Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/697

Rh SEPULCHRE, HOLY 671 demonstrable from the declaration of Josephus that the city in his time was " fortified by three walls except where it was encompassed by impassable ravines l ; from the absence of any record of an attack on the first wall till the second had been taken ; from a variety of incidental references in the siege by Titus ; from the apparent neces- sity of including within its circuit the pool Amygdalon, now known as Hezekiah's Pool or Birket Hamman el- Batrak 2 ; and from the remarkably small area which would otherwise be included by it. Writers on both sides have pressed into their service the remains of ancient buildings found in the districts traversed by the second wall according to their respect- ive theories. It seemed doubtful, till quite recently, if any sound argument could be based on these, the ruins being too fragmentary and occurring in too many different quarters to warrant any positive identification with a line of fortification as distinguished from other edifices. 3 But in the summer of 1885 a stretch of ancient wall 40 or 50 yards in length was disinterred, running northwards from the open space within the Jaffa gate to the west of Heze- kiah's pool, which certainly, as figured in the January number of the Quarterly JReports of the Palestine Explora- tion Fund, seems to go a long way to settle the question against the genuineness of the existing site. Considerable stress has been laid by some writers on the existence of ancient Jewish sepulchres, of a date apparently anterior to the Christian era, in the rock on which the present church is built, as proving that that rock could not have been within the circuit of the walls, inasmuch as it is alleged " the Jews never buried within their towns." 4 There is, however, no trace in the historical books of the Bible of any aversion on the part of the Jews to intra- mural interment. Whatever width of interpretation may be given to the recorded burial of eleven of the kings of Judah " in the city of David," the phrase can hardly be held to prove that such burial-place was without the walls ; while 2 Chron. xxviii. 27 and xxxiii. 20 seem to point very strongly in the opposite direction. Joab also, we are told, was buried " in his own house in the wilderness," 5 and Samuel "in his house at Ramah." 6 But the most striking case of all is Hebron, where in the midst of the city are found the jealously guarded walls which enclose the cave of Machpelah. If, then, these tombs are older than the time of Christ, there seems little difficulty in crediting that they might have been included within the second wall. We know for a certainty that they were within the third. The curious point rather is that their existence in the rock may be used as a strong argument against the site, for, speaking of the disinterment of the rock of the sepulchre from the accumulated soil heaped over it by the Romans, Eusebius 7 impresses on us the fact 1 Bell. Jud., v. 4, 1. 2 It is of course quite possible to draw a line, as Lewin does, which, while it includes this pool, will yet exclude the existing church, but all probability seems opposed to such a route. 3 Pierotti gives a detailed plan of the whole district in which the remains which he seeks to identify with the second wall occur (Jeru- salem Explored, pi. xxx.). But from this it would seem extremely doubtful whether any of those ruins can be identified with a city wall, or should not merely be regarded as portions of detached buildings, the walls of which project, now to the east, now to the west, of the imagined line. These tombs have been described by Hepworth Dixon, in Gentleman's Magazine, March 1877, and more fully by Clermont-Ganneau in Quar- terly Report of the Palestine Exploration Fund, 1877, p. 76. In 1885 two additional sepulchral chambers were discovered in the same rock a little to the south-east of the present church, of which a plan and notices are given by Schick in Zeitschrift des deutschen Palaestina- Vereins, 1884, vol. viii. p. 171. 5 1 Kings ii. 34. e 1 Samuel xxv. 1. 7 Theophania, Lee's translation, p. 199. that there was " only one cave within it, lest, had there been many, the miracle of Him who overthrew death should have been obscured." One argument remained which, at least up to 1847, it seemed difficult for the impugners of the orthodox site to meet, namely, Was it at all probable that Constantino should have been deceived, either by erroneous inference or by wilful misrepresentation, when in 325 he erected a monumental church over what was then believed to be the holy tomb 1 Apart from the consideration that of all localities this seemed to be the least likely to pass from the memory of the Christian church, 8 its exact position had been in a manner identified by the existence on the rock of Golgotha of a temple or statue of Venus, and on the site of the resurrection of a statue of Jupiter erected by Hadrian in the 2d century ; and the fact remains that on the superincumbent rubbish being cleared away by the orders of Constantino a cave was discovered, which it seems difficult, even were we willing with Taylor 9 to impute deliberate fraud to the existing bishop of Jerusalem, to believe could have been previously prepared beneath a heathen shrine, and in the midst of a population of pagans and of Jews. 10 In 1847 Fergusson, in his Essay on the Ancient Topo- graphy of Jerusalem, attempted to show that Constantino had built his memorial church on another site altogether, and that it was still existing under another name. On the eastern hill of the city, in the sacred Mohammedan enclosure of the Haram-es-Sherif, and on a spot generally considered to have formed part of the temple area, stands the magnificent octagonal building called the Dome of the Rock, usually but erroneously believed to have been erected by the caliph 'Omar, and so popularly known as the mosque of 'Omar. The jealousy of the Moslems had, with rare exceptions, prevented up to quite recent times the intrusion of Christians within its sacred precincts, but it was known to have been erected over a large mass of native rock rising above the surface of the ground and having a cave within it. A section of the building, very roughly executed, was given in the Travels of Ali Bey, published in 1816 (vol. ii. p. 74); but in 1833 Mr. Cother- wood, under the pretext of being a civil engineer in the employment of Mehemet Ali, and of examining into the structural condition of the building with a view to its repair, spent three weeks in examining it and its sur- roundings, of which he made elaborate drawings and sections. A general account of his investigations and their results, published in W. H. Bartlett's Walks about the City and Environs of Jerusalem (p. 148), led to Fergusson's getting access to those drawings, which confirmed him in the belief he had already begun to entertain from other sources, that the Dome of the Rock was originally a Chris- tian edifice; and in the essay referred to he argued at great length and with much vigour on both architectural and historical grounds that it and the Golden Gateway a walled-up entrance to the Haram from the east were built in the time of Constantino ; that the former was the church of the Anastasis, erected by that emperor over the tomb of our Lord, and the latter the entrance to the atrium of the great basilica described by Eusebius 11 as 8 Origen (Cont. Gels., i. 51) speaks of Calvary as of a spot well known in his day (185-254). 9 Ancient Christianity, 4th ed., London, 1844, ii. 277. 10 Finlay (Greece under the Romans^ p. 561) has argued that exact identification would be easy from the minute registration of property which prevailed in the Roman empire and extended to the provinces, by which the position of Golgotha and the property of Joseph of Arimathea might easily have been traced. But he seems to press his point too far (see Fallrnerayer, Golgotha und das heilige Grab, 4to, Munich, 1852, p. 8). 11 Vita Const., iii. 39.
 * Lord Nugent, Lands Classical and Sacred, London, 1845, ii. 47.