Endnote 44 – Church of the Apostles Found on Mt. Zion

Baldi, Enchiridion, no. 745. The ancient Georgian liturgical calendar gives us this information: “Commemoration of John, the Archbishop of Jerusalem, who first built Sion and of Modestos who rebuilt it after the fire.” (Gerardo Garitte, Le calendrier Georgien du Sinaiticus 34 [Brussels, 1958], p. 187.)

The reference to John II’s activity can only be to the Theodosian building, since everyone knew that the apostolic synagogue stood already on Mt. Zion for centuries. John’s activity is probably so strongly stressed because John was not only the Jerusalem bishop at the time Theodosius constructed the vestibule church, but also the man who enlarged it into the big rectangular church of Hagia Sion. (In the first Byzantine Zion church, the Column of Flagellation was part of the architecture of the portico; in the second, it stood in the center of the church. See Baldi, Enchiridion, nos. 732, 734, 739, 740, 741, 745, 746.)