The immovable ladder that can only be moved if six religions agree to it
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is arguably the holiest place in the entire faith of Christianity.
Deep in the heart of the old city of Jerusalem, its significance to all followers of Christ’s teachings cannot be overstated. After all, according to traditions dating back to the fourth century, it’s built on the site where Christ was crucified and then resurrected three days later. Even heathens like me who didn’t believe for one moment that the guy was the son of God can’t help but understand what a place like that means for his followers.
However, even for a site as holy as that, human error is going to get in the way and make something really stupid out of it. Case in point, on the outside of the church, underneath one of the windows on the right-hand side of the Church’s facade is a ladder – a pretty nondescript one by the looks of things, perhaps someone’s working on cleaning said window and has gone for a quick break? Nope, that ladder has been there for a long, long time.
In fact, it’s been there so long that no one really knows exactly how long it’s been there – we can only really guess based on depictions of the church itself, and considering that it’s, as I said before, literally the holiest place in Christendom, a fair few people have depicted the church in works of art, and if you look really closely, you can see this ladder in all of them. How old is the first visible depiction of this ladder, I hear you ask?
The first time this ladder appears in a work of art is in one that was made in 1728. There’s reason to believe that it was old by then as well.
Why has this ladder been there for so long?!
If you’re wondering why someone hasn’t come along and packed up this errant ladder into a waiting storage cupboard (or by the looks of it, a museum), then don’t worry, several different people have wondered the same. The core cause of it is the Status Quo. Before you get your jokes in about 12 bar blues riffs and double denim, no, I don’t mean the ‘Rockin’ All Over The World’ hit makers. Neither do I mean the vague concept; I mean the actual Status Quo that applies to nine of the major religious sites in Bethlehem and Jerusalem.
This Status Quo seeks to maintain these sites by saying that none of them can be changed at any level without the express permission of each religious group represented by those holy sites – the Church of the Holy Sepulchre might be one of the holiest spots in Christianity, but Christianity is a broad church, and no less than six separate branches of Christianity are represented by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, so that ladder is going to stay there until each branch can agree on what to do with it.
This would, of course, mean getting the Catholic Church, the Greek Orthodox Church, the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and the Coptic Orthodox Church to agree on anything in the first place.