PART I A Holy Site of Jews and Christians

In Jerusalem, just outside the Zion Gate of the old city near the crest of Mount Sion,^F1 often called Christian Sion, lie the partial remains of an ancient synagogue consisting of a niche, walls, floors, and foundations, incorporated into a building now venerated by both Jews and Christians.

For Jews the site is the traditional location of David's Tomb (the pseudo-tomb not the actual tomb) memorialized by a small synagogue on the first floor. Dominating the synagogue is the Cenotaph of David, a large Gothic sepulchral monument, shown in Figure 1. Atop the Cenotaph are several Torah scrolls, engraved silver canisters used in the Sephardic tradition to contain the Torah scroll, and other religious ornaments. The blackened stone of the niche, the result of centuries of smoke from candles and incense, are thought to be the remains of Jerusalem�s oldest known synagogue.

Christians commonly regard this site as that of the ancient venue of the Upper Room often referred to as the Cenacle or the Coenaculum. A memorial to this heritage, dating to the 14th century, consists of the reconstructed Room of the Last Supper and the adjoining Chapel of the Holy Spirit on the second floor. While a single building houses the two memorials, each has a separate entrance.

This article entails an examination of the veracity of these two seemingly conflicting claims and a reconsideration of the evidence, both historical and archaeological, regarding the identity of the original structure and its relevance at the time of its construction.

The formal name of this ancient synagogue, seemingly Judeo-Christian, during the second and third centuries is now unknown. In the fourth and fifth centuries, however, Greco-Roman Christians referred to the building in a variety of ways. Eusebius called it the �Holy Church of God� (Eusebius The Proof of the Gospel 6.18; Ferrar 1920b:30, 1981b:30). Cyril said it was the �Upper Church of the Apostles� (Cyril of Jerusalem Catechetical Lectures 16.4; Schaff and Wace 1989a:116). Egeria usually referred to it as �On Sion� (Wilkinson 1971:294). Epiphanius, who alluded to it in its second century context, said that at the time Hadrian visited Colonia Aelia Capitolina, ca. 131/132, it was a small �Church of God� (Epiphanius De Mensuris 14; Koester 1989:93). Theodosius said it was Holy Sion which is the �mater omnium ecclesiarum� or the Mother of all Churches (Theodosius The Topology of the Holy Land 7(b); Wilkinson 1977:66).

With the construction of the Basilica of Hagia Sion in the early fifth century the synagogue became of less significance. For a brief period, as the sacrarium of Mt. Sion, it served as the repository of the supposed bones of St. Stephen.^F2 Later it functioned simply as a side chapel. Centuries later it became known as the Tomb of David which remains its name to the present day.

For more than a thousand years Mt. Sion was under Christian domination and a place of Christian memorials and churches. Brief interludes of control occurred with the Persian invasion of A.D. 614 and the Islamic occupation of 1009�1099. The pseudo-Tomb of David, the remnants of this ancient synagogue, remained under Islamic control from 1219, except for the limited Franciscan occupancy of 1335�1551, until taken by the Israelis in 1948. Today it comes under the jurisdiction of the Israeli Ministry of Religious Affairs.

The Problem

There is no scholarly consensus as to the identity of the original synagogue. Nevertheless, both Christians and Jews relying on the statement by Epiphanius^F3 (ca. 315-402/3) claim it as their own. Writing late in the fourth century, Epiphanius claimed in chapter 14 of his work De Mensuris et Ponderibus that when the Roman emperor Hadrian (76-138) visited Jerusalem (ca. 131/132) a small �Church of God� and �seven synagogues� existed on Mount Sion (Epiphanius De Mensuris 14; Koester 1989:93).

Christians, believing this site to be that of the Upper Room, argue that the present-day remains are those of this small Church of God. Jews claim it as one of seven syn�agogues of the Jews observed by Hadrian. The matter remains in scholarly dispute as well and there is no clear consensus of scholarly opinion. Some literary sources and archaeological data support the existence of a Judeo-Christian synagogue on Mt. Sion in the second century. On the other hand, the exclusion of Jews from Aelia Capitolina, the Roman persecution of Christians, and the presence of the Roman Tenth Legion on Mt. Sion mitigate against it. Whether or not the remnants of the ancient synagogue do indeed date to the early Christian period remains an open question and one examined herein.

An early account by a pilgrim from Bordeaux, possibly a Judeo-Christian who visited Jerusalem in 333, referred to the tradition of seven synagogues on Mount Sion. This visitor wrote: �Seven synagogues were there, but only one is left�the rest have been �plowed and sown� as was said by the prophet Isaiah� (Pilgrim of Bordeaux 592; Wilkinson 1971:157-158).

With respect to the Upper Room, the question is�was there but a single upper room put to use by the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth at the time of the Passover in ca. A.D. 30?^F4 Luke's gospel employs an�gaiŏn or anōgēŏn as a variant for upper room (Luke 22:12) while the writer of the Acts of the Apostles uses hupěrō_iŏn for upper room (Acts 1:13). These two passages mark events in the roughly eight-week period from the Passover through Pentecost. The word an�gaiŏn refers to the venue of the Last Supper and hupěrō_iŏn the place where the disciples resided at the time of the Ascension and presumably at Pentecost. It remains to be seen whether or not these were one and the same location.

In his Vulgate translation of the New Testament, Jerome ren�dered these two Greek words by the single Latin word coenaculum, or cenaculum, meaning dining room which was customarily located on a second floor in Greco-Roman multi-story homes. At times translators render coenaculum and cenaculum into English as cenacle. Whether right or wrong, the Christian tradition ever since has been that these two places were one and the same (Lussier 1967:388; Mare 1987:233-234; Finegan 1969:147).

In early Christian tradition the location of the Upper Room was the home of Mary the mother of John Mark (Acts 12:12). In his gospel John Mark, presumably the young man who followed soldiers taking Jesus to the courtyard of the high priest in the Upper City escaped naked when in attempting to grab him they got his sleeping garment instead (Mark 14:51),^F5 also uses an�gaiŏn for upper room in reference to the venue of the Last Supper (Mark 14:15).

The importance of the Upper Room to Christians arises in its symbolic imagery of three critical, or watershed, events in Christian history. First, it is the acknowledged site of the introduction of the Eucharist at the Last Supper wherein Jesus introduced the rite to his followers.^F6 Second, it has an association with the Ascension as the place where Jesus' disciples resided awaiting the high Sabbath known as the Feast of Pentecost or Shavuoth. Third, it is the traditional location of the meeting place on Shavuoth, a Sunday,^F7 where very early in the morning the Holy Spirit descended on the disciples some fifty days from the Resurrection creating the Church of God (Hebrew: qehal'el; Greek: �kkles�a tou Theou).

The early followers of Jesus of Nazareth saw themselves as the sole legitimate suc�cessor of the fathers and the new Israel of God. They referred to their community as the Assemblage or Congregation of God usually translated into English as church, presum�ably written as qehal'el, the contraction of qehal 'eloh�m (Assembly of God). As to the word qehal'el, according to Roloff, writing in the Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament: �The term was used because it corresponded with the eschatological self-understanding of the Church, which understood itself to be the company elect by God and determined by him to be the center and crystallization-point of the eschatological Israel now being called into existence by him� (Roloff 1993:412).

When rendered into English the term qehal'el, may appear as Assembly of God, Congregation of God, Company of God, or Community of God, but it usually appears in translation as church of God or Church of God depending upon the exegesis of the translators.^F8 A translator's choice of rendering the majuscule Greek text of the apostolic period church of God or with the formal specificity of the proper name Church of God depends upon the exegesis the translator desires to emphasize, i.e., his or her own hermeneutic.^F9

The translators of the Septuagint rendered q^ehal 'eloh�m at Nehemiah 13:1 into Greek as �into the assembly of God.� The word �kkles�a as used in the LXX translates the Hebrew word qehila into its Greek equivalent, denoting the congregation of Israel. Following the Septuagint, the apostles apparently selected �kkles�a as the appropriate Greek equivalent of qehila, which they chose for rendering qehal'el, into Greek as Church of God."^F10 Hence, in Koin� qehal'el became Ekkles�a tou Theou, Church of God, a formal self-designation, or proper name, for the ancient church.

It was not until the ninth century that the Greek text of the New Testament employed minuscules. In the shift to minuscules, the Greek text became �kkles�a tou Theou. It appeared so in later Greek minuscule manuscripts. From then on, the Church of God commonly was known as the �kkles�a tou Theou. In the New Testament, the terms �kkles�a, when used in an ecclesial sense, and �kkles�a tou Theou consistently refer to the community of Christians and not buildings. During this period Christians met in houses, hired halls, and synagogues modeled after the Jewish synagogues (Mackowski 1980:143, 145). By the time of Epiphanius it could refer to either one. It was therefore natural for Epiphanius, writing after the A.D. 381 seizure of the Judeo-Christian synagogue by the Byzantines following the First Council of Constantinople, to refer to the meeting place of the Judeo-Christians on Mount Sion as a Church of God, distinguishing this meeting place from the seven synagogues of the Jews, believing this was the particular synagogue where Judeo-Chris�tians assembled in Hadrian�s day until its confiscation.

The Greco-Roman Christian tradition is that this small Church of God, whose rem�nants lie on the southern part of Mt. Sion in the southwestern portion of Jerusalem, purport�edly observed by Hadrian and called by Theodosius (ca. 530) the Mother of All Churches, was the seat of the Judeo-Christian community at Jerusalem. The question is�was it?

Previous Investigations

The remains of the Cenacle/pseudo-Tomb of David were subject to two archaeological inquiries, in 1859 by E. Pierotti (Pierotti 1864) and in 1951 by Jacob Pinkerfeld (Yadin 1976:116-117; Mackowski 1980:145). Bargil Pixner conducted a series of small exploratory investigations about the site. The work of Jacob Pinkerfeld (1960), Jack Finegan (1969), and Bargil Pixner (1990, 1991) dominate the literature. Bellarmino Bagatti (1971a, 1971b), Richard M. Mackowski (1980), Frances E. Peters (1985), W. Harold Mare (1987) and John McRay (1991) contribute commentary. Jerome Murphy-O�Connor (1994) and Hillel Geva (1998) offer significant criticism.

In 1949, Pinkerfeld examined the site in connection with dam�age caused by the explosion of a mortar shell entering the Pseudo-Tomb of David through its eastern window during the War of Independence. The Director of the Moslem and Druse Department in the Israeli Ministry of Religious Affairs later entrusted Pinkerfeld to make repairs to the marble floor and the damaged walls (Pinkerfeld 1960:41). Pinkerfeld collected data and prepared a preliminary report on the history of the building.

Figure 2 is the plan of the pseudo-Tomb of David as drawn by Pinkerfeld. He held that the building incorporated into the Tomb of David was a first-century Jewish synagogue. He based his conclusions on five observations. First, the niche of the apse resembled the style of the first-century A.D. synagogue found at Eshtemoa. Second, the direction of the niche was north, with a slight easterly deviation of several degrees, toward the Temple Mount and not in an easterly direction in the pattern of Christian church buildings. Third, the walls of the room were not all built at the same time. Fourth, the well-built wall containing the niche, remaining in situ, consisted of ashlars dating to the Roman period, the first building period on the site, as did the walls to the east and south. Fifth, the floor of the original building measured 1.92 meters below the threshold of the niche thereby paralleling that of the Eshtemoa synagogue at 2.08 meters below and that in Hauran at 2.20 meters.

As Pinkerfeld was one of the victims of the Jordanian attack on the Archaeological Convention of 1956 at Ramat Rahel his research came to an abrupt end. His posthumous preliminary report appeared in Hebrew (Pinkerfeld 1957). Later his widow consented to its translation and publishing, through the auspices of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Pinkerfeld 1960:43).

Bargil Pixner (1921-2002)^F11 published his findings and conclusions in a Biblical Archaeology Review article entitled �Church of the Apostles Found on Mount Zion� (Pixner 1990) and another article on the subject titled Die apostolische Synagogue auf dem Zion (Pixner 1991). Pixner�s basic argument was that the structure venerated as the traditional tomb of David on Mt. Sion was not the real tomb of David but actually a Roman-period synagogue built by a Judeo-Christian remnant under the leadership of Jesus� cousin Simeon. This synagogue, according to Pixner, later became known as the Church of the Apostles.

He agreed with Pinkerfeld that the original building was a first-century synagogue, but he challenged his finding on the orientation of the niche of the apse. Pixner held that the orientation was toward the Church of the Holy Sepulcher not the Temple Mount. Moreover, he con�cluded that the original structure was a Judeo-Christian synagogue, constructed ca. A.D. 73, which remained under Judeo-Christian control and occupancy until it was taken over by the Byzantines.

Pixner�s research also included excavations at the southern tip of Mt. Sion where he found three superimposed sills of a gate in the ancient Jerusalem wall. He held that the largest was built for the Herodian period Essene community in residence on Mt. Sion (Pixner 1997). Moreover, he argued that �the crudely worked middle sill� was part of a wall surround�ing Judeo-Christian Sion dating to the early fourth century (Pixner 1997:31). He concluded that this gate was the one by which the Bordeaux Pilgrim entered Christian Sion and observed its synagogue in 333.

Hillel Geva, writing in the Biblical Archaeology Review, dismissed the views of both Pinkerfeld and Pixner. In his analysis he concluded that �both the literary and the archaeo�logical evidence indicate that the city was totally destroyed� (Geva 1997:37) and that �the archaeological evidence clearly indicates that the entire western hill was only sporadically and sparsely inhabited during the Roman period� (Geva 1997:40). Moreover, Geva wrote that as to the �destruction layer marking the Roman conquest of the Upper City in 70 C.E., we consistently identified a construction layer of the Byzantine period (fourth to seventh centuries C.E.�with nothing in between!� (Geva 1997:38-39). He made his point quite clear in a follow-up comment about his article. He wrote �in my opinion, there was no Jew�ish-Christian community on Mt. Zion during the Roman period� since the whole western hill served as an encampment for the Tenth Roman Legion (Geva 1998:14). Pixner, of course, disagreed (Pixner 1998:15-16).

While there have been calls for excavation of this ancient synagogue site for decades, particularly by the Franciscan Order, unfortunately legal, political, and religious realities remain such that, barring some unforeseen situation any excavation, will have to be left to another generation.

Methodology

The plan of this study was the testing of Pixner�s theory that the remnants of the Mother of All Churches, which he calls the Church of the Apostles, can be found on the southwestern hill of Jerusalem, through a review of the evidence, both historical and archaeological, and the reexamination of the authenticity of the present day site of the Cenacle and the pseudo-Tomb of David in order to explain its significance. This study, therefore, presented an opportunity to reconsider the evidence regarding the identity of the original building and its relevance at the time of its construction.

The research design consisted of testing ten research hypotheses, set below in Table 1, Research Hypotheses, derived from the argument developed by Bargil Pixner, against both literary and archaeological evidence, and gathering evidence pertinent to the religious customs of its builders, e.g., Sabbath observance, Passover observance, Scripture reading, and the like. The criterion needed to falsify each research hypothesis was also set forth. This study involved acquisition, analysis, and presentation of archaeological and documentary data. As it was not possible to excavate this structure, this study employed existing data available in a published form and any necessary site survey data through field study.