ABSTRACT
This development was in strong contrast to Christian attitudes towards Jerusalem in both the Byzantine and early Moslem periods. During the Byzantine period Jerusalem was often described in biblical terms. Those such as the Bordeaux Pilgrim and Egeria revealed an intense curiosity in the Holy Land as the land of the Bible and visited the places where the great events of biblical history took place, namely, Mount Sinai, Mount Nebo, Mamre, Hebron, Jericho, Bethel and Mount Gerizim. However, whereas outside Jerusalem the sites from the Old Testament and New Testament were combined to create a single sacred geography, Jerusalem’s biblical past was either intentionally forgotten and rejected or ‘Christianized’. Christian-Byzantine Jerusalem drew its legitimacy almost exclusively from Christ.1 The sites of Christ’s Crucifixion and Resurrection became the New Temple of Constantine’s New Jerusalem. Mount Moriah was left in ruins as if to symbolize the victory of Christianity over Judaism, of Ecclesia over Synagoga.
