Julian was shy, cerebral and awkward. A biased Christian recalled his ‘oddly disjointed neck, hunched and twitching shoulders, wild darting eye, swaying walk, haughty way of breathing down that prominent nose, that nervous and uncontrolled laughter, ever-nodding head and halting speech’. But the bearded, burly emperor was also decisive and single-minded. He restored paganism, favouring the family’s old divine patron, the Sun, encouraging the traditional sacrifices in pagan temples and dismissing Galilean (as he called Christian) teachers in order to diminish their effete, unRoman values.
Julian had never expected to rule the empire. He was just five when Constantius murdered his father and most of his family; only two survived, Gallus and Julian. In 349, Constantius appointed Gallus as Caesar only to behead him, partly for his inept suppression of a Jewish revolt. Yet he needed a Caesar in the West and there was now only one candidate left. Julian, then a student of philosophy in Athens, became Caesar, ruling from Paris. Understandably, he was nervous when the unpredictable emperor summoned him. Inspired by a dream about Zeus, he accepted the imperial crown from his troops. As he marched eastwards, Constantius died and Julian found himself ruler of the entire empire.
Julian’s rebuilding of the Jewish Temple was not just a mark of his tolerance but a nullification of the Christian claim to have inherited the true Israel, a reversal of the fulfilment of the prophecies of Daniel and Jesus that the Temple would fall, and a sign that he was serious in the overturning of his uncle’s work. It would also win the support of the Babylonian Jews during his planned Persian war. Julian saw no contradiction between Greek paganism and Jewish monotheism, believing that the Greeks worshipped the Jewish ‘Most High God’ as Zeus: Yahweh was not unique to the Jews.
Julian appointed Alypius, his representative in Britain, to rebuild the Jewish Temple. The Sanhedrin were nervous: was this too good to be true? To reassure them, Julian, setting off for the Persian front, wrote ‘To the Community of Jews’, repeating his promise. In Jerusalem, exhilarated Jews ‘sought out the most skilled artisans, collected materials, cleared the ground and embarked so earnestly on the task that even women carried heaps of earth and brought their necklaces to defray the expenses’. Building materials were stored in the so-called Stables of Solomon. ‘When they had removed the remains of the former building, they cleared the foundation.’
As the Jews took control of Jerusalem, Julian invaded Persia with 65,000 troops. But on 27 May 363 Jerusalem was struck by an earthquake that somehow ignited the building materials.
The Christians were delighted by this ‘wonderful phenomenon’, though they may well have helped it along with arson. Alypius could have continued the work, but Julian had crossed the Tigris into Iraq. In tense Jerusalem, Alypius decided to await Julian’s return. The emperor, however, was already in retreat. On 26 June in a confused skirmish near Samara, an Arab soldier (possibly a Christian) stabbed him in the side with a spear. Pierced in the liver, Julian tried to pull it out, shredding the sinews of his hand. Christian writers claimed that he died saying, ‘Vicisti, Galilaee!’, ‘Thou has conquered, Galilean!’. He was succeeded by the commander of his guard, who restored Christianity, reversed all Julian’s acts and again banned the Jews from Jerusalem: henceforth there would again be one religion, one truth. In 391–2 Theodosius I made Christianity the empire’s official religion and started to enforce it.*3
JEROME AND PAULA: SAINTHOOD, SEX AND THE CITY
In 384, a splenetic Roman scholar named Jerome arrived in Jerusalem with an entourage of wealthy Christian women. Obsessively pious, they nonetheless travelled under a cloud of sexual scandal.
Now in his late thirties, the Illyrian Jerome had lived as a hermit in the Syrian desert, always tormented with sexual longings: ‘Although my only companions were scorpions, I was mingling with the dances of girls, my mind throbbing with desires.’ Jerome then served as the secretary to Damasus I, the Bishop of Rome, where the nobility had embraced Christianity. Damasus felt confident enough to declare that the bishops of Rome served with divine blessing in direct apostolic succession from St Peter, a big step in their development into the supreme, infallible popes of later times. But now the Church had such patrician support, Damasus and Jerome found themselves entangled in some very worldly scandals: Damasus was accused of adultery, dubbed ‘the tickler of the ears of middle-aged women’, while Jerome was said to be having an affair with the rich widow Paula, one of the many such ladies who had embraced Christianity. Jerome and Paula were exonerated – but they had to leave Rome and so they set out for Jerusalem, accompanied by her daughter Eustochium.
