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Saving the Holy Sepulchre: How Rival Christians Came Together to Rescue their Holiest Shrine

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For about sixteen centuries there has been an ongoing building project in Jerusalem. It is at the supposed location of Calvary and Jesus's tomb, which in between the time of the Gospels and the Emperor Constantine was originally a holy site dedicated to the goddess Venus. Constantine put a Christian basilica there, but as you can imagine, there were plenty of changes thereafter. "This is the only church in the world where first-century Herodian, second-century Hadrianic, fourth-century Constantinian, eleventh-century Byzantine, twelfth-century Crusader, nineteenth century neo-Byzantine, and twentieth-century modern masonry are visible in one place." This description of architectural history is from _Saving the Holy Sepulchre: How Rival Christians Came Together to Rescue Their Holiest Shrine_ (Oxford University Press) by Raymond Cohen. Not only does the architecture come in many different styles, but this is also "the only church in the world where six of the most ancient Christian denominations worship side by side." The minor communities, the Coptic, Ethiopian, and Syrian Orthodox churches have rights of usage of the site, but the major communities, the Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Armenian Orthodox not only have rights of usage but rights of possession of portions of the building. With but one church building over this sacred site, and many church groups that view the site as sacred, sometimes worshiping at the site has been difficult, and conflicts have been even bloody. Then in the twentieth century there was the very real risk that blocks of the church, or even its entirety, might start falling on the heads of those within. Cohen's book is a meticulous documentation of how some very disputatious devout people came to eventual agreements on keeping the building together.

Problems of maintenance go back to ancient Turkish law; if you repair or cover a structure, you own it. This resulted in a hall-of-mirrors renovation policy: each sect was eager to pony up the money for repairing the structure, declining aid from any of the others; but the others would have no such thing, and so the building deteriorated. This was especially apparent after a 1927 earthquake which damaged main walls of the structure, allowing in weather to accelerate wear and tear. There was a later fire that weakened the main dome over the building. The monks and clerics might have agreed that the building was crumbling, but could come to no agreement about who was to make things better. These were factions that squabbled viciously over which of them might be allowed to clean a certain step, or where an icon might be hung. It took some bullying from the ruler of Jordan in the middle of the twentieth century to get the restoration started; he told church officials that Status Quo or not, he was going to do the work himself if no one else would. The work would have been difficult even if everyone was cooperating. The main task of stabilizing the Rotunda took over three decades. Much of Cohen's book describes the difficult negotiations over the decades, and is full of sentences like these: "Just when all seemed to be going smoothly, fresh problems arose," or "Once again, the communities were at an impasse. They knew what had to be done but disagreed on how to do it." There are many unpleasant personalities profiled here; they may have been nice enough people, even full of Christian charity in their other activities, but over and over again, they literally refused to give an inch within the shrine, and their childish bickering put it, and anyone inside it, at risk for catastrophe. The detail of their disputes is painstakingly given here, and Cohen helpfully includes floor plans and other diagrams of the building; nonetheless, it is a confusing and frustrating story.

Be that as it may, Cohen wishes it to be an optimistic one. "Whatever the future holds," he writes on the final page, "the mother church is in better shape today than it has been for five hundred years." So this is a success story, as far as it goes, and one that needed to be told. However, it may be that nothing much has changed. According to a news story too recent for Cohen to mention, another part of the roof has been found to be weak and "could collapse, endangering human life," but a turf dispute between Ethiopians and the Egyptian Coptic Church is delaying any start of repairs. The non-architectural disputes continue. Last November, Greek Orthodox monks blocked a procession of Armenian clergymen they thought were somehow invading their own sacred space, and a fistfight broke out, requiring Israeli police to bring order. We can take damaged buildings and shore them up and make them whole again; we have not yet the cleverness to do so for our own natures.