Caesarea

Herod the Great built Caesarea from nothing on an open coast with no natural anchorage, sinking enormous blocks of hydraulic concrete that set under water to make two curving moles, and crowned the harbour with a temple to Rome and to Augustus visible from far out at sea. The city was Greek in culture and Roman in loyalty, and it became the seat of the governors of Judaea, so the prefects and procurators lived here and went up to Jerusalem when trouble was expected.

In 1961 an excavation of the theatre found a limestone block reused as a step, carrying a dedication of a building to the emperor Tiberius by Pontius Pilate, prefect of Judaea. It is the only inscription naming him from his own lifetime, and it confirms the title Tacitus and the gospels use.

The city's religious history was also violent. Josephus reports a long dispute between its Greek and Jewish populations over civic rights, and says the massacre of the city's Jews in 66 CE was among the sparks of the revolt. During the war and afterwards Caesarea served as the base of the Roman command, and Jewish tradition places the execution of Rabbi Akiva there among the ten martyrs remembered in the liturgy of the Day of Atonement.

Acts sets in Caesarea the episode it treats as the turning point of the whole book. Peter, staying in the port, sees a sheet let down with animals he has been taught not to eat and is told three times to kill and eat; messengers then arrive from a Roman centurion named Cornelius, and while Peter is speaking in his house the Spirit falls on the gentiles present, so that baptism follows rather than precedes. Peter's conclusion, that God shows no partiality, is the argument the church used to admit gentiles without requiring circumcision. Paul was later held in the city for two years before appealing to Caesar.

Around 232 Origen moved here from Alexandria after falling out with his bishop, and taught, preached and wrote for the rest of his life. He assembled a library, whose greatest item was his own Hexapla, the Hebrew text of the Old Testament set out with a transliteration and four Greek versions in parallel columns, a work of textual comparison unmatched for a thousand years. Pamphilus enlarged the collection and copied manuscripts before dying in the persecution of 309.

Eusebius, Pamphilus's pupil and later bishop here, used that library to write the first history of the Christian church, quoting documents at length precisely because he had them to hand. A great deal of what is known about the first three centuries of Christianity survives only as quotation in a book written from the shelves of this city.