Jerusalem: The Biography

† The Byzantines moved most of the Jewish traditions of the Temple Mount to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The reddish stone of the Temple Mount had been known as the ‘Blood of Zacharias’ (the priest murdered there as told in 2 Chronicles 24.21), but this site nowmoved to the Church as did the Creation, the burial place of Adam, the altars of Melchizedek and Abraham and Solomon’s devil-catching silver bowl. These joined the platter for John the Baptist’s head, the sponge that soothed Jesus on the cross, the column where he was scourged, the stone that killed St Stephen and, of course, the True Cross. The Temple had been the ‘centre of the world’ for Jews; no wonder this one-stop shrine of all biblical holiness, the Church, was now itself regarded as ‘a navel of the world’.