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Article: Jerusalem: the Christian holy city.
- Article from:
- Judaism
- Article date:
- March 22, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 American Jewish Congress. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Christian Jerusalem is at once a fact of history and a work of the imagination. The actual city, the place where King David ruled and Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, is irrevocably part of Christian memory. What happened there, whether one thinks of the siege of Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C.E., the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E., or the advent of Muslim rule in the seventh century, is no less constitutive of the Christian past than of Jewish history. When the Persians occupied Jerusalem in 614 C.E. it was a Christian monk from Mar Saba who wrote a lament mourning the destruction of the city. What he lamented was not a heavenly city, the new Jerusalem, but ...