At first, it may seem like the fertile imagination of a novelist—that the Temple treasures were hidden in a church. And I can’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they were. But the suggestion has plausibility, buttressed by some fascinating history and impressive archaeological remains.
I start with Procopius, the court historian of the Roman emperor Justinian (527–565 C.E.). At the summit of Byzantine glory, in the sixth century, Procopius describes a massive church Justinian built in Jerusalem. Unlike other churches in the Holy City, it was not constructed on a site of Biblical significance. Justinian called it the “New Church of Mary, 052the Mother of God,” commonly known as the Nea (Greek for “New”).1
Without a rationale for its existence as a commemorative site, the Nea itself is somewhat of a mystery. When it was consecrated on November 20, 543 C.E.,2 it was the largest Christian structure in the city and the center of an entire complex, including a hospital, hospice, library and monastery. Procopius describes its wonders in detail.3 The stones, he says, were gigantic (as in another structure not far away, the Jerusalem Temple, that the Romans had destroyed). In order to make room for the church, a massive artificial platform, or podium, was created, supported by huge vaults. This calls to mind another platform—the Temple Mount—where Solomon’s Temple and Herod’s Temple, the Second Temple, once stood. That platform, too, has huge vaults that support the southeastern part of Herod’s Temple Mount, an underground area known as Solomon’s Stables.
The roof of the Nea, Procopius tells us, was built of incredibly tall cedars, undoubtedly from Lebanon. Solomon, too, used cedars of Lebanon to build his Temple (1 Kings 5:8–11 [Hebrew verses 22–25]). And so did Herod.4
The Nea’s great and numerous columns, Procopius says, were like flames of fire, perhaps like the Hall of Columns in Solomon’s palace, which also graced the Temple Mount (1 Kings 7:6).
Then Procopius writes something odd: “Two of these columns stand before the door of the church, exceptionally large and second to no column in the whole world.” It is impossible not to be reminded of the two columns at the entrance to Solomon’s Temple, Jachin and Boaz (1 Kings 7:21; 2 Chronicles 3:17).
Procopius also makes much of the entrance to the Nea. First one enters a narrow colonnaded stoa, a kind of narthex; then a court with columns on all four sides. There is a clear division between this outer court and the inner sanctuary. This sequence seems to reflect the entry to Solomon’s Temple—a portico (‘ulam) with two columns (Jachin and Boaz), followed by a large hall (heikhal) and then the inner sanctuary (debir) (1 Kings 6).
The Nea sat upon the highest hill of Jerusalem (higher than the Temple Mount), which recalls Isaiah 2:2: “The house of the Lord shall be established on the top of the mountains and shall be exalted above the hills.”
As one scholar has already suggested, for such reasons Justinian’s Nea was seen as a kind of new Temple.5 Perhaps this is not surprising coming from one who, when he completed Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, declared, “Solomon, I have vanquished thee!”
Nor is it surprising then that, according to a Jerusalem lectionary preserved in Georgian from c.700 C.E., the whole of the Book of Kings—so much concerned with royalty and the Temple—was read aloud at the Nea every year on August 3.6
Archaeological excavations undertaken in the 1970s and early 1980s, by Israeli archaeologist Nahman Avigad and subsequently by Meir Ben-Dov, have uncovered parts of the Nea.a7 Everything known thus far completely confirms the accuracy of what Procopius wrote. It was built on the highest hill, and among the remains is a massive wall of huge stones 45 feet long and over 20 feet thick. It survives to a height of 26 feet. The northern apse in the tri-apsidal wall of the church is 16 feet in diameter and points east, as was customary in churches at this time. Avigad also uncovered sections of gorgeous marble floors, possibly part of an entrance court. Ben-Dov uncovered the southeastern corner of the great church, and the southernmost of its three apses, outside the present city walls, allowing an assessment of the size of the building—375 feet long and 185 feet wide! It was the biggest church ever built in the Holy Land.
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With these remains now exposed, it is possible to identify six huge barrel-vaulted halls—now cisterns over 30 feet high—as substructures for the church. This is just as Procopius described. The vaults had already been drawn by Charles Warren of the Palestine Exploration Fund in 1867–1870,8 but now, exploring them again, Avigad discovered an inscription in a tabula ansata (a rectangular frame with little triangles on each side) reading: “And this is the work which was carried out by the generosity of our most gracious Emperor Flavius Justinian, under the care and devotion of the most holy Constantinos, priest and hegoumenos (in the year) thirteen of the indiction [either 534/35 or 549/50].”9 Below the inscription is a large cross motif.
Could the Nea have been built as a new temple to house the Temple artifacts taken to Constantinople after the Byzantine empire crushed the Vandals, who had previously taken them from Rome?
As is well known from the Arch of Titus and the description of Josephus, the Roman emperor Vespasian took the Temple treasures to Rome after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. After parading them through the streets, he housed them in the Temple of Peace.10
According to Procopius11 and others,12 the Vandals took the Temple treasure from Rome to Carthage in the fifth century. In 553 the Byzantine empire, under Count Belisarius, managed to retrieve the Temple artifacts for “Rome.” This was the time of the emperor Justinian, and the “new” Rome was Constantinople, to which they were transferred.
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Procopius then tells a remarkable story. After the great triumphal procession through Constantinople in which the Temple treasures were exhibited, a certain Jew approached one of the imperial retinue and warned that unless the sacred items were “in the place where Solomon, the King of the Jews, formerly placed them,” terrible things would happen to the possessor, as had happened to the Romans, and subsequently to the Vandals. When Justinian heard this word of doom, “He became afraid and quickly sent everything to the sanctuaries of the Christians in Jerusalem.”13
If the Nea Church was so gigantic and spectacular and reminiscent of Solomon’s Temple (as described by Procopius and confirmed by archaeology), it would surely have been a fitting place for the storage of the Temple treasure, at least until the Persians invaded Palestine and captured Jerusalem in 614. Yet, we are sadly lacking good reports from visitors to the Nea between 553 and the Persian conquest. The Piacenza Pilgrim in 570 mentions the Nea only as having a “great congregation of monks, a hospice and a hospital.”14 But pilgrims can be quirky about what they report, and our sources are thin for this time period.
The Nea is shown grandly standing off the Cardo (the main street) in schematized form in the famous Madaba mosaic map of the later sixth century, as also in the less-famous mosaic of Umm er-Rasas from 785.
The absence of any reference to the Temple treasure in the few accounts we do have may be due to the fact that it was not on show but stored below in the vaults, guarded by monks and by the apotropaic care of the Mother of God.
What is clear, however, is that the Persians and their Jewish allies in 614 targeted the Nea Church when the Persians arrived in the city. According to an eyewitness account preserved in Georgian, Latin and Arabic, The Capture of Jerusalem (Expugnationis Hierosolymae), they destroyed the church and killed the clergy.15 This account tends overall toward exaggeration, and in fact the wrecking was not total, since the Nea continued to exist 055(as shown on the Umm er-Rasas mosaic),16 and the patriarch Sophronius used the Nea Church for his Christmas sermon in 634 when he could not travel to Bethlehem.17
The Commemoratorium de casis Dei of 808 records that there is “New St. Mary, built by Justinian” with 12 clergy and that “the Church of St. Mary itself which [was damaged] by the earthquake and engulfed by the earth has side walls measuring 39 dexteros [262 feet] …” This is clearly referring to the Nea since the account only lists the measurements of the four great churches in the vicinity: the Nea, the complex around Christ’s Sepulchre, the basilicas of Bethlehem and Holy Zion. These are described in order of size—the Nea being the first.
The date of the final destruction of the Nea Church is unclear. In 870 Bernard the Monk stayed in the hospice there (re-)built by the emperor Charlemagne: “All who come to Jerusalem for reasons of devotion and who speak the Roman language are given hospitality there. Beside it there is a church in honor of St. Mary, and to this the emperor (Charlemagne) added a splendid library, 058and 12 mansions, with fields, vineyards and a garden in the valley of Jehoshaphat. In front of this hospice is the cardo …”18
In the tenth century the historian Eutychius (Sa‘id ibn Bitriq), Melkite Patriarch of Alexandria,19 wrote that the Nea remained in ruins “until this very day,” stating that the original ruination happened at the time of the Persian conquest in the seventh century.20
While the Persian damage can only have been partial, burning and ransacking would fit well with a destruction caused by people looking for something, namely the Temple treasure. An eye-witness account by Antiochus Strategos indicates that the Persians not only massacred and enslaved the Christian population, but also plundered and burned churches. They even obtained the greatest Christian treasure: the True Cross. All discovered treasure would have been looted as booty, as was common in ancient warfare. Reporting the words of a monk called Thomas, Strategos lists places where the survivors found the dead: “‘At the altar of the Holy New (Nea) we found 600 souls … in the Book room (library) of the Holy New (Nea), 70 souls.’”21 So the Nea was clearly a place searched, looted and partly destroyed by the Persians, and the scene of a terrible bloodbath. But was the Temple treasure found? While it may well be that Persian sources would not necessarily have reported the discovery of the Temple treasure specifically, it is impossible that Jewish sources could be totally silent on this. Local Jews in this case supported the Persians in capturing Jerusalem, and if the Temple treasure had been found here, then something would have been recorded. Yet the ancient sources are silent.
And so the mystery of the Nea’s treasure remains unsolved. Did the Temple artifacts get buried in the 059deepest part of this structure, never to be found, or were they taken away and hidden somewhere else? Whatever the case, the chances are that they are still somewhere in the Holy Land, unless they were quickly melted down in total secrecy at some stage in the history of this troubled land.
At first, it may seem like the fertile imagination of a novelist—that the Temple treasures were hidden in a church. And I can’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they were. But the suggestion has plausibility, buttressed by some fascinating history and impressive archaeological remains. I start with Procopius, the court historian of the Roman emperor Justinian (527–565 C.E.). At the summit of Byzantine glory, in the sixth century, Procopius describes a massive church Justinian built in Jerusalem. Unlike other churches in the Holy City, it was not constructed on a site of Biblical significance. Justinian called it the […]
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See Meir Ben-Dov, “Found after 1400 Years—the Magnificent Nea,”BAR 03:04. The final publication report will appear in Hillel Geva and Oren Gutfeld, eds., Jewish Quarter Excavations in the Old City of Jerusalem, Conducted by Nahman Avigad 1969–1982, vol. 4 (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society).
Endnotes
1.
For a translation of Procopius’s De Aedifici 5:6, see John Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrims before the Crusades, rev. ed. (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 2002), pp. 124–128, and Procopius VII, H.B. Dewing, trans., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1940), pp. 342–349. See also Yoram Tsafrir, “Procopius and the Nea Church in Jerusalem,” Antiquité Tardive 8, pp. 149–164; J.T. Milik, “La topographie de Jérusalem vers la fin de l’époque Byzantine,” Mélanges de l’Université Saint Joseph 37 (1960–1961), pp. 145–151, at pp. 146–147 and 150–151.
2.
According to Cyril of Scythopolis, Vita Euthymii 71:18.
3.
De Aedifici 5:6.
4.
See Josephus, War 5.190 (cf. Antiquities 8.63; Ezra 3:7; 1 Esdras 4:48; 5:53). In the Jewish tradition of the targums (Aramaic translations of scripture) the temple is sometimes referred to as “Lebanon,” because of the cedars, see references in G. Johannes Botterweck, Helmer Ringgren and Heinz-Josef Fabry, eds., Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, vol. 7, trans. David E. Green (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), p. 456.
5.
Hagi Amitzur, “Justinian’s Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem,” in Marcel Poorthius and Chana Safrai, eds., The Centrality of Jerusalem: Historical Perspectives (The Hague: Kok Pharos, 1996), pp. 160–175. Amitzur has also suggested that the measurements indicate a building of 200 x 100 royal cubits, in keeping with Ezekiel’s prophecy of a future Temple (Ezekiel 40).
6.
Michel Tarchnischvili, ed., Le Grand Lectionnaire de l’Église de Jérusalem (Ve–VIIIe siecle), Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium (Corpus SCO), vol. 18 (Louvain/Leuven: Secrétariat du Corpus SCO, 1959–1960), pp. 188–189; 204–205.
7.
Nahman Avigad, “The Nea: Justinian’s Church of St. Mary, Mother of God, Discovered in the Old City of Jerusalem,” in Yoram Tsafrir, ed., Ancient Churches Revealed (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1963), p. 133; Dan Bahat, with Chaim Rubenstein, The Illustrated Atlas of Jerusalem (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), pp. 74–75. Hillel Geva and Oren Gutfeld, Jewish Quarter Excavations in the Old City of Jerusalem Conducted by Nahman Avigad 1969–1982, IV: The Cardo and the Nea Church (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, forthcoming).
8.
Charles Warren, Plans, Elevations, Sections &c., Shewing the Results of the Excavations at Jerusalem (Palestine Exploration Fund: London, 1884), pl. 26.
9.
Nahman Avigad, “A Building Inscription of the Emperor Justinian and the ‘Nea’ in Jerusalem,” Israel Exploration Journal 27 (1977), pp. 145–161. Hegoumenos means “superior” of a monastery: an “abbot.”
10.
Josephus, War 7.158–161. See Sean Kingsley, God’s Gold: The Quest for the Lost Temple Treasures of Jerusalem (New York: Harper Collins, 2007).
11.
Procopius, History of the Wars 4:9, Procopius II, H.B. Dewing, trans., (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1916).
12.
Theophanes, Chronographia 93. The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History, A.D. 284–813, trans. and commentary Cyril Mango and Roger Scott, with Geoffrey Greatrex (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997). There is no modern edition or translation of Cedrenus. You find the Greek text in Charles A. Fabrot, ed., Patrologiae Graeca 121 (1857). (cf. Cedrenus, Compendium Historiarum).
13.
Procopius, History of the Wars 4:9: 6–9.
14.
English translation in Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrims before the Crusades.
15.
Gérard Garitte, ed., La Prise de Jérusalem par les Perses en 614Corpus SCO 202–203 (Louvain/Leuven: Secrétariat de Corpus SCO, 1960): 78–79 (Georgian); 52 (Latin); Gérard Garitte, ed., Expugnationis Hierosolymae A.D. 614, 2 vols., Corpus SCO 340–341, 347–348; (Louvain/Leuven: Peeters, 1973–1974), 102 (Arabic); 68 (Latin).
16.
As noted by Robert Schick, The Christian Communities of Palestine from Byzantine to Islamic Rule: A Historical and Archaeological Study, Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 2 (Princeton: The Darwin Press, 1995), pp. 332–333.
17.
That the church was not destroyed is also indicated in the occasionally garbled account of Adomnan, De Locis Sanctis 1:4 (c. 685), written up on the basis of a description from a visitor named Arculf.
18.
English translation in Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrims Before the Crusades.
19.
Bartolomeo Pirone, ed., Eutichio, Patriarca di Alessandria (877–940), Studia Orientalia Christiana-Monographiae (Jerusalem: Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Franciscan Printing Press, 1987).
20.
Annals 1: 216. The serious damage he refers to, however, was more likely to have been of a more recent date, i.e., from the time of the earthquake of 746, with the restorations of Charlemagne only partly restoring its former glory, or else damage that took place subsequent to the restorations.
21.
Antiochus Strategos, The Capture of Jerusalem in A.D. 614, trans. from Georgian by Frederick C. Conybeare, English Historical Review 25 (1910), pp. 502–517, at p. 515, online at http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/antiochus_strategos_capture.htm. The numbers of the dead in the Nea are given differently here in the Georgian and Arabic manuscripts, either 600 (Georgian) or 290 (Arabic) (p. 515). The total number of Christians massacred in Jerusalem by the Persians, according to the body count made by the monk Thomas, was 66,509.