British Mandate: A Survey of Palestine: Volume II - Page 882

CHAPTER XXII.

general Julius Severus, fresh from a victorious campaign in Britain, who gradually drove the rebels from all their strongholds, including Jerusalem. The final stand was made at Bittir (now a small village seven miles south-west of Jerusalem) which withstood Severus for three years hut was finally stormed by the Roman army in A.D. 135: thousands of Jews were taken prisoner and sold into slavery, and Bar Cochba himself was killed.

9. Hadrian ordered that Jerusalem should be razed to the ground, and that a new Roman colony should be erected on its site under the name of Aelia Capitolina. He was determined finally to efface all traces both of Judaism and of Christianity and with this end in view he destroyed what still remained of the ruins of the Temple and caused bis statue to be set up in the centre of its great esplanade. He also obliterated from view the sites of Calvary and the Resurrection, levelling the intervening ground by the construction of a vast artificial mound of earth which was then terraced. Thereafter be built a shrine to Jupiter over the hidden site of Calvary and a shrine to Venus over the hidden site of the Resurrection. These constructions had in fact the opposite effect of that which he intended, for as will be explained below they merely served, less than two hundred years later, to provide yet another proof of their authenticity. Finally, he forbade any person who was a Jew , either by religion or by race, to set foot in Jerusalem (now Aelia Capitolina). As from this date there grew up in the Holy City a local Christian community which was no longer of Jewish but of Greco-Roman origin.

10. Palestine was once more at peace under Roman rule.

From The Christian standpoint, one of the most important results of the restoration of the Pax Romana was the increase, which may be dated from about the middle of the second century, in the number of pilgrims coming to Jerusalem from all parts of the world. The great Christian Basilicas of the Constantinian period were not of course as yet in existence, but the Christian community already bad its places of worship, of which the most important at that time was a small oratory on Mount Zion, on the site known today as the Cenacle *. Of these early pilgrimages (soon to he followed by countless others throughout the centuries until the present day) Eusebius (A.D. 265-340) ** writes in Book VI, Chapter 18 of the Demonstratio Evangelica that bishops came to Palestine from all over the world to see for
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* The Room of the Last Supper and of the descent of the Holy Ghost u.t Pentecost .

** Metropolitan of Caesarea: ecclesiastical historian.

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