In Saving the Holy Sepulchre, Raymond Cohen tells the engaging story of how three major Christian traditions--Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Armenian Orthodox--each with jealously guarded claims to the church, struggled to restore one of the great shrines of civilization. It almost didnt happen. For centuries the communities had lived together in an atmosphere of tension and mistrust based on differences of theology, language, and culture. But thanks to the dedicated efforts of a cast of kings, popes, patriarchs, governors, monks, and architects, the deadlock was eventually broken on the eve of Pope Paul VI's historic pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1964.

Religious leaders and political actors often use holy places to rally citizens to 'protect' or 'liberate' national territory as 'hallowed land.' The Holy Land, Palestine or Eretz-Israel, is the most obvious case of the process of 'religionizing' ethnic, national and territorial conflicts. This book analyzes fourteen case studies of conflicts over holy sites in the Holy Land, each representing a particular archetype of conflict. It seeks to understand the many facets of disputes and the triggers for the outbreak of violence in and around such sites. It also analyses the effectiveness of the conflict mitigation and resolution tools used for dealing with such disputes.

*Includes pictures of the church *Includes a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents The most famous church in Jerusalem for nearly 2,000 years, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, often called the Church of the Resurrection, was built in the era of St. Constantine, and the church as a structure has no history separable from the city of Jerusalem and its environs. It is venerated as being on the site where Jesus was crucified and buried, and naturally, making it a crucial pilgrimage site for Christians, and it is now the home of the Greek Orthodox Jerusalem Patriarchate. Moreover, it was the site of many important councils, some of which altered Christian history forever. In short, the Sepulchre was and is synonymous with Jerusalem, and it was essentially the nodal center of the city. Naturally, the Church has had a turbulent history just as Jerusalem has. Under the Emperor Vespasian, Jerusalem was attacked and depopulated by Roman forces in 70 CE, and from 131-134, the Jewish revolt invited another Roman reprisal. Over and over again, Jerusalem has been decimated, sacked and razed. In 135, Hadrian rebuilt the city as a Roman outpost and called it "Aelia Capitolina" (Sicker, 2-3), and even the era of St. Constantine provided no respite from wars and dislocation. The Emperor Hadrian also removed Jews from the city upon its renovation (Sicker, 2-4). In 313, Constantine the Great converted the Roman Empire and stopped the persecution of Christians, but the problems were far from over in Jerusalem. Jerusalem at the time was a center of pagan worship, with the emperor's main sanctuary being the temple of "Jupiter Capitolinus." The persecution had ended, but the hostility between Christians and non-Christians continued. In 314, Macarius, the Bishop of Jerusalem, set out to destroy the shrines around these pagan cults. Temples were the banks of the ancient world, and there was a tremendous amount of class warfare in the city. All the while, the church complex was about more than metaphysics, and Macarius sought to find the place where Jesus was buried. It is not known why he offered to look for this, but local tradition placed the site where the Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands. Underneath the pagan temple on the site before the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, workers found a Jewish cemetery where several caves lay with large, circular stones set in front as a means of blocking entry. Little doubt was expressed that it was the location of Christ's burial because this was the only cemetery in the area, was of ancient origin, and several tombs were built just as the New Testament describes. Even more, these few tombs (4 out of 900) with the large front stone were rare in Judea at the time. Only a handful of the wealthy had them, but since the New Testament speaks of Nikodemus as a rich man, the location of Christ's tomb was thought to be undoubtedly at this location (Berrett, 36ff). The evidence that Christ's tomb was at that location was backed by the apostolic tradition and basic common sense. The local population had venerated this site since apostolic times, but so much had been destroyed in the ensuing centuries that records which might have been consulted were likely long lost already. The site is close to the Mount of Olives east of Jerusalem and the Holy Church of the Lord's Hill, which lies to the west of it as a place particularly venerated by Christians. An artificial cave, located approximately 300 feet south of the hill, was certainly a burial crypt. The area around the cave itself suffered greatly from the Roman legionaries and the warfare there, so much has been lost, and the topography has changed radically since that time (Berrett, 35). The Church of the Holy Sepulchre traces the history and legacy of Jerusalem's most important church. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about the Church of the Holy Sepulchre like never before.

Moore traces and re-interprets the significance of the architecture of the Christian Holy Land within changing religious and political contexts.

More than 250 full-color photographs complement a fascinating look at Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the most popular pilgrimage site in Christiandom, in a study that explores the Church's history, the various Christian communities associated with it, and its rich architectural developmen

This book studies the archaeological record of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, surveying past excavations as well as recent research carried out within the church over the past three decades. An archaeological survey provides historical context for the second part of the book—a collection of primary sources pertinent to the history of the church.

This anthology explores the dynamics of shared religious sites in Turkey, the Balkans, Palestine/Israel, Cyprus, and Algeria, indicating where local and national stakeholders maneuver between competition and cooperation, coexistence and conflict. Contributors probe the notion of coexistence and the logic that underlies centuries of "sharing," exploring when and why sharing gets interrupted—or not—by conflict, and the policy consequences. These essays map the choreographies of shared sacred spaces within the framework of state-society relations, juxtaposing a site's political and religious features and exploring whether sharing or contestation is primarily religious or politically motivated. Although religion and politics are intertwined phenomena, the contributors to this volume understand the category of "religion" and the "political" as devices meant to distinguish between the theological and confessional aspects of religion and the political goals of groups. Their comparative approach better represents the transition in some cases of sites into places of hatred and violence, while in other instances they remain noncontroversial. The essays clearly delineate the religious and political factors that contribute to the context and causality of conflict at these sites and draw on history and anthropology to shed light on the often rapid switch from relative tolerance to distress to peace and calm.