Some forty or fifty years after Damasus the Roman author of the
original form of the so-called Isidorian collection of canons, incorporating
in his preface the substance of the Damasine definition on the subject of
the three Petrine sees, adds to Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch mention
also of the honour paid, for the sake of James the brother of the Lord
and of John the apostle and evangelist, to the bishops of Jerusalem and
Ephesus. Mere veneration of the “pillars” of the apostolic Church is
not enough to account for this' modification of the original triad ; the
reasons must be sought in the circumstances of the day. If Ephesus is
said to “ have a more honourable place in synod than other metropolitans,”
it may be merely that Ephesus, the most distinguished church of those
over which Constantinople, from the time of St John Chrysostom,
asserted jurisdiction, was a convenient stalking-horse for the movement
of resistance to Constantinopolitan claims ; but it is also possible that
the phrase was penned after the oecumenical Council of Ephesus in
431, where Memnon of Ephesus was seated next after the bishops of
Alexandria and Jerusalem. If the bishop of Jerusalem is “accounted
honourable by all for the reverence due to so hallowed a spot,” and
nevertheless “the first throne,” sedes prima, “was never by the ancient
definition of the fathers reckoned to Jerusalem, lest it should be
thought that the throne of our Lord Jesus Christ was on earth and not
in heaven,” we cannot help suspecting that at the back of the writer’s
mind hovers an uneasy consciousness that the apostolic traditions of
Rome, which were so readily brought into play against Constantinople,
might find an inconvenient rival in Jerusalem. Not that at Jerusalem,
apart from a certain emphasis on the position of James the Lord’s
brother, there was ever any conscious competition with Rome : but it
was true that, about the time that this canonical collection was published,
the see of Jerusalem was just pushing a campaign of aggrandisement, carried on for over a century, to a triumphant conclusion.
The claims of Jerusalem were comparatively modest at the start, and it did not occur to Damasus for instance that they need be taken into serious consideration. Two initial difficulties hampered their early course. Although Jerusalem was the mother church of Christendom, and the home and centre of the first apostolic preaching, Aelia Capitolina, the Gentile city founded by Hadrian, had no real continuity with the Jewish city on the ruins of which it rose. The church of Jerusalem had been a church of Jewish Christians, the church of Aelia was a church of Gentile Christians, and for a couple of generations too obscure to have any history. A probably spurious list of bishops is all the record that survives of it before the third century. Then came the taste for pilgrimages—in a.d. 333 a pilgrim made the journey all the way from Bordeaux—and the growing cult of the Holy Places: Jerusalem was the scene of the most sacred of Christian memories, and locally at any rate Aelia was Jerusalem. From the time of Constantine onwards
