As for the Samaritans themselves, there seemed nothing left to them but despair. Many, abandoning the god who had so transparently failed them, sullenly submitted to baptism; others, slumping into a numb isolationism, hunkered down in remote villages, where they ostentatiously covered any footprints left by visiting Jews or Christians with burning straw. Yet others, however, tried to keep the banner of rebellion flying—not by making a stand in Samaria, but by retreating beyond the border. As many as fifty thousand of them, fleeing the reprisals of Justinian’s death-squads, made a break for Mesopotamia, where they threw themselves on the mercy of the aged Kavad. The Shahanshah, rather than swallow the assurances of the Samaritans that they could deliver him Palestine, opted instead to put them all in chains and pack them off to toil in a gold mine. Nevertheless, back in Palestine itself, the Roman authorities remained twitchy in the extreme at any prospect of a Samaritan retrenchment just over the border. In the wake of the revolt, when twenty thousand Samaritan boys and girls were handed over to slavers, it was specifically decreed that they must be sold as far afield as possible— preferably in Persia or India. The prospect that any of them might grow up within striking distance of their homeland was altogether too alarming to be tolerated.
There was more to this anxiety than mere paranoia. Notwithstanding the milk and honey that flowed through the Holy Land, it bordered directly onto wilderness—and wilderness, as it had ever done, spelled danger. Right on the doorstep of Jerusalem, along the fifteen-mile road that led eastwards to Jericho, menace lurked behind every barren rock, so that what had long since come to be named the “Bloody Way”d was as notorious for banditry as anywhere in the empire. South of Jericho, where steepling cliffs plunged down towards the aptly named Dead Sea, there was an even more intimidating landscape, formed of nothing but dust, salt and mud. It was here, in the wake of the burning of the Temple in the first century AD, that an army of Jewish rebels had made a last, doomed stand. But already, long, long previously, the region had borne spectacular witness to the incineration of a sinful people and to the full, devastating horror of where the angering of God might lead. On the eastern shore of the Dead Sea, where the mud bubbled at its filthiest and most stinking, two mighty cities had once stood: Sodom and Gomorrah. Their inhabitants, so moralists recorded, had been wholly given over to vice: to rape, to sex with people of their own gender, and to breaking wind in public.e Provoked beyond endurance by such depravity, the Almighty had duly decreed the obliteration of the two cities. Fire and brimstone had rained down upon them. “The smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace.”51 Of Sodom and Gomorrah, nothing had remained, saving only the odd salt-caked ruin, to serve passers-by as an admonition and a terror.
The lesson was not entirely bleak, though. On the southern shore of the Dead Sea, there stood a church; and inside the church, there was a cave. It was said that Abraham’s nephew, Lot, graced by a tip-off from some angels, had sheltered here with his family: the only survivors of the annihilation of Sodom. The implication of this—that a righteous man, such as Lot, might be spared the ruin of a doomed people by fleeing into the wilderness—had not gone unremarked over the centuries. Samaritans were hardly the first refugees to have sought sanctuary beyond the borders of the Promised Land. Back in the days of their own persecution by Rome, Christians had done the self-same thing. Some of them, even after the conversion of Constantine, had refused to return from the desert to the temptations of everyday life: among the cliffs beyond Jerusalem, as on the mountains around Antioch or in the desert of Sinai, ascetics had looked to build for themselves a city of God. In the midst of a drear and bandit-haunted wilderness, the monasteries that dotted the eastern flank of Palestine aimed to blaze like bulwarks of paradise. Manned by warriors of God from across the empire, linked by paths that criss-crossed the wilds like the cords of a far-flung net, and buttressed by imposing stonework that gave them the look of fortresses, these lavras, as they were called, served the Church, in its great battle against the demonic, as an awesome first line of defence. Out in the desert, where Christ Himself had been tempted by the Devil, only the spiritual elite could hope to prosper. The weak fell away; the strong grew even stronger. This was why, in the Holy Land, it was the monks who constituted the shock troops of orthodoxy. Forged in the blast furnace of the desert, they brought to the practice of their faith a show of fortitude, of discipline, of steel. They, more than anyone, could be relied upon to embrace martyrdom at the hands of Samaritans; to stage public protests against any hint of concession to Monophysites; to press the imperial authorities to hold their nerve in the battle against every last enemy of God. Vital tasks anywhere—but in the Holy Land especially so.
“Arm yourselves against heresies, against Jews, against Samaritans, against pagans.” So had urged Cyril, a golden-tongued Bishop of Jerusalem back in the first century of the city’s existence as a Christian capital, warning converts there of the peculiar charge that God had laid upon their shoulders. “Many are your enemies: be sure you have ammunition.”52 Two centuries later, the marks of just how successful Cyril’s call to arms had been were everywhere to be seen, stamped on the face of the Holy Land: on the hill above Tiberias, on the summit of Mount Gerizim, in the mouldering shells of abandoned temples. There were, however, few visible traces of perhaps the most telling victory of all. Cyril, in the advice offered to his converts, had lingered on one particularly mortal threat: “If a book is not read in a church, then do not read it yourself, even alone.” Specifically, he had cautioned against those seeming-scriptures that “bore the title of ‘gospel,’ but were false, and full of deceit.”53 Such a warning, of course, would have been valid anywhere; but in the Holy Land, especially so. Not every Christian who flocked there was necessarily orthodox, after all. A yearning to walk in the footsteps of Christ did not necessarily imply obedience to the Council of Nicaea. There were grounds for alarm as well as self-satisfaction in the cosmopolitan character of the Holy Land. Nowhere else in the world, as Cyril had well appreciated, were banned gospels, banned doctrines, banned identities, likelier to be available.
Moreover, immigrants were not the only heretics to be found in Palestine. Camped out on the frontier between Christianity and Judaism, on what had become, since the Council of Nicaea, an ever more brutally patrolled no-man’s land, there lingered still a few obdurate squatters. Jews who “honoured Christ as a just man”54 and Christians who yearned to see the Temple restored: how were these to be categorised? As pestiferous impostors, came the ringing answer of the Church: “for, though they pretend to be both Jews and Christians, yet they are neither.”55 Add to this unsettling mix the Samaritans, who were darkly suspected of having fostered the swarming plague of Gnostics, and it was no wonder that bishops such as Cyril regarded the melting-pot of faiths to be found in Palestine as so potentially toxic. To scholars of his generation, the threat from heresy in the Holy Land seemed as terrifying as ever. After all, if a Jew could be a Christian—and a Christian a Jew—then who was to say what further monstrous fusions of beliefs might be possible?