Re: Jesus was born in Jerusalem?
2003.11.17 11:44
In the Preface to The Next Jerusalem: Sharing the Divided City, Michael Sorkin writes:
"I was also struck by the city's smallness. Well versed in the crisis of megacities and suburban sprawl, I found Jerusalem both relatively compact and strikingly uniform in its contiguities of texture and place. The city was relatively calm at the time, too, and felt accessible to me. So, as someone who loves cities both as physical and as cultural artifacts, I enjoyed my tourist's rights to the city and wandered freely between East and West. Emblematic of this freedom was a single day in which I paid visits to the Church of the Nativity, the Wailing Wall, and the Dome of the Rock--a typical tourist agenda, perhaps, but personalized by bet-hedging prayers for a family member suddenly taken gravely ill."
The Church of the Nativity (first built by St. Helena) over the traditional spot where Christ was born is in Bethlehem, not Jerusalem. It is the Church of the Holy Sepulcher (also to be attributed to St. Helena) over the traditional spots where Christ died and was buried that is in Jerusalem.
[I have to wonder] Did Sorkin really visit the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and say a prayer there?
Hopefully, the next edition of The Next Jerusalem will fix this mistake.
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