The Epistle of Hadrian

"Lest the men be harassed…"

Although much has been said to discredit Hadrian by the Christian Church, they cannot say that he was an unjust ruler. Indeed his reign was one of the most prosperous for Christianity. The four gospels of the bible, or at least three of them, seem to have been finalized during this golden age of peace. Hadrian never persecuted the Church, although he did not approve of it. He was deeply devoted to the Olympians, but had the pantheistic mind to view all gods as universal. It was only during the Jewish revolt, towards the end of his reign, that Hadrian acted against the Christians. His understanding appears to have been that the Christians were a branch of Judaism, and therefore subject to the same punishments. Convinced that only the Gods of Rome were civilized, He destroyed the Shrine of the Holy Sepulchre and built a Temple to Venus ontop of it. Antinous would surely have found his place near the altar of the great goddess of Love. This desecration, and the expulsion of the early Hebrew-Christian Church of Jerusalem was more a solidifying stroke than a persecution. The departure of the "Bishops of the Circumcision", as Eusebius calls the early Jewish Bishops of Jerusalem, made way for Greek Bishops, and the Westernisation of the Church. The desecration of the Holy Sepulcre seems to have had the effect of removing the Holiest site in Christiandom, the Tomb of Jesus, from the hands of believers, thereby preventing idol worship. But moreover, for non-believers, the presence of a Temple of Venus, over the place where tradition holds that Jesus rose from the dead, became a kind of proof that something might have occured. What was before just a rumor and matter of faith became more credible when covered up by the corinthian collums of the Temple of Venus.