You know, this really pisses me off. No, not Vice President J D Vance visiting the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, a place where I have been and found amazing and inspiring, but the utterly asinine comments of (supposedly) good Americans, some of whom even profess to be Christians.
I have seen several different tweets about this, and they are absolutely filled with haters in the comments. Some are from Protestants, bemoaning the fact that the Vice President is Catholic, even though the Church is managed jointly by Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Armenian Christian authorities. I saw one which slammed him for having married a Hindu, and many which berated him for also visiting the Western Wall, the holiest site for Jews.
But the Western Wall is also a site for Christians. It is the exposed remnants of the second Temple in Jerusalem, where Jesus himself walked and taught and prayed. How can it be wrong for any Christian to appreciate a place where Jesus was?
There is much of the Old City which is lost to time, deeply buried under two millennia of accumulated debris. The Via Dolorosa, the Way of the Cross through the Old City, is paved with stones on which Jesus never trod, and the buildings you can see are primarily Byzantine, not from the first century. But the Western Wall, though the ground is paved, has been excavated to the level of the first century.
Christianity is built on the foundation of Judaism. Our Old Testament books, by far the larger part of the Bible, are the ancient Jewish scriptures. We don’t ignore them, and at least in a Catholic Mass — I cannot write knowledgeably about how our Separated Brethren conduct their services — we have one reading from the Old Testament along with a responsorial song from Psalms, much of which are the writings of King David, roughly a thousand years before Jesus.
That Jesus was Jewish is attested to in the Bible, which tells us that the Holy Family made the annual pilgrimage to the Temple for Passover. We know that must have been a common thing for Jews in the first century, because the Holy Family had to have travelled by some sort of caravan, or they couldn’t have headed back toward Nazareth without knowing their 12-year-old son wasn’t with them. We know that Jesus told the crowd, in the Sermon on the Mount, that not a single letter of the old Jewish law would be wiped away.
Jesus himself frequently referenced the Jewish scriptures, and was a Jew from a Jewish family; Christians cannot (rationally) hate Judaism without hating themselves. No real Christian can visit the Old City and not be moved.
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