Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History)

Early Christians celebrating the Eucharistic Banquet, or Lord’s Supper, found in the Catacombs of San Callisto.

Early Christians celebrating the Eucharistic Banquet, or Lord’s Supper, found in the Catacombs of San Callisto.

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

INTRODUCTION
What Do the Everlasting Hills Desire?

Notes and Sources

The Books of the New Testament

Chronology

Acknowledgments

Index of Biblical Citations

General Index

Illustrations

Excerpt from
Heretics and Heroes

About the Author

Acclaim for Desire of the Everlasting Hills

The Hinges of History

Other Books by This Author

H
ISTORY HAS MUCH TO DO
with hills. From the
Hill of Zion on which King
David built Jerusalem to the Athenian Acropolis, from Bunker Hill of the American Revolution to Malvern Hill of the American Civil War, from Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi to Vietnam’s Hamburger Hill, the hills of this world have been prized. Much of humanity’s recorded story has taken place on their flanks and summits, and how much blood, of both conquerors and conquered, has been absorbed by their accommodating soils no one can say.

In
Rome I love to climb the
Janiculum, which the ancients called the “Golden Mountain” because of its yellow sand. One of the splendid natural defenses of Rome, it is a ridge that rises steeply from the west bank of the sludge-green Tiber and gives spectacular views of the great city that is spread beneath it. Like other strategic hills, it has known many battles.

It was just a century and a half ago—in 1849—that armies last clashed on its summit around the ornamental Renaissance arches of the Gate of San Pancrazio and in and out of the charming medieval buildings that lie beyond the gate and on whose walls one can still discern the work of bullets. What the bullets did to the men who fought here has long been concealed by earth. The winners were French troops in service to a reactionary pope, outraged that Italians would dare take up arms against him in their attempt to dissolve the Papal States and unite Italy. The losers were boys as young as fourteen, tragically
outnumbered but fighting with the insane bravery of youth, inspired by their charismatic leader, Giuseppe Garibaldi, and his no less charismatic wife, Anita. Today, each Garibaldi has a noble equestrian monument on this summit. Garibaldi with his saintly, mild demeanor surveys the city from his lofty marble platform; superwoman Anita, cast in bronze, raises a firearm in her right hand as she suckles a baby at her left breast, all the while urging her horse forward. They lost the battle but won the war; for beneath the hoofs of Anita’s advancing charger one can make out in the distance Michelangelo’s bone-white dome of Saint Peter’s and the lilliputian statelet of the
Vatican, to which the pope’s vestigial temporal power has been confined since 1870. The dead child-soldiers have no monument in marble or bronze, just a street sign—Piazzale dei Ragazzi di 1849 (Great Square of the Boys of 1849)—but their spirits haunt the slender umbrella trees that cluster mournfully in the Villa Doria Pamphilj, the vast seventeenth-century parkland that runs beside the scene of their deaths, where dirt paths are named in their memory and the boys of contemporary Rome kick footballs and fly kites.

The
Janiculum is more than a Roman hill. It speaks to Everyman, for one patch or another of its sloped ascents can serve to remind almost any traveler of his own ancestral history. At the southern end of the hill the alleys of
Trastevere wind mazelike in patterns established more than two millennia ago. Until the Tiber silted up, ships sailed upriver from the Mediterranean, depositing exotic cargoes and even more exotic human specimens in the port of Trastevere. From every corner of the ancient world they came here with their strange costumes and peculiar practices, Greeks and Syrians bearing the crushed pride of the vanquished, Gauls and Britons displaying
their lately acquired refinements, Oriental merchants speaking languages but dimly understood, Africans of every kind—Egyptians, Berbers, Nubians—and Jews with uncut beards, the whole babble contained within Trastevere’s narrow streets whose haphazard apartment buildings, designed to cram in as many souls as possible, leaned over the filthy streets, nearly blocking out the sky. Trastevere (in those days Trans Tiberim, the Place-across-the-Tiber) was exciting and a little dangerous, as it remains today, a place where basic cravings—for food, sex, revenge—can spurt unexpectedly into view.

It is instructive to select one or two of these groups of migrating visitors and see how they fared in subsequent ages. The Jews, for instance, have now been in
Rome longer than anyone else, boasting lines of descent far more ancient than any non-Jewish Italian can claim, back to the beginning of the
Roman empire and earlier. The first Roman home of the Jews was Trastevere, as memorial fragments found here still testify. These have been mounted in the portico of the
Basilica of Santa Maria, where you can identify the
shofars and etrogs
¹
that distinguished the graves of ancient Jews, as well as the doves and ships of those Jews—a minority within a minority—who were members of a primitive Christian community, the first to be established at Rome, probably in the fourth decade of the first century.