Читать книгу The Tribes Triumphant: Return Journey to the Middle East - Charles Glass, Charles Glass - Страница 32

Next door in St Mark’s Church I met the remarkable Sister Yostina al-Banna. An orthodox nun from Nineveh, which she called ‘the great city of Jonah’, she had three brothers who were priests. One of the three, George Yusuf al-Banna, taught geology at a university in Portland, Oregon. The second lived in Jordan, and the third was still in Nineveh. Sister Yostina had left Iraq, homeland of most Syrian Orthodox, little more than a year before.

‘This is the first church in Christianity,’ she said, making it one of the many first churches I have seen. The early Christians had no churches. They gathered in synagogues and, when uncircumcised Gentiles were admitted to their communities, in one another’s houses. They gave themselves the name Christian at Antioch, where I visited a cave in 1987 that also claimed the distinction of first church. The Turks had turned it into a museum. St Mark’s was still a church.

Sister Yostina said St Mark’s, built in AD 37, had been destroyed three times. ‘The first time was in 71, when the King Titus come to this city and destroy Jerusalem. Everything high, he cut it. The twelfth century was the last time.’ The nun, like the church itself, was old and small. But, also like the church, warm and welcoming. She showed me an Aramaic inscription that she said had been discovered in 1940. Aramaic, or Syriac, was the language of Palestine, spoken by Jews as well as Gentiles, at the time of Christ. The Syrian Orthodox still used it for their liturgy, as Lebanon’s Catholic Maronites did until Vatican II instructed them to use the vernacular. She said of the inscription, ‘It’s old, fifteen hundred years old. It is written in Aramaic, the language of Jesus, from right to left.’ Then she translated it: ‘This is the house of St Mark’s mother, who was chosen of Christ from the Apostles.’

St Mark’s mother, Mary, lived in the house below the church. That was the legend. If true, it was where St Peter took refuge when the angel helped him out of prison. The church was a museum of Christian legends. ‘In the upper room of the house down [down meant the levels below the church itself], Jesus made the Last Supper,’ she told me, adding another astonishing detail, ‘and, also, the washing of the feet.’ The Virgin Mary, she believed, was baptized here; although the New Testament did not mention her baptism. There were more stories, not all of which I understood.

Sister Yostina said, ‘Jesus sent St Peter and St John. He told them, “You shall enter the city Jerusalem, and you shall see a man carrying a jar.” In those days, only women carry jar. This was the miracle from God. St Mark went and stand and carry a jar. And they follow Him until He reach the house of his mother. So, they prepare for Him the upper room of the house down.’ That was not all. ‘After the cross, the Apostles with the Virgin Mary were afraid. They don’t know where they can go. They are strange in this city, so they turn back to the house of St Mark’s mother. They remain three days, until Jesus appear to them, after He be in this life, after three days.’