The Rock (16 page)

Ka’b agreed that the word
Golgotha
meant “place of the skull.” But, he immediately added, the skull was not that of Adam but rather had been found among the bleached heads of the condemned left lying about in what was, after all, a public place of execution.

Sophronius brushed this aside, insisting that the name referred to a single skull—the skull of the first man, our father Adam. Some monks, Sophronius went on to say, claimed that the rock itself had taken on the shape of the skull it entombed.

Adam was buried under Calvary, and the proof, according to Sophronius, lay in certain details that Ka’b had omitted from his version of the story of Adam and the Rock.

One day, said the Patriarch, Adam called his son Seth and said: “Go to the gates of the Garden and ask the guardian of the Tree of Life to give me the oil of mercy that God promised when he thrust me out of Paradise.”

“Father, I am ready,” said Seth, “but I know not the way.”

“Go by that valley which lieth eastward. There you will find a green path blackened by footprints left by my feet and your mother’s when we were turned away from the Garden. No grass has grown to cover them since.”

Following his father’s instructions, Seth reached the gates of the Garden, which he found guarded by an angel barring his entry. He was allowed but a glimpse of the Tree of Life. Its crown reached into Heaven, and its branches were covered with foliage and flowers and all kinds of fruit. Its trunk was gigantic and bare, with a terrible serpent wrapped around it, consuming everything within reach. The tree’s roots descended into a precipitous chasm that reached into the very depths of Hell. There they became the tree that the People of Muhammad call Zaqqum. The only inhabitant of Hell was Seth’s brother Cain, who was striving vainly to climb upwards. The roots of the Zaqqum were like live tentacles wrapped around him, pinning him down, their ends piercing his flesh.

Seth begged the angel for mercy. But the angel refused to give him the oil of mercy, saying that it could not be bestowed upon his father’s race until many more years had passed. In token of future mercy, however, the angel gave Seth three seeds from the heavenly tree, and suggested that he bury them with Adam.

Adam died shortly after Seth’s return, and Seth put the three seeds under his tongue before burying him under the Rock of Moriah, the site of the old Temple.

Adam’s body, Sophronius said, did not lie undisturbed. On the authority of a blessed chain of transmission, it is known that Noah dug up Adam’s body from under Mount Moriah’s summit to protect
it from the flood. He placed it in a teakwood coffin on his ark, and gave strict orders that it not be opened. When the raging waters of the flood had subsided, and the ark had reached its resting place, Noah ordered his son Shem to place the coffin on an oxcart pulled by a bull. Shem was to follow in the steps of the bull, and wherever the beast came to a stop, there he was to bury the coffin.

But Shem was greedy; he convinced himself that there were riches in the coffin. While awaiting the arrival of the cart, he opened the lid and there beheld Adam, beautifully preserved, all sixty cubits of him wrapped in a white shroud, whereupon he was consumed with regret at the terrible thing he had done.

When the bull arrived pulling the oxcart, as his father had said it would, Shem loaded the coffin and walked behind the cart. The bull stopped somewhere in Palestine, and there Shem reburied Adam. The three seeds from the Tree of Life germinated and produced three saplings. In time, these became one tree, with each component preserving its distinct nature. The tree was at once palm, cypress, and cedar, symbolizing, Sophronius said, Victory, Death, and Eternity.

Moses made his wondrous rod from this marvelous wood, the rod that drew forth sweet water from a rock in the Sinai. David replanted the tree in Jerusalem. Solomon attempted to cut columns out of its trunk for his Temple. But these kept growing even after they were cut and were therefore not suitable for construction.

Then the tree was stolen. A spring welled up to cover the place where it had been hidden, forming pools, the very same healing pools of the Church of the Paralyzed Man to which Umar had been taken by Sophronius. There the wood remained until the time of Jesus, when it miraculously floated up to the surface, and was unwittingly selected by the Romans to make the cross upon which Jesus died.

But where exactly in Palestine did the bull stop, Adam get reburied, and the three seeds from the Tree of Life begin to grow?

Now the story grew complicated. Sophronius maintained that the meaning of the name
Golgotha
, preserved in holy scripture,
confirmed that the place had to be Calvary. Ka’b continued to disagree, saying that he knew Christians to disagree with one another over the matter. Some said the Tree of Life first grew in Mount Lebanon and was planted by Noah, not his son. Seeing as how Muslims and Jews deny that Jesus was crucified, Ka’b said he himself held no opinions on the Tree.

Umar said that Arab sages had told him that the torso of Adam was buried with his limbs in Hebron, while only his head was buried under the Rock in Jerusalem. Others, he said, were of the opposite opinion: Adam’s head was buried in Hebron, beneath the sanctuary of Abraham, whereas his torso and feet were buried in the vicinity of the Rock. No one knows how the parts got separated from one another. Nonetheless, all agreed that they had.

Throughout this exchange, Sophronius remained adamant about the skull, insisting that it was buried in the place where Jesus was crucified, but open to suggestion regarding the other body parts.

Did Noah’s bull really stop where Sophronius said it did, and was the head later transported to Calvary? I myself am of the opinion that our Father Adam’s burial place is a subject fraught with confusion. Wise men had better drop the subject. God does not want us to know everything.

One thing, however, that He does want us to know, and that all Peoples of the Book agree upon: On the Day of Resurrection, on top of the old Rock, not the new one, God will restore the first man’s head to his body. And He will set him upright, and say:

(photo credit 14.1)

T
he raw rock of Calvary has been elaborately dressed up in masonry to the point of merging into the walls of the memorial intended to do it honor. Only the summit is venerated from the Basilica. And even it is not visible at first sight, being at floor level and dominated by a large new cross.

I see no reason to doubt that this was the site of the crucifixion. But it could not possibly have been the site of Abraham’s sacrifice. For if you inspect the foundations of the apse and the base of the rock from the underground crypts of the church, namely, from Adam’s Chapel, whose story I have just recounted, a reasonable man will realize that nowhere was Calvary flat enough to lay Ishaq across it. The old Patriarch saddled Calvary with too great a burden for common sense to carry.

I surmise that the rock upon which the Son of Mary, or another who looked like him, died (or was snatched away before he died, as some Meccan sages argue) was a tall, vertical block rising out of the corner of an ancient quarry.

By the time of Jesus, the quarry had been filled in. The earth accumulated around it, forming a mound out of which emerged the rock and the cleft tip that attracted Umar’s attention. Perhaps it resembled a hillock ideally shaped to support and display the wooden instrument of torture beloved by the Romans. The Temple, further east, was the center of Jerusalem in the days of Jesus. Calvary
would then have been just outside the city walls, in a visible place that the Romans would have used over and over again for public executions. At some point, the quarry must have become a garden cemetery, for it is written,

The sepulchre was intended for Joseph of Arimathea. Considering its distance from Calvary, it had to have been hewn out of the opposing rock face of the quarry, a stone’s throw away from Calvary. Here, according to the eyewitness of the two Marys, the body of Jesus was hurriedly placed and a large round stone was rolled across the entrance. But deep in the bowels of the earth, underneath the church and the dirt that had collected in the bowl of the quarry, the place of the execution and the burial of Jesus would have been conjoined into a single mass of rock.

Alas, none of this can be seen today. For the place is not even remotely as Jesus would have known it. The quarry has been turned into a beautiful open courtyard, paved with polished stone. Hundreds of lit candles cast dancing shadows on the ceiling and columns of the arcades that surround it.

On the far side of the Church of Resurrection lies the Rotunda, which is the building’s beating heart. Day and night it is filled with chanting monks bearing candles that cast a distorting light upon their faces. Their prayers resonate within the tall cylinder and can be heard like a muffled drone from the courtyard outside.

The tomb of Jesus sits in the center of the Rotunda, just as the Ark sat in the center of the Temple of Solomon. In order to build the tower so that it dominates the city from all angles, the entire vertical face of the quarry had to be cut out. The tomb was thereby freed from the mass of rock of which it once formed an inextricable part until large crowds could walk comfortably around it. Masons must
then have hollowed out the interior of the remaining stone block, forming a narrow chamber four arms and two thumbs long, barely tall enough to accommodate a person standing upright.

Inside this intricately carved chamber, a bench has been cut out of the rock. It is long enough for a body lying at full length. On this, the black-robed guardians of the tomb will tell you, the faithful Joseph laid the body of Jesus. When Umar entered the chamber, fifteen golden bowls stood in the place of that holy body. Filled with oil, they burn day and night, turning the normally light-colored limestone surround pitch black.

The mouth of the tomb faces east, toward Calvary. The stone that originally sealed this entrance, until it was mysteriously rolled aside, is situated at the western entrance. Bound with copper, it is anointed with holy balsam by the Patriarch once a year. During the week of Umar’s visit, Ka’b told me, the veins at his temple bulging with anger, it served as a Holy Table. Indeed, Ka’b could see that the whole edifice had been conceived with the Jewish Temple in mind—from the great steps off the Cardo to the long walk down the five-aisled Basilica and the Rock of the Cross, from the arcaded court to the beautifully finished triumphal tower of the Risen Christ, which mocked the ruins of the Holy of Holies it had supplanted.

S
ince adolescence, I have admired the lines of the New Temple and wondered about those who must have labored so hard to put them in place. No ill that my father could think to say of it diminished my enthusiasm and curiosity. “Idolatry run amok,” he would say of the place, forgetting his own passion for the Rock, which, to some people, also smacked of strange worship.

“The Church of the Dungheap,” he would call it, changing a letter in the Arabic word for resurrection,
qiyama
, to
qumama
. Although my father’s play on words caught on among some of Muhammad’s People, I never use it. The real dungheap at the time
was farther east. For one who did not live solely on memories like my father, there was nothing to admire about David’s Sanctuary in those days. It was just a boring expanse of stone that took two decades to properly clean up. In contrast, the Christian areas of the city buzzed with life, variety, beautiful things.

One day, I don’t remember how, the issue came up of who had commissioned the Church of the Resurrection.

“Christ raised her from dung to power,” Ka’b blurted in anger. “She was a commoner, and yet the whole empire let her have her way and christianize the world.”