ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Christian imposition and manipulation of memory in, around, and about Jerusalem from the earliest moments that we can begin to speak of “Christian memory” to the emergence of the Crusader States in the eleventh century. It explores role of Jerusalem in the earliest surviving Christian literature, namely, those texts that became the New Testament and contemporary texts dating from the late first to mid-second century. The Roman destructions of the second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 ce and then Jerusalem itself half a century later were moments of rupture in physical space and redefinition in the literary imagination. Memories of the city created a symbolic Jerusalem within Christian exegesis, pilgrimage narratives, and visual art and produced an imaginative homeland and center for theological worlds, however we construe the particulars of those theologies. The Persian and Arab conquests of Jerusalem in the early seventh century marked a significant moment in the medieval Christian imagination.
