong center of Orthodox literary activity. St. John of Damascus worked from this base in the 8th century, and it also attracted numerous other theologians and scholars, several of whom in the 9th century trans­lated the writings of some of the early Syriac fathers into Greek, a development that would lead to the hesychastic revival in medieval Byzantium. This time also witnessed to Mar Saba’s role as a major clearing house for international Orthodox liturgy. It was largely due to the influence of this monastic community that the so-called “City” or “Cathedral Rite of Byzantium” (high ceremonial, choral singing, and processions) was fused with the monastic ritual (heavy use of the psalter, simplified chant, and extended prayers for the liturgy of hours) so as to become the shape of Orthodox liturgical practice ever afterwards.

The high Middle Ages when the western armies intervened militaristically, known to us now as the Crusades, were obviously times that reflected major tensions between the Christians and their Islamic masters, and were a very mixed blessing for the Jerusalem Church. Crusader intervention followed soon after the partial demolition of the shrine of the tomb of the Lord by “Mad” Caliph Hakim in the early 11th century, but Crusader presence in the city was intermittent, and ultimately not long lasting. When the western armies did con­trol the city, they had a tendency to prefer a new set of church leaders who followed the western rites, a practice they also followed at Constantinople after the infa­mous Fourth Crusade, when they ousted the Orthodox patriarch and substituted a Latin one. The Al Aksa mosque built on the platform in Jerusalem where the Temple once stood (actually on the site of the southern portico of Herod’s Temple complex) incorporates the Latin Crusader church of the Templars. The excited romance of the discovery of Jerusalem can be traced in the legends of the medieval West from this time, with tales such as the Holy Grail gaining lively currency.

Pilgrimage has always been one of the raisons d’etre for the patriarchate of Jerusalem, therefore, and continues to be so. But in saying this it is extremely important not to overlook the profound significance of the increasingly dwindling local population of about 35,000 Arab Christians who have been suffering poli­tically for so long, in a veritable silent martyrdom. Modern demographic changes in Israel today, in a context of rising Islamic

Arab nationalism, has left little room in anyone’s political map for the Arab Christians, and they have been leaving Israel in massive numbers since the middle of the 20th century. The Jerusalem patriarchate had the closest links, especially after its occlusion by Islamic power, with the patri­archate of Constantinople, and phanariot higher clergy were regularly used to staff its offices under the Ottomans. It also has historical and very close links with the Church of Sinai.

In 1672 an important synod (often called the Synod of Jerusalem, although it took place in the Bethlehem Nativity Church) took place under the direction of the patriarch, and made some first moves in Orthodoxy to classify theological positions affirmed by Protestantism and Catholicism, and where Orthodoxy stood in relation to both. The council confirmed the canonicity of the Deuterocanonical literature, thus rejecting the Reformation world’s adoption of the shorter Hebrew canon. It also affirmed the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, but countered trends in Roman Catholic Augustinianism with an insistence on the integral role that good deeds play in the process by which God justifies the believer (Robertson 1899).

The Church of the Anastasis, with the patriarch at its center, continues to be governed by the monastic Brotherhood of the Holy Cross, which still makes up a pow­erful and focused Greek clerical community in Jerusalem. The monks are known as Hagiotaphites (“brothers of the holy tomb”) and the patriarch is ex officio the head of all the Brotherhood’s affairs. His title is “His Beatitude the Patriarch of the Holy City of Jerusalem and of All the Promised Land.” All bishops of the local synod (two eparchies at Akka (Ptolemais) and Nazareth, and several other titular archbishops such as Mt. Tabor, Jordan, and Kerak) whose complement does not exceed eighteen, must be members of the Brotherhood. The senior hierarchs are all predominantly occupied with the adminis­tration of one of the chief shrines of the Holy Land.

The local faithful are almost entirely Arabs (the resident Greek Christians number in the low hundreds today) with predominantly Arabic parish priests. The latter are mostly married, and the celibates among them his­torically have rarely been admitted to the higher offices of the church, presumably so that the synod of the Jerusalem patriarchate will never lose its operative Greek majority. Since 1958 there has been a new constitution for the administration of the patriarchate, replacing the one composed in Ottoman times and revised by the British administra­tion following World War I. This was partly influenced by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and it gave the Christian Arabs more voice. Since then (from 1960 onwards) there has been a growing admission that there should always be a small number of Arab bishops in the local synod. There are currently about 156,000 Orthodox faithful belonging to the jurisdiction ofthe Jerusalem patriarchate, living in the Roman Palestinian territories, now Israel, the West Bank, Gaza territory, and Jordan.

Throughout the 20th century there have been regular occasions of disruption and unrest in the patriarchate’s affairs. Relations with the Israeli government have sometimes caused difficulties, with the patriarch at times caught between state political inter­ests, those of the Brotherhood, and those of the Arab Christian faithful. Recent land deals involving the patriarchate and Israeli authorities caused great stresses in the church and involved a major (and bitterly contested) turnover of the leadership.

SEE ALSO: Constantinople, Patriarchate of; Cross; Islam, Orthodoxy and; Sinai, Auto­cephalous Church of

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Hunt, E. D. (1982) Holy Land Pilgrimages in the Later Roman Empire, ad 312–460. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McGuckin, J. A. (2004) “Jerusalem,” in The Westminster Handbook to Patristic Theology. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Melling, D. (2001) “Jerusalem,” in K. Parry et al. (ed.) The Blackwell Dictionary of Eastern Christianity. Oxford: Blackwell.

Robertson, J. N. (1899) The Acts and Decrees of the Synod of Jerusalem. London: T. Baker.

Wilken, R. L. (1992) TheLand Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought. New Haven: Yale University Press.