Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/698

Rh 672 SEPULCHRE, HOLY immediately adjoining ; and that the transference of the site from the eastern to the western hill took place some- where about the commencement of the llth century, when, in consequence of the invasion of the Turks, the Christians were driven from the former hill for a time. This work was followed up by his article " Jerusalem " in Smith's Dictionary of the Bible and by several minor pub- lications a ; and the whole question was, with some modifi- cations, re-argued by him at great length in The. Temples of the Jews and the other Buildings in the Haram Area at Jerusalem in 1878. Though at first Fergusson's essay seemed to fall dead, it inaugurated a discussion which has within the last twenty years been carried on with much keenness. His views have been supported on architectural grounds by linger, 2 and on general grounds by Sandie, 3 Smith, 4 and Langlois, 5 while among the multitude of his opponents may be specially noted Williams, 8 Lewin, 7 the Abb6 Michon, 8 De Vogue 1, 9 Pierotti, 10 Sir Charles Warren, 11 and Captain Conder. 12 The architectural arguments in favour of Fergusson's theory have forced Lewin, one of his most strenuous opponents, to argue that the Dome of the Rock may have been a temple to Jupiter erected by Hadrian, which he imagines may have been restored or rebuilt by Maximin Daza, the successor of Diocletian. 13 But they must be studied in Fergusson's own works or in that of Unger above referred to. The topographical objections are mainly founded on the necessity of restricting the Jewish temple to the south-eastern corner of the Haram, the site, how- ever, assigned to it by Lewin himself and Thrupp, 14 and on the difficulty of supposing a place of interment so near the sacred building. But Josephus, at the time of the siege, speaks of "the monuments of King Alexander," whatever that may mean, existing just over against or in front of the north colonnade of the temple. 15 As regards the historical argument, it would certainly appear that up to the close of the 6th century the balance of evidence is in favour of the eastern site. The narrative of the Pilgrim of Bordeaux 16 may perhaps be read as sup- porting either view. But Antoninus Martyr 17 and Theo- dosius 18 can hardly be reconciled with the existing location ; in two manuscripts of the latter 19 the writer believed that the same hill witnessed in succession the offering of Isaac, the vision of the angel at Araunah's threshing-floor, the building of the temple, and the death and resurrection of 1 Notes on the Site of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, London, 1861, and The Holy Sepulchre and the Temple at Jerusalem, London, 1865. 2 Die Bauten Constantin's am heiligen Orabe, Gottingen, 1863. Horeb and Jerusalem, Edinburgh, 1864. The Temple and the Sepulchre, London, 1865. Un Chapitre intdit de la Question des Lieux Saints, Paris, 1861. The Holy City, 2d ed., 2 vols., London, 1849. The Siege of Jerusalem by Titus, &c., London, 1863. Voyage religitux en Orient, 2 vols., Paris, 1854. Le Temple de Jerusalem, fol., Paris, 1864-65. 10 Jerusalem Explored, 2 vols. fol., London, 1864. 11 The Temple and the Tomb, London, 1880. Various papers in the Quarterly Statement of Palestine Explora- tion Fund. u Archaologia, xli. p. 157. Sepp has latterly tried to show that it was built by Justinian Die Felsenkuppel, eine Justinianische Sophitn- kirche, und die tibrigen Tempel Jerusalems, Munich, 1882. 14 Ancient Jerusalem, Cambridge, 1855. 18 Del. Jud., v. 5 3. Sandie's attempt (Horeb and Jerusalem, p. 259) to minimize this difficulty by supposing a rocky valley to have run up from the valley of Jehoshaphat westwards at this point, and so to have divided the temple from the tomb, seems inadmissible. Modern investigation shows that such a valley, or rather depression, did exist, but north, not south, of the Dome of the Rock. 18 Itinera Latina (Soc. de 1'Or. Lat.), Geneva, 1879, i. pp. 16-18. 17 Ib., pp. 100-106. 18 Ib., pp. 63-66. 19 The Louvain and British Museum MSS. , see Notes and Queries, 27th January 1877. our Lord. Many more passages might be quoted from writers of this period testifying to the belief that the hill that witnessed the offering of Isaac witnessed also the resurrection of Christ, and many others identifying the scene of the offering of Isaac with the hill on which the temple was built. Perhaps the strongest point in this connexion against Fergusson is that so striking a fact as the identity of the hill of the Passion with that on part of which the temple stood should only be directly spoken to by a single writer. After the 9th century the historical evidence becomes more difficult to interpret. Fergusson would date the transference of the site about 1000 ; but it seems clear from Istakhri (978) 20 and Mokaddasi (987), 21 both of whom were unknown to him, that before their days the Dome of the Rock was a Mohammedan place of worship, and the latter expressly states that it was suggested by a great Christian church. 22 The natural date to assign for such a transference would be about 614, when the city was captured by the Persians, and, to quote the carefully guarded narrative of Gibbon, " the sepulchre of Christ and the stately churches of Helena and Constantine were con- sumed, or at least damaged, by the flames." The buildings were repaired or rebuilt by Modestus a few years later, and their praises are sung by Sophronius, his successor in the patriarchate, but in terms which give little topographical information. Sophronius lived to see the capture of the city by 'Omar in 636, the earliest records of Avhose doings as yet available are the brief one of Theophanes (818) and the more lengthened one of Eutychius (937). From both of these it seems clear that the caliph confirmed the Chris- tians in the possession of the sites (whatever these might be) which he found in their hands. In or about 670 the French bishop Arculph visited Jerusalem, and under the hand of Adamnanus we have a detailed account taken down from his lips, 23 and a plan of the church of the Resurrec- tion as he saw it, which strikingly corresponds to the Dome of the Rock, as, however, it necessarily would correspond with any church which had been erected in close imitation of that building. 24 There are passages, however, in Arculph descriptive of the city very difficult to understand unless on the assumption that the transference of Sion, which had hitherto (see JERUSALEM) been identified with the eastern hill, had already in his time taken place. The next pil- grim who has left us a record is Willibald, 25 who visited the city early in the 8th century, and whose description applies on the whole better to the western than the eastern site ; 20 Bibl. Geog. Arab., ed. De Goeje, Leyden, 1870-71, i. p. 56 sq. 21 Ib., iii. p. 165 sq. a Ib., iii. p. 159. 23 Itin. Lat. (Soc. de 1'Or. Lat.), 1879, i. pp. 141-202. 24 The view that at the time when Arculph wrote the Dome of the Rock was in the hands of the Mohammedans seems strengthened by the well-known Cufic inscription which still runs round the colonnade of that building, and a complete translation of which by the late Professor Palmer will be found in the Quarterly Report of the Palestine Exploration Fund (1871, p. 164) and Fergusson's Temples of the Jews (p. 269). In it the construction of the dome of the building is dated 72 A.H. (691), but the name of the builder, which clearly was Abd-el- Melek in the original, has been erased and that of Abdallah el-Mamiin (198 A.H. ; 813) fraudulently substituted, "the short-sighted forger," as Palmer calls him, having omitted to change the date as well as the name. In this inscription there is very special mention made of our Saviour, and in a way which seems inexplicable unless the building on which it was inscribed had been, in the mind of the writer, associated in some important respects with the history of Jesus. And the tradi- tion that it was so continued long after ; for we find Theoderic so late as 1176 writing of it, "Hoc templum, quod nunc videtur, ad honorem Domini nostri Jesu Christi ejusque piae genetricis ab Helena regina et ejus filio, imperatore Constantino, constructum est " (ed. Tobler, St Gull, 1865, p. 46). Fergusson believes this inscription to have been written in the 12th century, but is obliged to admit that the alphabet employed is identical with that found on the coins of Abd-el-Melek ''3 of the Jews, p. 24). A facsimile of the sentence containing the date and the forgery will be found in the Rev. Isaac Taylor's The Alphabet (London, 1883, i. p. 322). 25 Itin. Lat. (Soc. de 1'Or. Lat.), 1879, i. pp. 244-297.