God's Gold (5 page)

Alongside donations made by the local Jewish citizens of Judea, rulers contributed artwork to the Temple as political tribute. King Herod had spoils captured by Israel's wars with “the barbarous nations” mounted all around the Temple complex. Sosius, the Roman governor of Syria, who in 37 BC helped Herod capture Jerusalem from Antigonos, the last ruler of the Hasmonean dynasty, also donated gold to the Temple, including a crown (
JW
1.357). There is every reason to expect that this pattern of royal political patronage was mirrored by vast unknown riches, such as the precious cauldrons, dishes, tables, and pouring vessels donated by the Roman emperor Augustus and his wife (
JW
5.562).

Herod Agrippa, grandson of Herod the Great, spent much of his youth in Rome, where he paid the price for supporting Caligula's imperial power struggle. Although the emperor Tiberius imprisoned Agrippa for his duplicity, when head of the empire Caligula subsequently appointed him puppet king of Israel from AD 37 to 44. At this time Agrippa also contributed to the splendors of the Temple:

The issue of what Rome encountered in the Temple in AD 70 is complicated even further by increased instances of deliberate plunder in the first century AD, as the jaws of Rome closed more tightly around Israel's neck. In 4 BC Sabinus seized the Temple treasury by force (
JW
2.50) and, as the fifth procurator of Judea from AD 26 to 36, Pontius Pilate later diverted sacred moneys to build aqueducts (
JW
2.175), no doubt including the arches still standing north of Caesarea. Gessius Flo
rus, Roman procurator of Judea in AD 65 and described as “eager to obtain the treasures of God,” later extracted seventeen talents in the name of the emperor (
JW
2.293), allegedly to make up for arrears of tribute, but really to stoke up war with the Jewish state.

Such “withdrawals” generated a slow simmering hatred across Israel for Roman institutions. By dipping into the Temple funds, however, Rome was merely duplicating its behavior elsewhere in the provinces. But in assuming Jerusalem's Temple was simply a place of worship, Roman policy would backfire disastrously. To Judaism, the Temple was the spiritual core of Israel's state religion.

But it wasn't just the Romans who plundered the Temple in the first centuries BC and AD. Once Jew took up sword against Jew inside Jerusalem during the First Revolt of AD 66–70, the various splinter factions deemed the Temple treasury acceptable prey because it contained wealth donated by groups whose authority they refused to recognize. After looting most of the upper-class houses of Jerusalem around AD 69, John of Gischala “betook himself to sacrilege, and melted down many of the sacred utensils, which had been given to the temple, including the vessels donated by the Emperor Augustus” (
JW
5.562). By ignoring the greater Roman threat, and immersing themselves in constant internal bickering and battling, the Jews were courting catastrophe and bringing the destruction of the Temple and its treasures closer by the day.

Jerusalem was not just an essential crime scene to pick up a treasure trail of DNA disseminated after the destruction of the Temple in AD 70. I had a parallel reason to get to the Holy City as soon as possible. As it turned out, I was not alone in questioning whether the key to the Temple treasure conundrum lay in Rome. Since the mid-1990s a heated political wrangle has been simmering between the Vatican and Israel, which accuses the papacy of imprisoning the treasure looted by Titus in AD 70. Israel is insistent that the spoils have remained in Rome uninterrupted for two thousand years and, not surprisingly, covets the repatriation of its birthright to put right an ancient wrong.

Both right-wing factions, such as the Temple Mount and Land of Israel Faithful Movement, and Israeli politicians are committed to recovering the lost sacred vessels and, not least, to benefiting from their transferable divine powers. This war of words boiled over in 1996, when Israel's minister of religion, Shimon Shetreet, presented the Vatican with historical research, allegedly compiled at the University of Florence, which apparently left no shred of doubt that the gold candelabrum and other treasures still languished in Rome. Shetreet claimed to possess statements from former popes confirming that the Catholic Church holds these objects. An official inquiry leading to the return of the sacred vessels was demanded.

Then, in 1999, Moshe Katzav, president of Israel, formally asked Cardinal Angelo Sudano, prime minister of the Vatican, to prepare a list
of all the Temple treasures and Judaica in his possession. Israel's chief rabbis, Yehuda Metzger and Shlomo Amar, joined the battle lines in January 2004 by requesting permission from Pope John Paul II to search the Vatican storerooms. The Israeli newspaper
Maariv
reported that the rabbis planned to buy back the gold candelabrum. All of these formal petitions fell on deaf papal ears.

The case for the repatriation of the Temple treasure from the Vatican is also vehemently championed by the Temple Mount and Land of Israel Faithful Movement. The ultimate goal of this extreme Zionist organization is to establish a Third Temple in Jerusalem over the ground space of the historical Solomonic and Herodian Houses of God, today occupied by the Muslim Dome of the Rock and Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary). The Movement boldly asserts that Israel has “very clear evidence” that the Vatican continues to imprison the two-thousand-year-old Temple treasure, “making this an undeniable fact.” A newsletter released by the movement in 2003 summarizes the argument thus:

Further expectation and curiosity have been aroused by Steven Fine, professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Although the University of Florence denied any connection with research pinpointing the Temple treasure in the Vatican, he contributed further tantalizing ammunition. An unpublished inscription on a mosaic in a chapel of Saint John Lateran, Rome, and dated to 1291, reads: “Titus and Vespasian had this ark and the candelabrum and…the four columns here present taken from the Jews in Jerusalem and brought to Rome.” Legend has it that Pope Pius XII (1939–1958) even showed the gold menorah to Isaac Herzog, chief rabbi of Israel, but refused to return it.

My own research confirmed the existence of a rich vein of tradition placing the Temple treasure in Rome uninterrupted from the Late Roman period onward. By the nineteenth century the Eternal City's Jewish ghetto believed that Early Christian soldiers threw the seven-branched candelabrum into the River Tiber, whose bed miraculously turned bronze from Rome to Ostia. The Jewish community even petitioned Pope Benedict XIV (1740–1758) for permission to excavate the Tiber and recover the menorah, a request denied. Hence, diverse threads woven at disparate times have created a zealous climate of hope and anticipation.

Without personally having access to the “undeniable facts” serving as Israel's accusations against the Vatican, I intended to tread very cautiously among this war of words and to accept nothing as the gospel truth. In my own scientific work I had met many brilliant biblical scholars with elaborate theories born of passion and emotion, but these were often straw houses lacking secure foundations. My own interest in the Temple treasure of Jerusalem had no religious or political agenda. As a humanist and “man of science,” I was committed simply to historical integrity, to exposing the truth in whatever shape it might take.

The Vatican and its museums are renowned for their secret archives,
winding storerooms that contain endless shelves of ancient masterpieces. Like earth's oceans, nobody really knows exactly what's down there and, of course, Dan Brown's
The Da Vinci Code
has recently added great weight to conspiracy theories swirling around the papal residency. Could the Temple treasure really be languishing in those vaults? Simply discounting the idea out of hand wasn't an option: a Catholic priest even claims he once saw several Temple relics in a vault buried four stories under the West Wing.

If any of the great treasure of Jerusalem lies beneath the Vatican's holy facade, then word of its presence ought to be inked into the Secret Archive. But excavating this evidence would be a Herculean task. Although the Papal collection currently meanders along seven and a half miles of bookshelves in the Tower of the Winds, an astronomical observatory built in 1578, the archive's contents today owe much to chance survival and random removal and relocation.

There is no doubt that great wonders and mysteries lurk under lock and key. Even the Tower of the Winds' staff has no knowledge of some documents residing behind a heavy door at the end of a corridor on the lower floor. It is always closed, and its key never leaves the side of the chief prefect. Behind it are stored the Vatican's most sensitive and precious documents: for instance, Greek letters exchanged between the popes and emperors of Byzantium discussing the protection of the Crusaders in 1146 and the last letter sent to the pope by Mary Queen of Scots a few days before she fell under the ax of Queen Elizabeth I in 1587.

If word of the Temple treasure of Jerusalem truly lies amid these tantalizing documents, we have to assume that it—or a facsimile—has survived undisturbed for at least seventeen hundred years. Are such ancient scrolls even capable of long-term survival amid Rome's micro-climate? Probably not. In the Hall of the Parchments alone, thousands of documents have been turned purple by a violet-colored fungus that scientists have failed to contain.

In all honesty, the tumultuous history of the Secret Archives makes survival extremely unlikely, especially for documents covering the first
two hundred years of the Temple treasure's presence in Rome. In AD 303, Eusebius Pamphilus, bishop of Caesarea in Palestine and the father of Church history, recorded how in the reign of Diocletian: “I saw with my own eyes the places of [Christian] worship thrown down from top to bottom, to the very foundations, and the inspired holy scriptures committed to the flames in the middle of the public square” (
History of the Church
8.2.1). Rome's Early Christian archive went up in smoke. Nothing survived for monks to make copies from. The crucial documentation covering the nine centuries after the reign of Constantine the Great are also irretrievably gone, and the earliest surviving entry, register Number 1, dates to the papacy of John VIII in AD 872–882.

At this time, and in a bizarre quirk of fate, the papal archive was stored in the Patriarchum on the Palatine Hill, alongside a castle-fortress that abutted the Arch of Titus. Because this Roman arch depicted some of the holy treasures of Jerusalem looted by Titus, including the mighty gold candelabrum, the ninth-century building was known as Turris Cartularia, the Tower of the Seven Lamps. The safety of the archive was entrusted to the Frangipani family, who were also in charge of the public granaries. However, in the course of endemic fighting between Rome's noble families, the archive vanished. So, in its current form the bulk of the archive dates from 1612, when it was reestablished by Pope Paul V Borghese. Preservation of word of the Temple treasure within the Secret Archive, confirming its current existence within the Vatican, is beyond a million-to-one chance.

What about the treasure itself, though, within Vatican City, as argued passionately by various high-powered Israeli politicians? In England I spent six tortuous weeks politely harassing the Israeli embassy to reveal its sources. Although they contacted universities, the Israel Antiquities Authority, and various political offices, no one could locate the original documentation or “undeniable facts.” In the face of my immense frustration, the embassy's press secretary did finally provide me with a hollow answer: “If anyone knows the Vatican does.”

No doubt the embassy tried its best on my behalf, but no one was going to go on the record about this sensitive issue. The official line
claimed that the historical documentation had gone missing when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon dissolved the corrupt Ministry of Religion for financial irregularities in 2004. Its duties had been carved up between various other ministries, such as the Department of Culture and Ministry of Education, with some interests “falling between the cracks,” or so I was informed. It sounded to me as if someone was plastering over those cracks. A whitewash was in progress, but why?

Next I pursued the Vatican, although I suspected that a portcullis of silence would swiftly fall. If they did have the Temple treasure they surely wouldn't come clean; if they didn't, why waste time answering disrespectful questions? In the end, my communication with Dr. Paolo Liverani, curator of classical antiquities in the Vatican Museums, made the Vatican's formal position crystal clear: “In later times there is not the smallest evidence that any part of the treasure of the Temple arrived in Rome and I do not think that the Vatican has any interest to hide the Menorah or any other part of the booty of Titus.”

With various doors slammed in my face, but with Israel's “undeniable facts” still beyond my grasp, I had one card left to play. Uncomfortable as I was talking to a group that wanted to eject Islam from the Temple Mount and replace it with a third Jewish Temple, I was optimistic that the director of the Temple Mount and Land of Israel Faithful Movement, Gershon Salomon, would be more forthcoming with fact. If there was any validity to Israel's allegations against the Vatican, the truth would out.