the identification was complete. The second difficulty was of a less
archaic kind, and took longer to circumvent. Aelia-Jerusalem did not
even dominate its own district, but was quite outshone by its near
neighbour at Caesarea. Politically Caesarea was capital of the province :
ecclesiastically it was the home of the teaching and the library of
Origen, and the Origenian tradition was kept alive by Pamphilus the
confessor and by Eusebius, bishop of the church at the time of the Nicene
council. It was hardly likely that the council would do anything
derogatory to the friend of Constantine, the most learned ecclesiastic
of the age : and in fact all the satisfaction that the bishop of Jerusalem
obtained at Nicaea was the apparent right to rank as the first of the
suffragans of the province—like Autun in the province of Lyons,
or London in the province of Canterbury. Local patriotism felt the sop
thus thrown to it to be quite unsatisfying, and for a hundred years the
sordid strife “for the first place,” rtf* a-pwretW as Theodoret calls it,
went on between the bishop of Jerusalem and the bishop of Caesarea.
In the confusion of the doctrinal struggle it was easy enough for an
orthodox bishop to refuse allegiance to an Arianising metropolitan:
and Caesarea being in close relations with Antioch, it was natural for
the bishops of Jerusalem to turn to their neighbours at Alexandria, nor,
we may suppose, was Alexandria disinclined to favour encroachment
upon the territory of its Antiochene rival. Western churchmen, with
their profound belief in the finality of every decision of Nicaea, looked
coldly on the movement, and it is one of the counts in Jerome’s
catalogue of grievances against John of Jerusalem. But at the first
Council of Ephesus, with Cyril of Alexandria in the chair and John of
Antioch absent, Juvenal of Jerusalem secured the second place, though
he still failed to abrogate the metropolitical rights of Caesarea. At the
Latrocinium of Ephesus in 449, again under Alexandrine presidency, he
managed to sit even above Domnus of Antioch. The business of the
Council of Chalcedon was to reverse the proceedings of the Latrocinium,
and it might have been anticipated that with the eclipse of Alexandrine
influence the fortunes of Jerusalem would also suffer. But a timely
tergiversation on the doctrinal issue saved something for Juvenal and
his see : the council decreed a partition of patriarchal rights over the
“East” between the churches of Antioch and Jerusalem.
Very similar were the proceedings which established the “auto- cephalous” character of the island church of Cyprus. The Cypriots too began by renouncing the communion of the Arian bishops of Antioch: they too espoused the cause of Cyril against John at the Council of Ephesus, and were rewarded accordingly : and just as the Empress Helena’s discovery of the Cross served the claims of the church of Jerusalem, so the discovery of the coffin containing the body of Barnabas the Cypriot, with the autograph of St Matthew’s Gospel, was held to demonstrate finally the right of the Cypriots to ecclesiastical isolation.
