Seeking the truth of history at the holy places of Jerusalem

From the first century Christians and others have been interested in visiting the Holy Land and seeing the places associated with the life and death of Jesus. This is especially so at the pivotal feasts of the year, at Christmas and now at Eastertide.

In the early days this was a once-in-a-life time journey and those going there rightly called themselves pilgrims. But travel is now so easy that those crowding into the city may mostly be called tourists.

From the beginning certain places have been especially sought out: the Upper Room, the Garden of Gethsemane, Pilate’s Palace, the Via Dolorosa, Golgotha and the Tomb offered the family of Jesus by the merchant Joseph of Arimathea.

Here, in this article, a sort of Easter special, we will explore briefly some aspects of these places and their history, and perhaps see that they may be far more authentic than the sceptics over the centuries often allowed. We can take them roughly in the order in which they are mentioned in those final chapters of the individual gospels.

The Upper Room

We can start with the location of the place where Jesus and the Apostles marked the Passover.

Today in an edifice on Mount Zion a room called the Cenacle is shown as the dining room of the Last Supper and also the room where by tradition the Apostles and Mary were gathered at the descent of the Paraclete. This is the “Upper Room” of long tradition. Yet to some it does not seem appropriate.

The term “Upper Room” had an exact meaning in the Old Testament. An ordinary house was of one story and was called beit. But a more respectable house of some social standing, though necessarily of wealth, had an upper extension, called in Arabic ‘alliyeh (see picture). This chamber was set aside for special occasions and for special guests, as in the story of Elijah and the Shunammite woman (II Kings: 4), as shown in the mid-19th century woodcut illustrated.

The Cenacle as envisaged by later translators and as shown to tourists, conforms not to the usages of ancient Israel but to Roman and Greek dining customs. The historical reality, if we follow the gospel texts, would have been quite different, more familial and homely as is the style of Pasch among observant Jews today. Where this ‘alliyeh was is not known except that it was outside the city.

The Garden of Gethsemane

Another site that was outside the city was the garden where the group went after observing the Passover. This was where Jesus was arrested, where Peter resisted with armed violence, and was told by Jesus that “those who live by the sword dies by the sword” – a maxim many Christians are happy to ignore.

Pilate’s Palace

Jesus was carried as a prisoner into the city before the chief priest and from there to Pilate’s court, and from there to Herod’s palace and then back to Pilate again.

What makes any discussion of the location of the sacred sites difficult is the fact that the city of Pilate and King Herod and the chief priest was annihilated after the Jewish Revolt in 70AD by the Roman Legions of the Emperor Titus. (The carvings on the Arch of Titus in Rome show the legionaries carrying away the sacred objects from the Temple, including the Menorah, the sacred, seven branched candelabrum.) Jerusalem was again razed after another revolt in the time of Hadrian.

The Via Dolorosa

But if the houses were burned down, their cellars remained, and on these the old city could be rebuilt and was. So that the first Christians could be fairly certain about where the events of the Passion had taken place. But as time went on doubts rose. The Emperor Constantine’s mother, Helena, visited the city and secured recognition of the sites we know today, as well as bringing to light the timbers that came to be thought of as “the True Cross”.

The processional way that has become known down to today as the Via Dolorosa, was created to run from site to site through this new city, thus inspiring the devotion centred on the images that can still be seen in nearly every local church still, the Stations of the Cross. These represent in peto the way Jesus passed to the execution site which stood outside the city.

Golgotha and the Tomb

It is that scene of execution, which can never at any time have been a pleasant place, that poses a real problem, as does the connected mystery of the tomb which Joseph of Arimathea made available to the family of Jesus. Burials were always made outside the walls according to Jewish custom. Recent Israeli archaeological work in around the shrine of the Holy Sepulchre have found earlier burials, demonstrating that at one time what is now an urban site was once suburban. And the Gospels narrative suggest the tomb was near Golgotha, or Calvary after the Latin, as it came to be known, “the place of the skull”.

It was the increasing concern of some Protestant traditions that gave rise to doubts about Golgotha and the Tomb. Such different American writers as William McClure Thompson and Mark Twain found the atmosphere of Jerusalem dismaying. Both disliked the Oriental enthusiasm of the Orthodox and the Copts, and the elaborate ceremonials of Catholics. The image in their imaginations that they cultivated of the city in the time of Jesus was very different and more austere.

Thus the ‘Garden Tomb’ which was promoted by the British imperialist General Gordon appealed more to the tastes of such people. Certainly today the Garden tomb, which lies well outside the old city walls, gives many visitors an impression of what might have been seen on the first day, not just of the week, as the Gospels says, but of the Christian era as a whole, when the holy woman arrived to anoint the dead body, and encountered instead evidence of the risen Christ. It is really a matter of projective imagination. Authenticity has little to do with it.

* * *

These arguments have gone on for hundreds of years and are unsettled. In the notes he provided to his mid-18th century edition of the translation of the New Testament (made at Rheims in 1582), Bishop Richard Challoner remarked about the divergence of learned opinion over the exact age of Jesus at the time of his death, that such differences “are of little consequence”.

His opinion would be shared by many today à propos of many other differences between the learned. For Christians of faith, it is not where things happened that is of prime importance, but what is claimed to have happened. For it is on those claims that their confidence rests.

The same can be said of all places of pilgrimage. In this context we should perhaps bring to mind the lines in TS Eliot’s Little Gidding;

“You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid…”

On the over-all matter of pilgrimages and faith, even in this age when the numbers of annual pilgrims are said to be growing, those other lines from an early Irish poet are apposite:

“Techt do Róim,

mór saítho, becc torbai;

in Rí con-daigi i foss,

manim bera latt ní fhogbai.”

Or in the fine exactness of the translation by Frank O’Connor:

“To go to Rome

is little profit, endless pain;

the Master that you seek in Rome

you find at home or seek in vain.”

For those in the right frame of mind, all places can be holy; if they believe God is everywhere, and Jesus ever attentive to their prayers, then every place in creation can be a source of saving grace.

That is not a problem: the problem is whether or not they truly believe what Jesus asks them in the Gospels to believe…