Page:Orthodox Eastern Church (Fortescue).djvu/59

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THE GREAT PATRIARCHATES
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of these exarchates, Ephesus and Cæsarea, had a chance of developing into patriarchates; they were swallowed up by Constantinople, and sank back to the position of ordinary metropolitan Churches.

We now come to the other two sees that eventually made up, with the three older and greater ones, the classical number of five patriarchates. These sees are Jerusalem and Constantinople.

4. Jerusalem.

The position of the Bishop of Jerusalem was quite an extraordinary one. During the time of the Apostles his Church had been the centre of the Jewish Christian community. It was, of course, an Apostolic See, counting its bishops from St. James the Less, the "Brother of the Lord" (Gal. i. 19). But the Emperor Adrian (117–138) had expelled all Jews from the city in 135; the very name Jerusalem was to disappear—in its place stood the heathen colony Aelia Capitolina. The Christian Jews had to leave just as much as the others; already most of them had fled at the first destruction of the city (70) to the little Greek town Pella in Peræa. So in some sort the original Church of Jerusalem had come to an end. After Adrian's time we find only a small and poor community of Gentile Christians in Aelia Capitolina, still, however, governed by an unbroken line of bishops. Now Aelia was in the civil division of the Empire a town of no importance at all; it was not one of Diocletian's chief towns. The Governor of the Province of Palestine lived at Cæsarea (in Palestine), as he had when St. Paul was sent there to be tried by Felix the Governor (Acts xxiii. 23, seq.). So for a time the Bishop of Aelia was only a local bishop under the Metropolitan of Cæsarea in Palestine. And yet inevitably he was looked upon as something more than just the equal of any other bishop. Call the city Aelia Capitolina or what you will, to Christians it was always Jerusalem, Sion, the Holy City to them as much as to the Jews. This bishop ruled over the places where our Saviour had suffered and died, where the Holy Ghost had descended on the Apostles, where, as they thought, the Lord