The People are the City: Scriptural and Art Historical Reflections

In my City of Gods book (Brill 2025), I followed up on an intuition that I had that the New Jerusalem in the Scripture is in fact not a reference to a certain place but rather to a certain people.

Namely, that "New Jerusalem" is something like a metonym, that is, "a word or expression that refers to something using the name of one of its qualities or features." Here, the something being referred to is the people of God in toto, and the word or expression that is used to refer to it is "New Jerusalem.

Scholars like Robert Gundry have noticed this (and successfully argued it, I think) in the past,* but I wanted to root it more historically in my book, and not just carry around the hunch. That's because hunches, while an absolutely vital starting place for much good research, are not findings in themselves.

You can't really footnote a hunch, though some people have tried to pull it off. See, for instance, Nicolas Berdyaev, The Divine and the Human (English trans.), 1949, p. 6, note 1.

A gutsy footnote from Berdyaev

Origen Confirms a Hunch

Anyway, when reading as much of Origen for my chapter on him as I could get my hands on (which is a lot indeed), I found this juicy quote in his Commentary on Matthew, Book 6, section 13. There, Origen writes this: οἱ ἄνθρωποι ἡ πόλις εἰσί--"the people are the city." He goes on to say that by Jerusalem, he means those who have hoped in the earthly Jerusalem. 

The people themselves are the city, the name of which is employed to refer to them collectively. This, Origen says, is what Matthew 20:17 means when it tells us that Jesus was about to go up to Jerusalem. It means that He was about to go to the Jews, whose hopes were in this specific earthly city (Comm. Matt. 16.1, 3), and who would contribute strongly to Christ's death in handing Him over to the Gentiles (ibid. 16.3).

Suffice it to say that "Jerusalem" is a shorthand way of referring to its inhabitants.

By the way, this kind of metonymy is often seen in modern news reporting, where we sometimes read that "the White House" declared such and such a policy. We also see it in the famous morale-boosting order that Horatio Nelson issued to his fleet in the decisive Battle of Trafalgar (1805), when he sent up the signal, "England expects that every man does his duty."


Lord Nelson's order to his fleet: "England expects!"

Clearly, "England" here refers to the people of England, and chief amongst them King George III, and certainly including Nelson himself! What is England? England is its people. The people are the country.

We see the same in the examples above. That Origen takes "Jerusalem" to be a shorthand way that Matthew used to speak of people--in this case, the Jews whose capital it was--is clear not only from this quote.

It is clear also in a newly discovered Second Homily on Psalm 66 (LXX), where he makes it quite clear that the saints, by their holy manner of life and the exercise of virtues, may also be considered Jerusalem

[L]ook at your Jerusalem, seek your own return there .... And see how your lamentation may be helpful to you, teaching you to seek the same fatherland and to comprehend the secrets concerning it and to lament until you return to the city constructed with precious stones, not inanimate ones, for you are to be “living stones constructed, a spiritual house, into a holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” [1Pet 2:5]. If, then, you will lament your exile from Jerusalem and understand that being present in the body you are absent from the Lord [cf. 2Cor 5:8], having been made one by God you will be a crystal stone, a stone of the enclosure, a selected stone, a sapphire stone, and whatever other precious stones are mentioned, of the ones that constitute the Jerusalem in heaven.

Here, the stones that constitute the city are in fact the listeners to his homily--"living stones" to use the language of 1 Pet--who are not merely living but also precious and are further constructed into a spiritual house. Together, these many living stones--you and I--constitute Jerusalem in heaven.

Once again, the people are the city.

People as City in Scripture

I hadn't ever really thought of how this might show up in the New Testament, but it does.

While I was reading through the New Testament in Greek this morning, I began the Gospel according to Mark. There, I was struck a very similar thought in two verses in relatively quick succession:

(SBLG) καὶ ἐξεπορεύετο πρὸς αὐτὸν πᾶσα ἡ Ἰουδαία χώρα καὶ οἱ Ἱεροσολυμῖται πάντες, καὶ ἐβαπτίζοντο ⸃ ὑπ᾽ αὐτοῦ ἐν τῷ Ἰορδάνῃ ποταμῷ ⸃ ἐξομολογούμενοι τὰς ἁμαρτίας αὐτῶν. 
(ESV) And all the country of Judea and all Jerusalem were going out to him and were being baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. (Mark 1:5)
(SBLG) καὶ ἦν ὅλη ἡ πόλις ἐπισυνηγμένη ⸃ πρὸς τὴν θύραν. 
(ESV) And the whole city was gathered together at the door. (Mark 1:33)

In these verses cases, "all Judea," and "the whole city" are used to refer to the people of Judea and the people of the city, respectively. Once again, the people are the city and are referred to as such.

Artistic Representation: S. Pudentiana (ca. 400)

So perhaps it's not necessary that the same thing is seen in late antique art as well. This last summer I was enabled by my DFG grant to take a research trip to visit the early Christian churches of Rome and Ravenna, specifically to inspect their apse mosaics in situ. I have yet to write about this here, but hope to do so soon.

The first church I went to in Rome--a church I'd long wanted to see in person--was S. Pudentiana. Among the many things to say about this church and its art is, in this context, is a tripled vision of Jerusalem. 

Apse mosaic, S. Pudentiana, Rome (ca. 400), displaying three Jerusalems

In the background of this apse, we see buildings representing what we may reliably conclude, following Bianca Kühnel and others, are the Anastasis (Gk. 'resurrection') known in the West as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre) and Martyrium built by Constantine at the beginning of the fourth century on and next to the historical Golgotha where Christ was crucified and nearby which He was buried and resurrected. 

These structures, forming a larger ecclesial compound, Eusebius writes, were a "new Jerusalem" built on Golgotha that stood opposite the Old Jerusalem--a Christian Jerusalem vs a historically Jewish one (Eusebius, Vit. Const. 3.33). (We will leave aside for now the fact that the Jews had long been expelled by Hadrian from Jerusalem, beginning in the 130s, when the city itself was razed and renamed Aelia Capitolina).

These buildings, you will observe, are surrounded by the four living creatures of Revelation, which cause us to think of the heavenly Jerusalem, at the center of which is the throne of God (also pictured) around which, we know from Rev. 4:6-8 and 22:1, that the four living creatures assemble. As if to underscore this, the city walls are shown, which likely would have numbered 12 before the apse was altered in an unfortunate baroque redesign of the church's sanctuary end. And so we have not only the Christianized old Jerusalem (the "new Jerusalem" that Eusebius wrote about; see above), but also the heavenly Jerusalem, in the center of which the enthroned Christ sits with the living creatures worshipping around Him.

Situated under the city, and flanking Christ, we then see the twelve apostles. The twelve apostles, remember, are centrally featured in Revelation's vision of the New Jerusalem, with each of them associated with one of the city's twelve foundations: 

(SBLG) καὶ τὸ τεῖχος τῆς πόλεως ἔχων θεμελίους δώδεκα, καὶ ἐπ᾽ αὐτῶν δώδεκα ὀνόματα τῶν δώδεκα ἀποστόλων τοῦ ἀρνίου. θεμέλιοι τοῦ τείχους τῆς πόλεως παντὶ λίθῳ τιμίῳ κεκοσμημένοι· ὁ θεμέλιος ὁ πρῶτος ἴασπις, ὁ δεύτερος σάπφιρος, ὁ τρίτος χαλκηδών, ὁ τέταρτος σμάραγδος, ὁ πέμπτος σαρδόνυξ, ὁ ἕκτος σάρδιον, ὁ ἕβδομος χρυσόλιθος, ὁ ὄγδοος βήρυλλος, ὁ ἔνατος τοπάζιον, ὁ δέκατος χρυσόπρασος, ὁ ἑνδέκατος ὑάκινθος, ὁ δωδέκατος ἀμέθυστος·

 (ESV) And the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. The foundations of the wall of the city were adorned with every kind of jewel. The first was jasper, the second sapphire, the third agate, the fourth emerald, the fifth onyx, the sixth carnelian, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth chrysoprase, the eleventh jacinth, the twelfth amethyst. (Rev 21:14, 19-20)

This brings us back to the theme of this post. By juxtaposing Constantine's refurbished Jerusalem and the heavenly Jerusalem, the artist(s) and likely their episcopal commissioner, who would have been either Siricius (384–399) or Innocent I (401–417), forces the reader to associate the apostles not only with the physical city of Jerusalem, where they dined with Jesus before His passion and crucifixion, gathered around His cross, and came together in one accord to pray and receive power from on high at Pentecost, but also with the heavenly Jerusalem, in which they also have a pronounced presence. 

This, I suggest, is yet another instantiation of the by now established late antique rhetorical practice of metonomy, and specifically of naming the people of a place as the place itself, as is seen in Origen's comments on Jerusalem and Mark's description of the inhabitants of Judea and Jerusalem.

The New Jerusalem is no mere collection of buildings and civic infrastructure. The New Jerusalem people are the city. 

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* Robert H. Gundry, “The New Jerusalem: People as Place, Not Place for People,” Novum Testamentum 29, no. 3 (1987): 254–64, https://doi.org/10.2307/1560758.