Searching For The Place Of The Skull

As pilgrims descend on the holy land to celebrate easter, Ted Harrison proffers a word of caution: if you’re looking for the location of jesus’s crucfixion and burial then, tradition aside, you need to investigate a growing list of competing sites. Just where exactly was golgotha?

- Ted Harrison

The pilgrims who today carry heavy crosses in the footsteps of Christ may all be heading in the wrong direction. Golgotha, or Calvary as it is also known, the place of Christ’s crucifixion, may well not be where the guidebooks say.

Golgotha means ‘the place of the skull’ in ancient Aramaic. It was appropriately named as it was the place of common execution used by the Roman military occupying Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. It was to this place, according to Bible accounts, that Jesus was compelled to carry his cross on the first Good Friday.

John’s Gospel says that nearby the place of execution there was a garden with an empty tomb belonging to Joseph of Arimathaea. He was a Jewish elder and covert admirer (perhaps a relative) of Jesus. After Jesus was pronounced dead, his body was taken down from the cross and placed in Joseph’s newly hewn tomb.

But where exactly was Golgotha? And where was the tomb that on the first Easter morning was so miraculously empty? To identify the very spot where the momentous events at the centre of their faith actually happened is to some Christians extremely important.Yet there are at least four theories that maintain that the locations authenticated by Christian tradition are in fact completely wrong.

AMATEUR ARCHÆOLOGIST

The main tradition goes back 1,700 years to Helena, the mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine. She identified the two sites, the tomb and Golgotha, which are today incorporated within the ancient Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

For centuries, the tomb and Golgotha have been guarded by monks of several denominations, who are so argumentative and disputatious (for a particularly violent monk-on-monk brawl, see FT244:4-5) that they are not even trusted with the church key. The door is unlocked every morning by a member of one of two Muslim families.