Jerusalem Liturgical-Pilgrimage Christianity

Once Constantine's builders uncovered what they took to be the tomb of Christ and raised a great church complex over it in the 330s, Jerusalem became something no other city was. A place where the events of the gospel could be commemorated on the day and at the spot they were believed to have happened. Its clergy built a liturgy out of exactly that — Palm Sunday as an actual procession down the Mount of Olives with branches in hand, the veneration of the Cross on Good Friday, an all-night vigil at the tomb at Easter. And the crowds who came to see it wrote home about what they saw. One of those visitors, a woman from the Latin west named Egeria, kept a detailed travel diary in the early 380s recording precisely what was done and when. The manuscript disappeared for centuries and was rediscovered in an Italian library in 1884, and it remains the single most valuable eyewitness account of early Christian worship anywhere. What makes this community hard to pin down is the very thing that made it distinctive. It was always part settled and part passing through — resident clergy and monks, local Christians, and a constant flow of pilgrims from every corner of the Christian world.