Jerusalem After Constantine Poem by gershon hepner

JERUSALEM AFTER CONSTANTINE

When after Constantine the Christians spurned
the Temple site where Roman vandals burned
the edifice that Herod once had built,
Mount Moriah's monument, they'd jilt
the nation which believed they had been chosen
to be God's people, but now seemed a frozen
remnant, testifying by defeat
that they had lost their former fragrance, sweet
as sacrifices offered on the altar
to God, whose choice of them began to falter
when they rejected God's self-sacrifice,
His son, allegedly, and, put on ice,
were chosen to be put on ice, as said
above. There Christians built a sepulcher,
destruction first performed by Nebuch-
dnezzar, and repeated by the Romans
by Constantine thereby confirmed. The omens
looked even worse when on the Temple site
the Muslims placed two other buildings. Now
the chances that God ever will allow
the Jews to serve Him where they did appear
vanishingly small. To three faiths dear,
can Jews now be denied what from the stem
of Jesse was their blossom, their Jerusalem?


Diarmaid MacCulloch ("The Chief Inhabitant, " LRB,7/14/11) reviews Simon Sebag Montefiore's "Jerusalem: The Biography." He points out that the Christians after Constantine deliberately left the site of the Temple as a place of ruins and foul-smelling garbage because Jesus had been recorded as having prophesies that not one stone of the Temple would stand on another:
And Jesus went out from the temple, and was going on his way; and his disciples came to him to show him the buildings of the temple. But he answered and said unto them, "You see all of these things, do you not? Truly I say unto you, there shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down." (Matthew 24: 1-2) .

Sir Diairmaid's response was:
A positive cornucopia. Thanks.

7/24/11 #8039