Juvenal of Jerusalem

Bishop of the Holy City

Nothing certain survives of Juvenal's origins. He appears in the record already as bishop of Jerusalem, about the year 422, and he held the see until 458 — thirty-eight years, as the synaxarion says, and among the longest episcopates of the fifth century. His Jerusalem was not yet the Jerusalem of later imagination: for all the glory of the Holy Places, the bishop of the city was canonically a suffragan of the metropolitan of Caesarea Maritima, who was himself under the great see of Antioch, whose patriarch held the whole civil Diocese of the East. Nicaea's seventh canon had granted the bishop of Aelia (Jerusalem) an honorary precedence "following the custom and ancient tradition," while expressly safeguarding the rights of the metropolitan — a phrase whose ambiguity Juvenal spent his life exploiting.

The years of his episcopate were the golden age of Palestinian monasticism, and his name is bound up with its fathers. He was the friend and confidant of Euthymius the Great, whose Life (by Cyril of Scythopolis, our best source for the period) shows the two men in constant dealing; he consecrated the church of Euthymius' laura; and the monastic witnesses of the age — Euthymius, Gerasimus of the Jordan, Symeon the Stylite in his Syrian pillar — are the men whose judgment counted more, in the end, than any imperial rescript. The empress Eudocia, widow of Theodosius II, spent her last years in Jerusalem under Juvenal's episcopate and endowed it magnificently.

Ephesus, 431, and the ambition of Jerusalem

At the Third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus in 431 Juvenal took his place beside Cyril of Alexandria, and the council he helped to carry condemned Nestorius and proclaimed the Virgin Theotokos. He also used the occasion to advance a claim: that the see of Jerusalem, the mother of all the churches, held its rank not from the civil order of provinces but by apostolic right, and should therefore be free of Antioch and set over the Palestinian provinces and even over Arabia and the two Phoenicias. John of Antioch resisted; Pope Celestine wrote against the pretension; and nothing came of it then. But the claim had been made, and Juvenal did not abandon it.

The council of 449

The years after Ephesus brought the second act of the Christological quarrel. The archimandrite Eutyches, condemned at Constantinople in 448 for teaching that after the union there was but one nature in Christ, appealed to Alexandria, and in 449 a council met again at Ephesus under Dioscorus of Alexandria which restored Eutyches, deposed Flavian of Constantinople, and terrorised the bishops into signing — the assembly Pope Leo called the latrocinium, the "Robber Council." Juvenal sat second to Dioscorus and was the first after him to subscribe. It is the least defensible passage of his life, and the sources do not conceal it.

Chalcedon, 451: the patriarchate of Jerusalem

Two years later Theodosius II was dead, Marcian and Pulcheria reigned, and the Fourth Ecumenical Council met at Chalcedon. On the first day, when the acts of 449 were read out and the temper of the assembly became plain, Juvenal rose from the Alexandrian side of the hall and crossed over to sit with the bishops of the opposite party, and a body of Palestinian bishops crossed with him. He signed the condemnation of Dioscorus and subscribed the definition of faith: one Christ acknowledged in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.

The council then settled his jurisdiction. In its seventh session it ratified an agreement made between Juvenal and Maximus, patriarch of Antioch: the three Palestines (Palaestina Prima, Secunda and Tertia) passed to Jerusalem, while Phoenicia and Arabia, which Juvenal had also claimed, remained to Antioch. So the pentarchy of patriarchates received its fifth and smallest member, and the Church of Jerusalem became autocephalous. Seen from Antioch — and this collection looks from Antioch — the elevation of Jerusalem was a diminution: the great see of the East, already stripped of much of Cyprus and pressed by Alexandria, surrendered three provinces to a rival whose credentials were the Holy Places rather than the canons. The settlement has never been reversed, and the Antiochian tradition has generally accepted it as the price of concord and of Chalcedon; but it was a concession, not a gift, and the sources record the bargaining plainly.

Exile and restoration

Juvenal's change of side at Chalcedon cost him his city. The monks of Palestine were overwhelmingly of the Alexandrian mind, and when the news came that their patriarch had abandoned Dioscorus and confessed two natures, the monastic party rose. A monk named Theodosius, who had been at Chalcedon and carried back a lurid account of it, went ahead of Juvenal to Jerusalem, roused the monasteries and the people, and when the patriarch came back and refused to anathematise the council he was driven out. Theodosius was installed in his place, consecrated bishops through Palestine, and held the Holy City by force; blood was shed, and the bishop of Scythopolis was murdered. Juvenal fled to Constantinople, where the patriarch Anatolius and the emperor Marcian received him.

The usurpation lasted, the accounts say, some twenty months, and in 453 imperial troops restored Juvenal to his throne; Theodosius escaped to Sinai. Not all the sources agree on the reckoning of the interval — the synaxarion tradition gives twenty months of exile, while some modern chronologies compress the flight and the restoration into 453 itself — and the entry records the difference rather than choosing.

What ended the schism was not the soldiers but the monks. Euthymius the Great had refused from the first to communicate with Theodosius, and had withdrawn into the deep desert rather than be sought out; his refusal was decisive for the Palestinian ascetics. The empress Eudocia, who had at first gone with the anti-Chalcedonian party, sent to consult Symeon the Stylite, and afterwards Euthymius; both told her plainly to hold to Chalcedon and to communicate with Juvenal. She submitted, and with her a great part of Palestine returned. Juvenal governed his restored church for five years more and reposed in peace in 458, having been a bishop thirty-eight years.

Juvenal and the Robe of the Theotokos

A tradition of great antiquity binds Juvenal to the feast his memory shares. The so-called Euthymiac History, a passage cited in the third homily on the Dormition attributed to John of Damascus, relates that at Chalcedon the empress Pulcheria and the emperor Marcian asked Juvenal for the body of the Mother of God, to be laid in the church they had built at Blachernae; and that Juvenal answered that the tomb in Gethsemane had been found empty, the Apostles having opened it on the third day at Thomas' request, and that only the grave-clothes remained — which he sent to Constantinople. Byzantium therefore possessed a second account of how the Virgin's garments came to Blachernae, running beside the tale of Galbius and Candidus and attributing the transfer to Juvenal himself. Whether the Euthymiac History is a genuine fifth-century fragment or a later interpolation is disputed among scholars; but the pairing on July 2 of the patriarch of Jerusalem with the Deposition of the Robe is unlikely to be accidental, and the Slavonic troparion of Juvenal, hailing him as successor of James the Brother of God on the throne of Jerusalem, is sung on the day the City remembers what came from that throne.