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Time: Jesus' Jerusalem
Time also takes a historical approach this week, but largely avoids historical debates. Instead, writer David Van Biema is more intent on transporting the reader to Jerusalem, circa A.D. 33. "It is worth revisiting Jerusalem during this period not so much in celebration as in curiosity—to know the metropolis that shaped Jesus' last ministry and so wove itself into his great story, and to note, cautiously, the ways in which its vexations foreshadow those of Jerusalem today." And Van Biema does a superb job at evoking the sights, sounds, tastes, and smells of first-century Jerusalem. For example:

The pilgrims would have shared the road with ox teams carrying huge slabs of marble and limestone. Jerusalem, like today's Chicago, New York City, or London, was a huge, ongoing building project. The sounds of construction would have mixed with the bleats and bellows of sacrificial animals for sale in streetside shops. The view to Jesus' left would have been taken up by a wall perhaps 150 ft. high—a wall not of the Temple itself but of a gargantuan platform atop which it perched. … Asked to imagine the boy's main impression, Roni Reich, director of Temple Mount excavations for the Israeli Antiquities Authority, says, "Big!"

That's not to say that the Time piece never delves into some of the historical debates over what Jerusalem was like, but when it does so, it doesn't use the typical "the church says, but scholars say" dichotomy. Instead, it lets description play against description:

The scene [at the temple] must have been spectacular. Whether that spectacle is understood as deeply felt or empty depends on later interpretation. "The place was as vast as a small city. There were literally thousands of priests, attendants, temple soldiers and minions," writes historian Paul Johnson. "Dignity was quite lost amid the smoke of the pyres, the bellows of terrified beasts, the sluices of blood, the abattoir stench, the unconcealed and unconcealable machinery of tribal religion inflated by modern wealth to an industrial scale."

Bruce Chilton, a religion professor at Bard College whose book Rabbi Jesus was published in October, says recent scholarship finds a great deal more meaning and joy in the proceedings. Pilgrimages were festive occasions, with families or friends traveling together and camping overnight in the hills around the city and singing cheerful sacred songs outside the Temple. Although parts of the sacrifice would be immolated for the Lord or consumed by the priests, others would be cooked and shared by the pilgrims, who ate little meat the rest of the year. "Not only would they offer this very scarce protein to the deity," says Chilton, "but actually share a meal of meat with the Lord of Israel. The sense was one of wealth and celebration."

Van Biema's description is a little disjointed at parts—the ending is particularly jumpy—and he never really follows through with his promise "to note, cautiously, the ways in which its vexations foreshadow those of Jerusalem today." But you have to admire his refusal to draw simple parallels between the political/ethnic conflicts in Jesus' Israel and in today's. "The situations now and then are not analogous," he writes. "Israel's current Jewish government, unlike the Roman Empire, is not alien to Jerusalem. The Palestinians are not as defenseless as the ancient Jews. … Still, the intertwined dynamic of military occupation and religious clash is shockingly familiar."

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April (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45