In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

No God but One

Such was the sheer number of pilgrims who travelled from across the world to the Holy City that at times it appeared in danger of bursting at the seams. In 516, when a great army of ascetics descended upon Jerusalem, in a particularly rowdy demonstration of support for Chalcedon, ten thousand of them barged into a single church. A few years later, Justinian, looking to raise a monument proportionate to his self-regard, was obliged to extend the ridge on which his new church was being built, so that its foundations ended up “partly on solid rock and partly on air.”²⁸ Space was running out. Jerusalem, which even in the off-season had some eighty thousand inhabitants, was full to overflowing.

Yet, one part of the city—the most prominent of all—remained undeveloped. South of the Church of the Resurrection, beyond the multitude of golden crosses rising triumphantly above the crowded streets, there loomed a great, flat expanse of rubble-strewn and garbage-piled rock. Evidence, perhaps, that the site was of no great significance? Quite the opposite. The rock was the very spot commemorated by ancient prophets as “the mountain of the house,” a haunting phrase that Jerome, in his Latin version of the Bible, had chosen to translate as Mons Templi—“Temple Mount.”²⁹ In doing so, he had commemorated the most famous building ever raised in the city: a temple fashioned back in the mists of time by Solomon, the wise and fabulously wealthy son of King David, to serve Almighty God as His earthly house. Here, for anyone with a taste for church-building, was the obvious model to beat: Justinian himself, entering Hagia Sophia, was said to have cried out in triumph, “Solomon, I have vanquished you!”³⁰ The Temple itself, though, had long since been obliterated: for in 586 BC, after some four hundred years of existence, all its gold and cedar-wood had gone up in flames, together with the rest of Jerusalem, when the King of Babylon had stormed the city. True, the return of the Jews from their exile in Mesopotamia had seen them build a second, and ultimately even more imposing, Temple; but this too, in AD 70, had been put to the torch, after the Jews, resolved to throw off Roman rule, had risen in revolt and been comprehensively flattened for their pains. Roughly sixty years later, another, even more desperate, rebellion had resulted in an even more desperate defeat. The Promised Land was left a charnel-house. The Roman authorities, resolved to abolish the wearying cycle of insurgency and repression once and for all, promulgated a new set of title-deeds. The Jewish homeland became, by imperial fiat, “Palestine”—the name by which it would still be known in the time of Justinian. Furthermore, the Jews were banned from their own ancient capital altogether, so that for them even to glance at Jerusalem from the crest of a far-off hill was accounted a crime. The smoking ruins themselves were renamed “Aelia Capitolina” and rebuilt as a pagan city. This rebranding policy was so successful that by the time of Constantine, when the first Christian tourists began to turn up in the Holy Land and ask for the road to Jerusalem, many of the local officials had no idea where they were talking about, and pointed them vaguely in the direction of Persia.

This ignorance had not lasted for long, of course; but even as the Church set to cleansing the city of demon worship, it showed little enthusiasm for turning back the clock. Just as Christ had superseded the Law of Moses, so did His Holy City glitter all the more brightly for having been raised amid the rubble of the erstwhile capital of the Jews. It was not enough to succeed; others had to fail. Nowhere better served to express this presumption than the Temple Mount. Here, in the wake of repeated Jewish rebellions, a pagan emperor had raised a temple—the Kapitolion—to Jupiter, the king of the Romans’ gods. Christian emperors had refined the humiliation. While the Kapitolion was left to crumble into ruins, the Temple Mount was converted into a sterquilinum—a refuse dump. What better proof than the reek of shit and pigs’ carcasses that the Jews were no longer a Chosen People? It was to ram the point home that the Roman authorities, always suckers for a good procession, allowed the Jews, once every year, on the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple, to star in a humiliating piece of street theatre. A band of Jewish pilgrims—pale, weeping and bedraggled—would climb up the steps of the Temple Mount, reach the perforated rock on the summit, and then start to blow on rams’ horns, wail and tear out their hair. It was, for any watching Christians, a most edifying spectacle. “For while the mob of wretches congregates and groans over the ruins of their temple,” as Jerome, with palpable relish, had once put it, “the manger of the Lord sparkles, the church of his resurrection glows and the banner of his cross shines forth from the Mount of Olives.”³¹

Scorn that was paid back by the Jews themselves with undaunted hatred. Time had not eased the trauma of the ruin that the Romans had wrought on their Holy City. The general whose legions had torched the Temple, so the rabbis taught, now shared a corner of hell with Jesus, where he was destined to be consumed by fire, reassembled and then burned to ashes again for all eternity, as punishment for his unspeakable crime. Four centuries on from the destruction of the Temple, Jewish horror at the sacrilege had, if anything, intensified. The rabbis, struggling to articulate what the Temple itself had once so eloquently expressed, had come to identify its ruins with a novel concept to which they gave the name of “Shekhinah”: the notion that God Himself might be present on earth. It was not, as the blasphemous and arrogant Christians taught, the rock of Golgotha that stood at the centre of the world, but the Temple Mount. There it was, upon “the foundation-stone of the whole of the universe,”³² that Abraham had brought Isaac to be sacrificed; that Adam lay buried; and that “the world itself, moulded from its dust, had originally been founded.”³³ Reading into the future the patterns cast by such a past, the Jews maintained an invincible confidence, amid all their desolation, that the Temple would one day rise again. Tantalisingly, back in the reign of Julian, they had enjoyed a brief glimpse of how such an eventuality might actually come to pass: for the apostate emperor, ever imaginative when it came to Christian-baiting, had ordered the Temple rebuilt. Only a few months’ preparatory excavations had been possible before Julian’s untimely death in Mesopotamia, however; and even those had been marked by the eruption on the site of “terrifying balls of fire”³⁴—which the Christians, naturally enough, had attributed to divine displeasure, and the Jews to arson. Ever since then, the site had remained barren; but still, three times every day, the Jews would solemnly pray for the restoration of its former glory. Only rebuild the Temple, they knew, and much else as well would be fulfilled: the humbling of Rome; the humiliation of its ruler, who would be forced to eat “dirt like a worm”;³⁵ and the coming of the Messiah.

As things stood, however, many Jews believed that Jerusalem under its Christian rulers was no less polluted than pagan Jerusalem had been: a sump of blood and idols. Ironically enough, those who did journey to the Temple Mount were likely to have been influenced, not by their own teachers, but by the example set by Christian pilgrims. Certainly, in the opinion of most rabbis, energies were better devoted to the study of the Torah, the holiness of which remained inviolably sacrosanct, than in trekking to the nest of heretics that Jerusalem had become. Nor was it necessary to inhabit the schools of Sura and Pumpedita, far from the Holy City, to hold this view: for there were rabbis in Palestine. An entire Talmud too. The scholars responsible for its composition might not have possessed the sheer exhaustive love of nit-picking displayed by their counterparts in the East; but that scarcely dented the growing weight of their authority. Indeed, the rabbis of Palestine were acknowledged to hold the advantage over those of Mesopotamia in several distinctive ways: they were more open to those who were not themselves scholars; they were better able to incinerate those who displeased them with a single glare; and they were more obsessively alert to the menace posed by menstruating women. Valuable though all of these attributes undoubtedly were, however, the Palestinian rabbis’ most trend-setting talent was for something more portentous: a rewriting of Jewish tradition so as to give themselves a starring role in it. Control of the past, not for the first time, promised control of the future.

As in Mesopotamia, so in Palestine, the rabbis had long since taken it for granted that they should serve as the leaders of the Jewish people. Needless to say, all of their various writings were designed to offer a ringing endorsement of this view. A version of history in which the Jews of Palestine, disoriented and demoralised by the shattering loss of the Temple, had turned for guidance to the rabbis, whose power and prestige had accordingly known no limits, was promoted with gusto. That the truth had been rather different, and that most Jews had for centuries been in the habit of looking for justice from city councillors, local magnates or even the Roman governor, had inhibited the rabbis not at all. They knew themselves, with a sublime self-confidence, to be the embodiments of God’s will—and, sure enough, over the course of the centuries, reality had come to blend with their ideal of what it should be. Their rivals as spokesmen for the Jews of Palestine began to fade from the scene. Their rulings and proscriptions were increasingly accepted. Their understanding of what it meant to be chosen by God started to verge on the definitive. Jewishness, in the Promised Land, had turned decisively rabbinical.

That this was so, however, did not owe everything to the rabbis themselves, and their obdurately learned ambition. A certain debt was owed as well to their bitterest and most inveterate foes. The Jews of Palestine, unlike those of Mesopotamia, were provincials in a Christian empire. As such, they were objects of neurotic fascination to their rulers. Attempts by the imperial elite to spell out precisely what Christianismos might be had repeatedly led them to define its presumed opposite: Ioudaismos. Even at Nicaea, Arians and Catholics had furiously accused each other of being Jews in Christian clothing. Over the subsequent centuries, the same smear would invariably be applied whenever one faction of the Church wished to charge another with heresy. As a result, Christians increasingly came to cast the Jewish faith in terms of a religio that could serve as a mirror of their own: chauvinistic and desiccated where Christianity was universal and fire-touched by the Holy Spirit. The Jews themselves, of course, would hardly have recognised this characterisation, nor the presumption of the Church that they subscribed to and practised a “religion” called Ioudaismos. Religio, after all, was a Christian concept; and so too, for that reason, was “Judaism.”^c

Nevertheless, the Church leaders’ great labour of ring-fencing their own faith did have far-reaching implications for the faith practised by the Jews. The border between the two was now more firmly patrolled than ever. Bishops and emperors were not the only ones who stood guard over it. Rabbis did as well. This duty, of course, was one that they had always claimed for themselves; but their neighbours were increasingly content, even relieved, to cede to them their role as the watchmen of God’s will. The Jews of Palestine, confronted as they were by the monumental and menacing edifice of Christian orthodoxy, had grown increasingly fretful about what their own frameworks of authority, and their own orthodoxy, might be. Rather than have it defined for them by the Christian Church, they preferred to turn to the scholars whose massive achievement in compiling the Talmud had been preparation for precisely such a moment. “Why should a rabbi be hailed as a king? Because it is by virtue of the Torah that kings rule.”³⁶ Hardly the most rib-tickling of jokes, to be sure—but one that bore, by the time of Justinian, an unmistakable hint of truth.

And certainly, among the Jews of Palestine, there was a desperate need of leaders. The tide of affairs was palpably flowing against them. Christian authorities in the Holy Land viewed the continued presence of its previous tenants as both a challenge and an embarrassment. Although the Roman state, like the Church, recognised Judaism as a distinct and officially sanctioned religion, that hardly implied beneficence. Rather, toleration was the flip-side of a mounting obsession on the part of Constantinople with regulation of the empire’s Jews. A people hedged about with legal definitions, after all, were a people who could more readily be targeted with restrictions and indignities. Jewish noses were repeatedly rubbed in the brute fact of their second-class status. They were forbidden to join the army; to serve in the bureaucracy; to buy Christian slaves. Synagogues, although protected by law from being burned down or converted into churches, were permitted only to be renovated, and on no account to be built from scratch. Many Jews, it was true, had felt perfectly free to ignore this prescription—so much so that the ban had coincided with a golden age of synagogue construction. Almost every Jewish village had come to boast one. Even the humblest and most remote might be built out of stone, while the larger, urban synagogues tended to be so sumptuously decorated that it was only their orientation towards Jerusalem that made them readily distinguishable from churches. Nevertheless, even for those wealthy enough to have commissioned all the synagogues’ mosaics and gleaming marble, the prosperity these fittings proclaimed was not entirely good news. The boom-time in Palestine owed little to the natives and almost everything to incomers. The mass immigration of Christians into the Holy Land might have generated huge profits for individual Jewish hoteliers and relic-suppliers, but it threatened to swamp the Jews as a people. Those who had not been cowed or seduced into accepting baptism by the triumphant swagger of Christianity were finding themselves obliged to retreat to ever higher ground. By the sixth century, the Jews of Palestine probably numbered no more than 10 per cent of the total population.³⁷ Even though Christians might fret that the Jews were breeding “like worms,”³⁸ the reality was that they had long since become a minority in their own land.

And an ever more embattled one at that. Early in the reign of Justinian, that inveterate sponsor of intimidating architectural statements, a team of workmen climbed a mountain named Berenice, some ninety miles north of Jerusalem.³⁹ Their view from the summit was spectacular: in the distance rose the Golan Heights, a river-scored plateau that marked Palestine’s frontier with Syria; below stretched a glittering lake dotted with fishing boats, so broad that the locals proudly termed it a sea; along its shores, the fields were “a paradise, rich with wheat and fruit, with wine, oil and apples.”⁴⁰ In fact, so fertile was the land that even the women were renowned for the spectacular bloom of their beauty. The region was known as Galilee—and for centuries it had served as the stronghold of the rabbis of Palestine. Tiberias, a city picturesquely sited on the lower slopes of Mount Berenice, directly beside the lake, boasted the only batei midrash—“houses of study”—that could rival those of Mesopotamia for prestige. The city still remained, in the reign of Justinian, overwhelmingly true to its distinguished heritage: its councillors were all Jewish; it had no fewer than thirteen synagogues; even its bath-houses were rabbinically approved. Nowhere in Palestine could rival it as the conscience and watchtower of Jewish life.

Which was precisely why, in the opinion of Justinian, it needed to be reminded of its proper place. The Jews were not alone in laying claim to Galilee: Christians as well revered it as a region hauntingly touched by the sacred. Christ Himself had lived there for much of His life: He had toured its villages, delivered sermons from its mountains, walked on the waters of its lake. Galilee was second only to Jerusalem on the itineraries of Christian tourists. Granted, their behaviour was not always all it might have been: whether carving their names on furniture used by Christ or ogling the famously attractive Jewish women, they had a certain tendency to gaucheness. Yet although, as one Italian visitor ruefully reported, “there is no love lost between the Jews and us,”⁴¹ it was not pilgrims who were chiefly responsible for this mood of tension. As elsewhere in Palestine, so in Galilee: many Christians aimed to be more than tourists. Land was their truest heart’s desire—the soil once trodden by Christ. As a result, churches had come to colonise Jewish fields, whole villages of settlers to be planted throughout the region, and walls, bristling emphatically, to gird even the smallest monastery, the most insignificant Christian hamlet. Now, with the arrival of Justinian’s workmen on the slopes above Tiberias, the time had come for the rabbis themselves to be issued with a notice of imperial intent. A huge church, designed to glower over the streets below, was to be raised directly on the summit of Mount Berenice. A massive ring of fortifications, complete with the latest fashion in watchtowers, was to be constructed around it. As elsewhere in the empire, so in the very stronghold of Judaism, an emphatic statement was to be made: no defiance of the Christian faith anywhere but the gaze of the emperor, unblinking and all-seeing, would be upon it.

True, there was an element of bluff in this eyeballing of the rabbis. Justinian, who had thought nothing of driving the philosophers of Athens into exile, had no corresponding intention to force the closure of the schools of Tiberias. In fact, to a large degree, they served his purpose. The rabbis offered to the emperor a living assurance that there did authentically exist a religion such as “Judaism,” one with authority figures and a clearly defined orthodoxy: the mirror-image of his own. The alternative—to acknowledge that in the great ocean of belief there might still be those who swam untrammelled beyond the twin dragnets of Christianity and Judaism—was infinitely more unsettling. The rabbis themselves would probably not have disagreed. After all, it was hardly unflattering to their pretensions to imagine a world in which there were Jews and Christians, and no one else. It was telling, perhaps, that the watchtowers built on Mount Berenice were not confined to its summit. Although the presence of the great church clearly established where the supremacy lay, Justinian did not neglect to offer his protection to the Jews as well. The fortifications ran right down the slope of the mountain and enclosed the entire city.⁴² The Jews may have been second-class subjects—but they were at least within the fold.

There remained others, however, who were harder to sort. Not everyone who trod the sacred dust of the Holy Land could be categorised neatly as a Christian or a Jew. Much though both emperors and rabbis might have wished it otherwise, Palestine was simply too God-haunted, too dream-crowded, too memory-stalked for that. Right in the heart of the province, for instance, there was a people who openly derided both Christian churches and Jewish synagogues as abodes of idolatry, and all those who worshipped in them as upstarts. The Samaritans, inhabitants of a region midway between Jerusalem and Galilee named Samaria, claimed that they, and they alone, had preserved the unadorned wishes of heaven. “There is no God but One,”⁴³ they declared. “Let us believe in Him and in Moses, His Prophet.”⁴⁴ From these simple presumptions, so it seemed to the Samaritans, much else inevitably flowed: all the scriptures penned since the time of Moses, whether by Jews or Christians, were mere deluded vanity; the purity of the teachings that God revealed to His Prophet had been corrupted by any number of subsequent accretions; Jerusalem, far from being a holy city, had been promoted as such by David and Solomon for purely political reasons. In truth, it was neither the Temple Mount nor the rock of Golgotha that constituted the centre of the world, but rather a wooded peak in Samaria—Mount Gerizim. It was here—on a flat expanse of rock named the “Eternal Hill” by the Samaritans—that Noah’s ark had landed, Abraham had prepared to sacrifice Isaac, and the laws given to Moses had been preserved. To believe any differently, as the Jews and the Christians did, was to distort the primal teachings that God had revealed to the ancient prophets. It was to neglect the principal duty of humanity: due submission to God.⁴⁵

None of which, needless to say, did much for the Samaritans’ popularity with their neighbours. Jewish scorn for their pretensions ran particularly deep. For centuries, in a blatantly tit-for-tat manner, the rabbis had accused the Samaritans themselves of being the idolators—this on the supposed grounds that they were descended from pagans and worshipped a dove. As a result, far from embracing them as potential allies, most Jews refused even to sit down with them, let alone consume their wine or food—although the odd rabbi was prepared to grant that it might be legitimate to tuck into one of their boiled eggs.⁴⁶ As for Christians, the sanctions they applied would prove, in the long run, to be of an altogether more forceful order of brutality: an exercise in state-sponsored violence bred of wholly predictable tensions. Despite the fact that the Samaritans were permitted to serve in the Roman army, and indeed had long enjoyed an impressive reputation among their commanders for martial savagery, Christian relic-hunters had still ransacked Mount Gerizim, and Christian colonists had still flooded into Samaria. In 484, Samaritan patience had finally snapped. A bishop had been mutilated in his own cathedral; churches had been desecrated; open rebellion had blazed right across central Palestine. The provincial authorities, although initially taken by surprise, had been ruthless in crushing the revolt. Samaria had been left littered with some ten thousand corpses. All Samaritans, unsurprisingly, had been demobbed from imperial service for good. The crowning act of vengeance, however, had been to ban them from the sacred slopes of Mount Gerizim, and to build, on its previously unadorned summit, a church within a fortress. And on the church, as one Samaritan historian would bitterly record, “there was constructed a very high tower which was painted white, and from which lamps were hung to glow in the night, so that all in Constantinople and Rome might see them.”⁴⁷

There was, of course—as any Jew could have pointed out—nothing particularly ground-breaking about this display of imperial vindictiveness. The Samaritans, however, had not had four hundred years to adjust to the loss of their holiest sanctuary; nor could they quite bring themselves to believe that God would permit its continued desecration. Desperation and rage duly festered. A few decades on from the great revolt, when a small band of Samaritan insurgents, “prompted by the suggestion of a woman,”⁴⁸ sought to seize back the summit of Mount Gezirim from its Christian garrison, the incipient rebellion was quarantined only with difficulty; and in 529, when rioting saw a number of Jews and Christians killed by a mob of Samaritans, the spark proved sufficient to light a second conflagration. For a brief while, it seemed as though not only Palestine but the whole empire might be cut in two: for a warlord who shared with the long-dead pagan emperor the sinister name of Julian, a man variously described as a king, a messiah, or “a bandit chief,”⁴⁹ proclaimed the foundation of a Samaritan empire, blocking the roads from the north, and menacing Jerusalem. Adding yet further spice to the rebellion, the insurgents staged a number of highly pointed atrocities, of which the most spectacular was the incineration of a bishop on a bonfire fuelled by the relics of Christian martyrs. Insults such as these, of course, might almost have been calculated to provoke a devastating response. The imperial vengeance, when it finally came, was inevitably a terrible one. The rebel army, brought to battle, was annihilated with such efficiency that twenty thousand Samaritan warriors were left dead, including a summarily decapitated Julian. New, more impregnable fortifications were raised around the summit of the Eternal Hill, and the slopes of Mount Gezirim scoured clean of every last trace of a Samaritan presence. Meanwhile, across the rest of Samaria, the ruin was universal. Land that had once been hailed as “the most fertile in the world”⁵⁰ was now a wilderness of carrion, rubble and weeds.

As for the Samaritans themselves, there seemed nothing left to them but despair. Many, abandoning the god who had so transparently failed them, sullenly submitted to baptism; others, slumping into a numb isolationism, hunkered down in remote villages, where they ostentatiously covered any footprints left by visiting Jews or Christians with burning straw. Yet others, however, tried to keep the banner of rebellion flying—not by making a stand in Samaria, but by retreating beyond the border. As many as fifty thousand of them, fleeing the reprisals of Justinian’s death-squads, made a break for Mesopotamia, where they threw themselves on the mercy of the aged Kavad. The Shahanshah, rather than swallow the assurances of the Samaritans that they could deliver him Palestine, opted instead to put them all in chains and pack them off to toil in a gold mine. Nevertheless, back in Palestine itself, the Roman authorities remained twitchy in the extreme at any prospect of a Samaritan retrenchment just over the border. In the wake of the revolt, when twenty thousand Samaritan boys and girls were handed over to slavers, it was specifically decreed that they must be sold as far afield as possible— preferably in Persia or India. The prospect that any of them might grow up within striking distance of their homeland was altogether too alarming to be tolerated.

There was more to this anxiety than mere paranoia. Notwithstanding the milk and honey that flowed through the Holy Land, it bordered directly onto wilderness—and wilderness, as it had ever done, spelled danger. Right on the doorstep of Jerusalem, along the fifteen-mile road that led eastwards to Jericho, menace lurked behind every barren rock, so that what had long since come to be named the “Bloody Way”^d was as notorious for banditry as anywhere in the empire. South of Jericho, where steepling cliffs plunged down towards the aptly named Dead Sea, there was an even more intimidating landscape, formed of nothing but dust, salt and mud. It was here, in the wake of the burning of the Temple in the first century AD, that an army of Jewish rebels had made a last, doomed stand. But already, long, long previously, the region had borne spectacular witness to the incineration of a sinful people and to the full, devastating horror of where the angering of God might lead. On the eastern shore of the Dead Sea, where the mud bubbled at its filthiest and most stinking, two mighty cities had once stood: Sodom and Gomorrah. Their inhabitants, so moralists recorded, had been wholly given over to vice: to rape, to sex with people of their own gender, and to breaking wind in public.^e Provoked beyond endurance by such depravity, the Almighty had duly decreed the obliteration of the two cities. Fire and brimstone had rained down upon them. “The smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace.”⁵¹ Of Sodom and Gomorrah, nothing had remained, saving only the odd salt-caked ruin, to serve passers-by as an admonition and a terror.

The lesson was not entirely bleak, though. On the southern shore of the Dead Sea, there stood a church; and inside the church, there was a cave. It was said that Abraham’s nephew, Lot, graced by a tip-off from some angels, had sheltered here with his family: the only survivors of the annihilation of Sodom. The implication of this—that a righteous man, such as Lot, might be spared the ruin of a doomed people by fleeing into the wilderness—had not gone unremarked over the centuries. Samaritans were hardly the first refugees to have sought sanctuary beyond the borders of the Promised Land. Back in the days of their own persecution by Rome, Christians had done the self-same thing. Some of them, even after the conversion of Constantine, had refused to return from the desert to the temptations of everyday life: among the cliffs beyond Jerusalem, as on the mountains around Antioch or in the desert of Sinai, ascetics had looked to build for themselves a city of God. In the midst of a drear and bandit-haunted wilderness, the monasteries that dotted the eastern flank of Palestine aimed to blaze like bulwarks of paradise. Manned by warriors of God from across the empire, linked by paths that criss-crossed the wilds like the cords of a far-flung net, and buttressed by imposing stonework that gave them the look of fortresses, these lavras, as they were called, served the Church, in its great battle against the demonic, as an awesome first line of defence. Out in the desert, where Christ Himself had been tempted by the Devil, only the spiritual elite could hope to prosper. The weak fell away; the strong grew even stronger. This was why, in the Holy Land, it was the monks who constituted the shock troops of orthodoxy. Forged in the blast furnace of the desert, they brought to the practice of their faith a show of fortitude, of discipline, of steel. They, more than anyone, could be relied upon to embrace martyrdom at the hands of Samaritans; to stage public protests against any hint of concession to Monophysites; to press the imperial authorities to hold their nerve in the battle against every last enemy of God. Vital tasks anywhere—but in the Holy Land especially so.

“Arm yourselves against heresies, against Jews, against Samaritans, against pagans.” So had urged Cyril, a golden-tongued Bishop of Jerusalem back in the first century of the city’s existence as a Christian capital, warning converts there of the peculiar charge that God had laid upon their shoulders. “Many are your enemies: be sure you have ammunition.”⁵² Two centuries later, the marks of just how successful Cyril’s call to arms had been were everywhere to be seen, stamped on the face of the Holy Land: on the hill above Tiberias, on the summit of Mount Gerizim, in the mouldering shells of abandoned temples. There were, however, few visible traces of perhaps the most telling victory of all. Cyril, in the advice offered to his converts, had lingered on one particularly mortal threat: “If a book is not read in a church, then do not read it yourself, even alone.” Specifically, he had cautioned against those seeming-scriptures that “bore the title of ‘gospel,’ but were false, and full of deceit.”⁵³ Such a warning, of course, would have been valid anywhere; but in the Holy Land, especially so. Not every Christian who flocked there was necessarily orthodox, after all. A yearning to walk in the footsteps of Christ did not necessarily imply obedience to the Council of Nicaea. There were grounds for alarm as well as self-satisfaction in the cosmopolitan character of the Holy Land. Nowhere else in the world, as Cyril had well appreciated, were banned gospels, banned doctrines, banned identities, likelier to be available.

Moreover, immigrants were not the only heretics to be found in Palestine. Camped out on the frontier between Christianity and Judaism, on what had become, since the Council of Nicaea, an ever more brutally patrolled no-man’s land, there lingered still a few obdurate squatters. Jews who “honoured Christ as a just man”⁵⁴ and Christians who yearned to see the Temple restored: how were these to be categorised? As pestiferous impostors, came the ringing answer of the Church: “for, though they pretend to be both Jews and Christians, yet they are neither.”⁵⁵ Add to this unsettling mix the Samaritans, who were darkly suspected of having fostered the swarming plague of Gnostics, and it was no wonder that bishops such as Cyril regarded the melting-pot of faiths to be found in Palestine as so potentially toxic. To scholars of his generation, the threat from heresy in the Holy Land seemed as terrifying as ever. After all, if a Jew could be a Christian—and a Christian a Jew—then who was to say what further monstrous fusions of beliefs might be possible?

Answers to that, in the manuscript-littered libraries of the Holy Land, were certainly still there for those with eyes to see. Jerome, ever the assiduous bookworm, had reported in a tone of mingled horror and fascination his perusal of a gospel written in Hebrew that contained the noxious teachings of a sect called the Nazoreans. These, heretics who had the nerve to claim descent from the original Jewish Church that had existed prior to the arrival of Paul upon the scene, taught something truly shocking: that the Holy Spirit was not only female but the heavenly “mother”⁵⁶ of Christ. Nor was that the worst, by any means. To true connoisseurs of heresy, the Nazoreans ranked as mere beginners. The Church’s leading specialist in such matters, a bishop from Cyprus by the name of Epiphanius, had identified an infinitely more sinister attempt to poison the faithful with the toxin of Jewishness. Explaining to his shocked readers the existence of Christians who denied the Trinity and held Jesus to have been merely a man who obeyed the Law of Moses, and who turned in the direction of Jerusalem when they performed their daily prayers, the learned bishop had fingered a teacher called Ebion: a veritable monster, so Epiphanius claimed, who had blended Judaism with “the repulsiveness of the Samaritans,”⁵⁷ not to mention a whole host of other heresies, too. In such a figure, then, could be caught the ultimate glimpse of a world in which Christians and Jews forgot their proper place: a world in which there was nothing to stop some innovative heretic from “taking an item of preaching from every sect, and patterning himself after them all.”⁵⁸

No wonder, then, that bishops such as Cyril and Epiphanius, backed up by the militant fervour of the province’s monks, and the muscle of the imperial Roman state, should have laboured long and hard to impose an orthodox model of Christianity on the Holy Land. No wonder either that the Jews, menaced as they were by such a project, should have regarded with an increasingly suspicious hatred those of their number who still thought to call upon the name of Christ. People such as the Nazoreans or the Ebionites, squeezed from both sides, duly found themselves pushed ever deeper into the shadows. There was nothing for them to do, in the battleground for rival faiths that Palestine had become, save to retreat into ever deeper oblivion. No-man’s land, in the final reckoning, had proved an impossible place to be. Certainly, by the time of Justinian, no bishop thought to bother himself with the Ebionites—nor any rabbi either. Their doctrines and their doings had become things so spectral as to have been almost entirely forgotten. The Christians and the Jews of Palestine, cordially though they might detest one another, could at least agree on one thing: hybrids were beyond the pale.

And perhaps literally so. If indeed the Ebionites and their like did manage to cling on to a precarious existence within the Christian empire, then it could only ever have been on the margins: on the Golan Heights above Galilee, perhaps, or in outposts planted deep in the desert.⁵⁹ To those defined by the Church as heretics, as to refugees from Samaria, it was no longer their traditional heartlands that held out the surest prospects of survival, but rather the wilderness. The result was a curious irony: for even as the frontier between Palestine and the desert was being colonised by the shock troops of Christian orthodoxy, by monks and ascetics, so also did it bear a certain ghostly witness to the world as it had been before the establishment of Christianity, when the borders between rival faiths had been less clear-cut, more fissiparous. Just as the massive stonework of a lavra, a desert monastery, proclaimed the triumph of the new, so also were there to be glimpsed, faint perhaps, but present all the same for those inspired to track them down, the broken traces of a far more ancient order. In the wilds between Palestine and Sinai, for instance, there stood shrines raised by tribesmen who still worshipped a whole multitude of gods: “polytheists” as they were contemptuously termed. Meanwhile, in the cliffs above the Dead Sea, it was not unheard of for mysterious scrolls to be excavated from “chambers in the middle of the mountain with many books in them”:⁶⁰ scrolls that might prove to contain versions of the Jewish scriptures, but fabulously ancient, and with strange and variant readings. Clearly, then, amid the dryness of the sands, prospects for the survival of otherwise long-forgotten manuscripts were not altogether hopeless; and perhaps, that being so, the same was true of long-obsolete doctrines too.

Out in the wilderness, after all, beyond the reach of the Christian empire, and the monks who had colonised its periphery, there was no one greatly to care which gods people might worship, nor which books they might read, nor which obsolete beliefs they might hug to themselves. Out in the wilderness, there was no one to patrol the frontiers of faiths that elsewhere, once and for all, had put up the barricades.