Why do Ethiopian monks live on the roof of Jesus’ tomb?

There is a chair.  It’s not a special chair, it’s made of wood, simple, with a straight backrest and a worn seat.  The type of chair you might find in the kitchen of any old house.  It’s faded from the sun, its legs are chafed.  Someone once repaired it badly, with a crooked nail sticking out a little from the side, and it’s placed on a roof in Jerusalem under a sun that in summer exceeds 40º.

And there’s a man sitting on it.  Now listen carefully, because this is the only thing you need to understand out of everything I’m going to tell you during the next hour. That man is not resting.  That man is not praying, nor meditating, nor contemplating the landscape.  That man is working.

  His job is to sit there.  That’s the job, to do nothing else.  occupy that space with his body in that chair, at that exact point on the roof.  And when he gets up, another man immediately takes his place, and when that one gets up, a third one comes.  And so, without interruption, without a single gap, without a single minute in which the chair remains empty, day and night for decades.

And now I want you to ask yourself the obvious question, the one that anyone who sees that for the first time asks.  and that it is almost always answered incorrectly.  What is he watching?  And the answer is that he’s not watching anything, he’s occupying it.  Because on that roof, possession is not proven with papers, it is proven with the body, it is proven by being there.

  And the day that chair is left empty for just one night, the day no one occupies it for a few hours, someone is going to say that that space no longer belongs to who they thought it did, and they’re not going to say it jokingly.  He’s going to say it very seriously, and he’s going to build an argument on it, and that argument is going to last for centuries.

  Now I’m going to tell you where that roof is.  That roof is above the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre, the building where, according to Christian tradition, the tomb of Jesus is located, the holiest place in Christianity.  And above that place, on the rooftop, among mud and adobe huts, live some monks.  They are Ethiopians. They’ve been there for centuries.

  Nobody has kicked them out, and the reason they are up on the roof and not down inside the church with everyone else is one of the most uncomfortable stories that Christianity has produced,  and hardly anyone tells it.  We’re going inside the building because we need to understand what it is before we can understand what’s happening above it.

  The Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre is not a church, it is a jumble.   This is what happens when for 17 years different civilizations build, destroy, rebuild, add, wall up and renovate on the same piece of land without ever agreeing. Inside there are Roman chapels, Byzantine structures, cross arches, Ottoman additions, 20th-century repairs, all stuck together, all forcibly fitted, all sharing walls with things that have nothing to do with it.

  It is dark, it smells of incense and sidewalk and damp stone. There are stairs that lead to places you don’t expect.  There are corridors that suddenly narrow .  There’s a lamp hanging there that’s been there longer than many countries. And there are six churches inside.  Six.  The Greek Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church, represented by the Franciscans, the Armenian Apostolic Church , the Coptic Church, the Syriac Orthodox Church, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church .

  Six Christian denominations forced to share the building that they all consider the most important of their faith, and they do not get along.  It’s not that they have their theological differences and carry them out gracefully.  They’ve been literally fighting inside that church for centuries.  There are videos, there are images of monks of different faiths punching each other among the chandeliers while Israeli police enter to separate them.

  And to manage that chaos there is a document, it is called the statuo.  And this is the strangest thing I’m going to tell you about that building, and it’s completely true.  The statute is an agreement that was established in the 19th century under the Ottoman Empire and that establishes something very simple and very brutal.

  Everything remains exactly as it is .  Each confession retains what it possesses at the time of signing.  Not one centimeter more, not one centimeter less. The liturgical schedules, the spaces, the keys, the lamps, the nails on the walls, everything is frozen in the state it was in that day.  And nothing, absolutely nothing, can be changed without the unanimous consent of the six confessions.  Unanimous, all six.

Now think about what that means in practice.  It means that if there is a leak in the roof and to fix it you have to touch an area that two confessions are disputing over.  The leak can’t be fixed.  It means that if a beam is rotten and repairing it involves workers stepping on a space belonging to another church, [clears throat] the beam continues to rot, and it means that on the facade of the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre, supported by a cornice, under a window, there is a wooden staircase, and that staircase has been there for more than

250 years.  Nobody moves it. It appears in 17th-century engravings, it’s in 19th-century photographs, it’s in today’s photos.  You can go to Jerusalem right now , look up at the facade and there’s a ladder leaning against it for no purpose, because nobody knows for sure who it belongs to.  And since nobody knows who it belongs to, nobody can touch it.

  And since nobody can touch it, it has been there for two and a half centuries.  That staircase is the best summary there is of what goes on inside that building.  And if that’s the logic that governs a staircase, imagine the logic that governs an entire roof.  I want to go back to the ladder because I have fallen short and it is the most absurd and most revealing object in all of Jerusalem.

  It is on the main facade above the door supported by a cornice under one of the windows on the upper floor. It’s an ordinary wooden ladder with rungs, the kind of ladder a bricklayer would use.  And it has been there, in that same position since at least the middle of the 17th century; it appears in an engraving from 1728.

It is leaning there, just like today, 250 years ago, and it has not moved.  And the question everyone asks is the same: what is it for ?  And the answer is that we don’t know for sure.  There are hypotheses. Someone may have left it there to access the ledge.  It’s possible that monks of some faith used it to take food or water out the window.

In times when leaving through the main door meant paying taxes to the Ottoman authorities.  It is likely that it originally had a perfectly banal use.  And then he stayed.  And when the statute was signed, the ladder was there.  And the statute says that everything stays as it is.  And from that moment on, that staircase ceased to be a staircase.

   It became a position.  Because if an Armenian moves it, the Greeks will say that he has touched something that does not belong to him and that this implies a claim over that space.  And if a Greek takes it back, the Armenians will say exactly the same thing. And since no one knows for sure whose ledge it’s leaning on, no one touches it.

  It has survived wars, the end of the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate, the creation of the State of Israel, the 1967 war, intifadas, attacks, and changes in sovereignty over the city.  And it’s still there.   It has moved two or three times in its entire history.  Once someone removed it as a prank, they returned it.  It is listed.

  It is called the immobile staircase.  And now listen to me, because this is what I want you to take away.  A Pope once said that the ladder would not be removed until the Christian churches were united.  In other words, the staircase is a thermometer.  As long as it’s there, Christianity remains broken, and it’s been there for 250 years.

  And now he looks up from that staircase to the roof.  And you will see the mud huts and you will see the chair and you will understand that the ladder and the chair are the same object. They are two pieces of wood that no one can move because moving them would be tantamount to admitting something.

  And in that building, admitting something is losing. I want you to understand the extent of this, because maybe you still think I’m exaggerating.  In 2008, inside the basilica, a fight broke out between Armenian monks and Greek monks during a celebration.  The Israeli police had to be called in to separate them.  The officers entered Christianity’s holiest site to separate clergymen who were punching each other.  There are pictures, you can see them.

An Armenian with a white beard grabbing a Greek by the habit as the two roll on the floor among candelabras.  And the reason for the fight was a procession, a parade.  Someone went where they shouldn’t have, or stayed longer than agreed, or entered a space at a time that didn’t correspond to them. And that’s a crime in that building.

  That’s a crime.  And it’s not the only time.  There have been fights over lamps, over the cleaning of certain steps, because whoever cleans a step is claiming ownership of that step.  There are areas of that church that are dirty, with centuries of accumulated grime, because no one can clean them without triggering a conflict.

  There are nails in the walls that have been rusting for centuries and cannot be removed.  There is a window that cannot be opened.  There are boarded-up doors and there is a fire in the history of that building in which the confessions took a long time to coordinate to put it out because they could not agree on who had the right to enter, in what area with the water.  And all of this is regulated.

  All of this is written.  There are documents that specify how many minutes each liturgy lasts, in what order they enter, which lamps each person can light, and at what time.  It is a choreography of mistrust, rehearsed for centuries, performed every day with clockwork precision.  And it works.  That’s the craziest detail of all.  Works.

That building has been operating like that for centuries.  Without anyone killing each other, without anyone being completely expelled, without anyone winning the game definitively. A perpetual technical tie managed with petty and millimeter-precise rules in the building constructed on the tomb of the man who said to love one another.

  And now go up to the roof and look at the Ethiopians.  Because Ethiopians are not in that choreography. They already lost.  They’re already out.  They no longer argue over minutes of liturgy or lamps.  They are arguing over 2 meters of rooftop space and a chair.  They are so low in the rankings, or so high depending on how you look at it, that they don’t even participate in the main dispute.

  Their dispute is with the Copts, the two poorest fighting over the roof, while the rich fight over the marble below.  And now I’m going to tell you the detail that almost nobody knows and that says more about Christianity than any theological treatise.  The door of the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre opens every morning and closes every night.

  And the key, the key is not held by the Greeks, nor by the Catholics. Armenians, Copts, Syriacs, and Ethiopians do not have it.  The key is held by a Muslim family, and it is not a curious anecdote or a symbolic gesture.  It is the actual system for opening and closing the most sacred place in Christianity and has been working this way for more than eight centuries.

  Two Muslim families from Jerusalem share the task.  One keeps the key, the other opens and closes the door.  The positions are hereditary, they pass from father to son, they have been doing it for generations.  Every morning a member of one of those families arrives at the door, receives the key, climbs a ladder that is passed to him from inside because the lock is high and opens it, and at night he returns and closes it and takes the key back to his house.

Now stop and think about why.  Why did Christianity give the keys to Christ’s tomb to some Muslims?  It was not an imposition.  That’s the surprising part.  It wasn’t that a sultan ordered it to humiliate anyone.  It was a solution.  It was the only possible solution. Because the six Christian denominations that shared that building did not trust each other.

  And it wasn’t paranoia.  If you gave the key to the Greeks, the Armenians would protest.  If you gave it to the Catholics, the Copts would protest.  Any confession that held the key would have the power to decide who enters and who does not, and at what time and under what conditions.  And that power was too much.

  So it was agreed to give it to someone who wasn’t part of the fight.  A neutral third party.  And the third neutral party in Jerusalem during those centuries was a Muslim.  And there it is, there’s the fact that summarizes 17 years of Christian history, better than any book. The Christians did not trust each other enough to keep the key to their founder’s tomb among themselves and had to ask someone of another religion to keep it for them.

  And they’ve been doing it for eight centuries and it works.  It is the saddest and most practical thing that church has produced.  And both at the same time.  And I want you to remember this because it’s the context you need to understand what’s happening on the roof.  In this building, distrust is not an occasional flaw, it is the architecture.

  Everything is built on it: the keys, the schedules, the ladder that no one moves, and a chair that a man occupies day and night so that no one can say that the space is free. I want you to know how long they’ve been there, because the data changes completely. How do you judge all of this?  Christianity arrived in Ethiopia in the 2nd century.

  In the 24th century.  Let’s put that in context because people don’t do it and they should. Ethiopia adopted Christianity as the official religion of the kingdom around the same time as the Roman Empire did, not centuries later, not as a result of a 19th-century European colonial mission, which is what many people mistakenly assume .

  At the same time, when pagan gods were still worshipped in Britannia , when much of central and northern Europe had not heard of Christ, when it would be six centuries before Scandinavia became Christianized and eight before Lithuania did. In the Horn of Africa there was already a state church, and that church looked towards Jerusalem from the beginning.

  There is evidence of Ethiopian pilgrims in the Holy Land from a very early period. There are references to stable communities. There were periods when the Ethiopian presence in Jerusalem was numerous and respected, with important properties and the diplomatic backing of a kingdom that was once a first-rate regional power.

  Ethiopians are not newcomers to Jerusalem; they are among the oldest inhabitants.  And now I want you to do the math with me.  The Franciscans who represent the Catholic Church at the Holy Sepulchre arrived in the Holy Land in the 11th century. The Ethiopians had already been there for almost 1000 years.  1000 years. And today the Franciscans are inside with their chapel, with their schedules, with their rights recognized in the statute.

  And the Ethiopians are on the roof, in mud huts, with a chair in dispute.  And that seems to me to say something, and not about Ethiopians. It says something about how sacred space is divided up in this world and what criteria are actually applied when it comes to deciding who gets in and who does n’t.

  And the criteria when you scratch the surface is almost never seniority, almost never loyalty, almost never merit.  The criterion at the Holy Sepulchre was who could pay the Ottoman tax at the time it was due.  And from then on, everything else was fixed forever by an agreement that says things stay as they are. And things stayed as they were, with some inside and others on the roof.

  And now the central question: how does an entire church end up living on a rooftop?  Because Ethiopians are not newcomers .  They didn’t show up last year asking for a spot.  Ethiopians have been in Jerusalem longer than almost everyone else.  The Ethiopian Christian presence in Jerusalem has been documented since late antiquity.

  Pilgrims, monks, stable communities, and at times with the backing of a powerful kingdom that maintained diplomatic relations with the great powers of the region.  They had properties, they had chapels, they had a space within the Holy Sepulchre complex, like everyone else, and they lost it.  And this is where the story gets ugly, and I’m going to tell it to you with all the starkness it deserves, without softening anything.

  They lost it because they went bankrupt.  It sounds vulgar, it sounds unspiritual, but that’s exactly what happened in the Ottoman Empire.  Maintaining a presence in the holy places cost money. Taxes had to be paid, fees had to be paid, bribes had to be paid, let’s be clear, because that’s how the administration of the time worked and each Christian denomination paid to keep its spaces.

The Greeks had money, the Armenians had money, the Catholics had the European monarchies behind them that financed their presence for political prestige.  The Ethiopians were far away and at certain times in their history, Ethiopia had very serious problems at home, wars, invasions and their community in Jerusalem was left without support and without funds.

  And when they couldn’t pay, they lost their spaces.  And their spaces were given to other faiths that could afford it, and the Ethiopians were sent up to the roof, to a space on the rooftop above the chapel of Saint Helena, where they were allowed to stay.  And there they built some small mud huts, made of adobe, [music] a modest chapel, and there they remain.

  Now I want you to position yourself physically because that’s what makes this hurt.  Beneath their feet, a few meters away, lies the tomb, the place for which their people crossed deserts and seas for centuries, the exact spot toward which they pray, and they are above, outside, on the rooftop, under the sun in summer, under the rain in winter, in mud huts built on the roof of the most sacred place in their religion, which they cannot enter through the main door like others, and it has been like this for centuries and they have not

left.  That’s the part that has me here, not that they were kicked out.  That, as sad as it may be , is commonplace.  The poor lose and the rich win.  And that has happened everywhere and in every era.  What has me here is that they didn’t leave .  They could have left.  They could have said that if there’s no room for them downstairs, there isn’t.

  and return home, to a country where they have their own monasteries, their own churches, their own canon of 81 books and a tradition that does not depend on anyone.  And instead they stayed on the roof and put a chair there and sat down.  And now let’s go to what happened in 1970, because that’s where this story stops being sad and becomes something else.

Ethiopians do not share that roof alone.   They share it with the Copts.  The Copts are the Egyptian Christians, and the Copts also have spaces up there, and they also have a chapel, and they also have a historical claim to that same land.  And the two faiths have been fighting over the same square meters for centuries.

  Who owns what? Who has the right to pass through where? Who can repair which wall?  Whose door is that exactly?  That hallway? that chapel.  And in 1970, during Holy Week, patience ran out.  And I want you to know exactly how it happened, because it’s brutally pragmatic.  The Copts were busy; it was their celebration. They were downstairs at the liturgy with the whole community focused on the rite.

  And while they were downstairs, the Ethiopians changed the locks.  That simple, that physical, that unspiritual.   They removed the cylinders from the locks of the doors that give access to the disputed chapels and put in new ones, and they had the new keys .  And when the Copts went up, they could no longer enter.

  And since that day, since 1970, those chapels have been in Ethiopian hands and the Copts protest.  They have been protesting ever since , nonstop, they have gone to Israeli courts, filed claims, brought the matter to the attention of governments, asked for mediation and it has been to no avail because the statute says that everything stays as it is and the problem is that now it is like this .

  The occupation created the fact, and the fact created the law.  And that’s why there’s a chair and that’s why there’s a man sitting on it day and night, because the Copts learned their lesson the hard way and their response [music] was to put a monk up there permanently, physically, so that no one could ever do the same thing to them again. That man in the chair is a Copt and he is there to show that the space is not empty.

  And what happened in 2002 will explain to you just how serious this is .  It was a hot summer day, with direct sunlight on the rooftop and no shade.  And the Coptic monk on duty, a man who had been sitting for hours under that sun, did something perfectly human. He moved the chair a couple of meters.  in the shade.

  And with that, the chair came to be on land that the Ethiopians consider their own.  And everything blew up .  The monks got into a fight.  Ethiopians versus Copts on the roof of the Holy Sepulchre.  With blows.  11 people ended up in the hospital.  11. For moving a chair 2 meters.  And now you can laugh about this. And that would be understandable.

  It sounds ridiculous, it sounds absurd, it sounds like the worst thing organized religion can produce, but I do n’t laugh because when a man fights like that over 2 meters of roofing, he’s not fighting for the 2 meters, he’s fighting for what those 2 meters mean. And what they mean is that their ancestors were expelled from the main gate for not being able to pay, and that if they give up 2 met today, tomorrow they will ask for four.

And now we have to answer the question that has been floating around here for half an hour without anyone asking it. Because?  Why do African monks, thousands of kilometers from their homeland, endure centuries of humiliation on a rooftop for a space they can’t even enter through the door? They could leave.

  They have a country, they have churches, they have monasteries in the mountains of northern Ethiopia, which are older than half of the cathedrals in Europe.  They have their own liturgical language, Jez, and their own biblical canon with 81 books, 15 more than yours.  They don’t need Jerusalem to have a church. And yet, they stay.

  And the answer is in a book, it’s called Quebranast, the glory of kings, and it’s the foundational text of Tiiope’s identity.  And to understand those men on the roof, you have to understand what that book says, because they’ve been believing it for 1000 years .   It tells that the Queen of Sheba, who in Ethiopia is called Maqueda, traveled to Jerusalem to meet Solomon, had a son with him, that this son Menelic, when he was an adult, returned to Jerusalem to meet his father and that when he returned to Ethiopia, he took the ark of the

covenant with him. With the complicity, the text says, of the firstborn of the priests of Israel who left with him.  And according to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, that ark remains in Ethiopia, in a chapel in Axum, guarded by a single man who sees it and does not share what he sees with anyone .

  Now, I’m not saying that’s historical truth.  Nobody can verify it because nobody can enter that chapel.  I’m telling you, they believe it.  An entire country believes it. And now look at what that implies.  If you believe with all your heart that your people are the direct continuation of the lineage of Solomon, that the ark that was in the temple of Jerusalem is now in your land, that your Church is not a branch, nor a mission, nor a graft, but the legitimate heir of all that.

  So Jerusalem is not a tourist destination, it’s your [music] home and you’re not there as a guest, you’re there by right and you’ve been there forever.  And the fact that some Greeks and Italians with more money have sent you to the roof, doesn’t change anything.  Change where you sit, don’t change who you are, and that, and nothing else, is what sustains those men on a rooftop in Jerusalem, in mud huts, generation after generation, under the sun and under the rain, without giving an inch.

  It’s not stubbornness; it’s that in their story, in the story they’ve been told since childhood and which they believe with the same conviction that you believe Australia exists, that roof isn’t a punishment, it’s what remains of an inheritance that belongs to them.  And you don’t give up an inch of an inheritance, not even if you have to sleep on the roof for 300 years.

And I want you to know what those men are carrying, because it’s not just a chair and some huts, they’re carrying a different Bible than yours.  And almost nobody knows this.  And when I tell people about it, they are surprised, and rightly so, because it is one of those things that should be taught but isn’t .

  Your Bible has 66 books if it is Protestant, 73 if it is Catholic.  The one belonging to those monks has 81 more books.  at least.  And they are not appendices, they are not footnotes, they are not theologians’ commentaries, they are books of scripture with the same rank as Genesis or the Gospel of John, read in the liturgy, copied by hand for 100 years, sung aloud in ceremonies.

And among them is the Book of Enoch, a text that describes how 200 angels descended on a mountain and swore an oath to each other, that gives their names, that tells what they taught men, things that should not be taught, and that describes what was born from the union of those beings with human women.

  That book was in the ancient Jewish canon. The New Testament mentions it without any dissimulation.  It was known to the first Christians and disappeared in the West for more than 1000 years.  There were no copies, no references, it was considered lost forever and was in Ethiopia, [music] in use read aloud.

  There is the Book of Jubilees that retells Genesis with details that do not appear in your version.  There is the Mashafakidan, the book of the covenant, which is presented as the record of what Christ said to his disciples in the 40 days after the resurrection. A period of which your new testament barely tells you four scenes, 40 days.  And you have four scenes.

  And they have a whole book.  And those men, those on the roof, those fighting over a chair, those living in mud huts over the tomb they cannot enter, they read those books, they have them, they sing them, they carry them within them.  And now I want you to create a mental image that leaves me completely bewildered.

  Under that roof, in the basilica, there are Catholic, Greek, and Armenian clergy celebrating the liturgy with a Bible of 66 or 73 books.  And above, on the rooftop, in the huts, there are some poor men singing in a dead language with an 81-page Bible. Those with more books are on the roof, those with fewer are inside with the marble.

  And it’s no coincidence, because the 15 books they have left over are precisely the ones that were discarded in the West.  And discarding books and discarding people when you think about it carefully is exactly the same operation.   It is decided what goes into the canon and what does n’t go in stays out on the roof. I want to take you to the roof because we’ve talked about rights and disputes and centuries, and there are people up there.

   It is called Deir es Sultan, the sultan’s monastery in Arabic.  A grand name for what it actually is.  You go up and the first thing that surprises you is the contrast.  Below, in the basilica, there is marble, there is gold, there are silver lamps hanging by the dozens, there are icons with precious metal frames.

  There is a wealth accumulated over centuries by churches that had power and money and monarchies behind them.  And up above, there is mud, small, low huts with whitewashed and cracked walls, rough wooden doors, small windows, a small courtyard of uneven stone, a dome that sticks out from the ground, because the floor of the roof is the ceiling of the chapel below and that dome is the only thing that reminds you that you are on top of something else.

  Clothes hanging out to dry, a couple of potted plants, and dark-skinned men in robes and turbans moving slowly and silently.  There is no proper running water.  The conditions are harsh, the structures are deteriorated because repairing them requires the unanimous consent of all six faiths.  And the Copts do not grant it, because giving permission to repair would be tantamount to acknowledging that the space is Ethiopian.

  So the huts are falling to pieces and cannot be repaired, and the monks live inside. Think about that for a moment.  Think about what it means to live in a building you ca n’t repair, because repairing it would make you lose the right to be in it. It’s a perfect trap.  If you fix it, you lose.  If you don’t fix it, it will fall down.

  And in either case, you end up with nothing.  And they have chosen the second option.  They have chosen to stay in a falling-down building because they prefer their broken roof to someone else’s intact roof .  And there’s something else up there that leaves me speechless.  They sing in Jeez, with drums, with citterns, those metal instruments that are shaken and sound harsh with the same melodies that are sung in the monasteries of northern Ethiopia, at Lake Tana, in Libela, in Debredamo, on a rooftop in Jerusalem, [music]

above the tomb of Christ, which they cannot enter through the door, singing in a dead language with the same melodies that their grandparents and their great-grandparents and their great-great-grandparents sang . And on Easter, on Easter night, they hold a procession, they walk around the dome on the roof, because they cannot walk around the tomb, which is what the others do down below, inside the basilica.

  So they walk around the dome that is above the tomb, a few meters away, separated by a stone slab. circling outside on the rooftop, while below, the liturgies of the churches that could afford them played.  And I do n’t know what to call that.  I know what they would call it.  They would call it loyalty.   To be honest, I can’t look at it without feeling something inside me churning.

  And there is one day a year when all of this becomes unbearable.   On the Saturday before Orthodox Easter,  the Holy Fire ceremony is celebrated in the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre.  It is probably the largest and most intense religious ceremony in Christianity, and almost no one in the West knows about it. Thousands of people crowd inside the church, thousands more outside, in the courtyard, in the streets.

  There are people who have been waiting for hours.  There are pilgrims who have traveled from Greece, from Russia, from Cyprus, from Armenia.  The Greek Orthodox patriarch enters the shrine, the tomb; he is only previously searched to ensure he is not carrying any means to light a fire. The door closes and the crowd waits in silence with unlit candles in their hands and after a few minutes they come out with lit candles and the fire spreads from candle to candle, from hand to hand and in a matter of seconds the whole basilica is illuminated

by thousands of flames and people scream and cry and hug each other.  I’m not going to get into whether that’s a miracle or not.  It’s not my job and it’s not my responsibility. What I want to tell you is where the Ethiopians are that day.  They are up on the roof and the fire is coming down on them. Someone climbs a ladder from inside the basilica to the rooftop with a lit candle and passes it around.

  And up above, among the mud huts, they light their candles with that flame that has risen from below and celebrate their Easter there on the rooftop with the fire that has been brought to them and make their procession around the dome.  Singing in Jeez, with the drums, with the istros, spinning on a rooftop under the Jerusalem sky, while beneath their feet thousands of people scream and cry inside the church they cannot go down to.

  And that honestly breaks my heart , because it’s not a brutal exclusion.  Nobody is hitting them or throwing them out; on the contrary, someone is taking the trouble to turn up the fire. It’s a polite exclusion, a well-mannered exclusion of the kind you can’t report anywhere because technically no one has done anything to you.  They’ve turned up the heat, they’ve been nice, you just can’t get in.

  And they have n’t been able to enter for centuries.  And every year, every Easter, someone climbs that ladder with a candle and they receive it and give thanks and sing and stay there. And now I want to tell you what’s underneath them, literally underneath, because when you know, the image of those men on the roof is going to be even harder for you to stomach.

Under the roof where the Ethiopians live, inside the basilica, there is a small structure, a kind of chapel inside the church, like a little stone house in the middle of the nave.  They call it the aedicule, and inside the aedicule is the tomb, a tiny chamber.  It can fit half a dozen people squeezed in, and inside there is a marble slab on which pilgrims rest their hands and on which the body is supposed to have been placed .

  And that slab has been there for centuries.  And in 2016, for the first time in hundreds of years, they raised it. It was a restoration team.  With the permission of the confessions, within the framework of some urgent works, because the structure was at risk of collapse, and they removed the slab, and what they found underneath, first was fill, rubble, construction material accumulated over centuries.

  And beneath the fill, another slab, a second, older marble slab, which no one knew was there.  Nobody appeared in any records.  No one had seen her in centuries.  And that slab had a cross engraved on it.  And beneath all that, the rock, the original limestone bed of the cave, carved into the shape of a burial bench, like those used in Jewish burials of the first century.

  Samples of the mortar that joined the structures were taken and dated. And the dating yielded a range compatible with the 24th century, which is exactly when historical sources say the first basilica was built there. Now, mind you, that doesn’t prove that it’s anyone’s tomb in particular.  It proves none of that.

  It only proves that the structure we venerate today was built when the sources said it was built and that underneath there is a tomb carved into the rock consistent with the funerary practices of the correct period.  It’s an archaeological fact, not a miracle.  But now go back to the roof and look at those men and realize one thing.  When they lifted that slab.

  In 2016, when for the first time in centuries what lies beneath the marble was opened up, when scientists entered with their instruments and cameras and saw the rock.  The Ethiopians were up on the roof, a few meters away, separated by a stone slab, perhaps listening to the noise of the construction work.

  And they didn’t go down because they could n’t. I want to stop and tell you what I think because I’ve been going over it in my mind and I can’t quite put my finger on it.  There are two ways to look at this, and both seem true to me at the same time, and that’s what makes me uncomfortable.  The first one is probably what you’re thinking: it’s pathetic that adult men consecrated to God are fighting with their fists over 2 meters of roof and 11 of them end up in the hospital for moving a chair.

  It’s the best demonstration.  that organized religion brings out the worst in people, that if Christ were to raise his head and see what is being done in the building constructed over his tomb, he would pick up the whip again.  And those who think that are right .  It’s hard to argue with that.  And then there’s the second way.

  And the second way is this: those men are all that’s left, because think of the alternative, think of what would happen if they left.  If one day the Ethiopians were to say with all the dignity in the world that enough is enough, that they are not going to continue humiliating themselves on a rooftop, that they are going back to their country, where they have entire churches and cathedrals carved into the rock and a canon with 15 more books, and they came down from that roof and left.

  What would happen the next day?  The next day someone would occupy that space and after 20 years nobody would remember that there were Ethiopians there. And after 100 years, the African presence in Jerusalem, that presence which has been documented for 15 years, would have disappeared from the map as if it had never existed.

And the story would be told only by those who stayed, those who could pay.  And in that story there would be no Africans.   Just like in the history of Christianity that you were told as a child, there were no Africans, right? Think about it.  Think about the images you have in your head of the history of Christianity.

  Rome, Constantinople, the monasteries of Ireland, the Gothic cathedrals, the councils.  Where are the Ethiopians in that story?  They are not there, even though they have been there since the 24th century, even though they preserved books that Europe lost.  Although they never left Jerusalem, they are not there, because those who write history are those who had the marble, not those who had the clay.

So when you see that man sitting in the chair on the roof, under 40 grams, refusing to move, you can either laugh or you can realize that this man is the only thing preventing an entire town from disappearing from the story and that if he gets up, it’s all over.  and that’s why he doesn’t get up.

  And that’s why when someone moves that chair 2 meters, 11 people end up in the hospital because for them it’s not a chair.  It’s the last sentence of a book they’ve been writing for 15 years and they don’t intend to let it be erased.  And we’ve reached the end, and I want to tell you why the title of this video says the reason is disturbing.

  Because maybe you were expecting something else, maybe you were expecting a secret, an object hidden in the roof, a manuscript buried under the huts.  There’s nothing like that.  What’s disturbing is not what they keep.  What’s disturbing is why they’re up there.  They’re up there because centuries ago they could n’t afford to pay.  That’s all.

  That’s the reason.  There is no theology, no doctrinal schism, no heresy, no condemnation by a council.  There was a bill and they couldn’t pay it, and they were kicked out of the holiest place in Christianity and sent to the poorest community there because they had no money, and they were left with the roof.  And they’re still there.

  And now I want you to think about what that says, because Christianity has a book. And in that book there is a man who drives the money changers out of the temple with whips, who says that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom, who says that the last shall be first, and in the building built over his tomb, the poor are on the roof and the rich are inside, and it has been like that for centuries and nothing has happened, nobody has corrected it.

None of the six faiths that are fighting down there have said in all these centuries that maybe this should be fixed, that maybe there is a place on the planet where poverty should not determine access.  That’s precisely it, nobody has said so.  And on the roof there is a chair and a man sitting on it day and night so that nobody takes away 2 meters of rooftop space from him.

  And on the facade there is a staircase that has been there for 250 years, leaning against it because nobody can agree on who can touch it.  And the key to the tomb is kept by a Muslim family, because the Christians do not trust each other. I started this video by talking to you about a chair and I told you that that man wasn’t watching anything.

  And it was true, he ‘s not guarding a treasure, there is no treasure.   He’s keeping watch to make sure they don’t take away what little he has left.  And that’s after 2000 years in the building that was built over the tomb of the man who said that the last would be first.   It’s the most disturbing thing I’ve come across in a long time.

  And the monks remain above, singing in a dead language, on top of a tomb they cannot enter.  M.