Chapter 20
In This Chapter
● Journeying to the sacred spots linked to Jesus’s life
● Retracing Jesus’s final steps in Jerusalem
● Understanding the events behind the sites
Everybody likes a road trip. What’s not to like? You clear your schedule, pack your bags, load up on munchies, and hit the road. In this chapter, you take a special kind of road trip — a virtual pilgrimage. You visit the most important places associated with Jesus of Nazareth.
Every religion has its sacred places, those bits of earthly real estate where holy events have happened. Most of the sites mentioned in this chapter can’t be traced back to the historical Jesus, but they come about as close as you can expect.
The Basilica of the Annunciation
The Basilica of the Annunciation is a Roman Catholic Church in Nazareth that’s dedicated to an event narrated in Luke’s gospel. It’s the story of how a young girl named Mary agreed to give birth to Jesus (Luke 1:28, 30-32). You may wonder how anybody could know the location of such an event after 2,000 years (Chapter 9 takes up whether the story is historical to begin with). There are some caves deep below the basilica that folks began regarding as Mary’s childhood home as early as the 200s. Three different churches have been built on top of these caves. The current basilica, dedicated in 1968, exposes all of those layers to view.
The best day to visit the Basilica is March 25, the day of the Feast of the Annunciation in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions.
The Church of the Nativity
The Church of the Nativity commemorates the birthplace of Jesus, which, of course, was Bethlehem. Matthew and Luke mention that Jesus was born in the city of David (Matthew 2:1, 4-6; Luke 2:1-7; see Chapter 9). Matthew’s gospel mentions that Jesus was born at home (Matthew 2:11), but Luke’s gospel mentions that Jesus was born in a stable. By the early 100s CE, several Christians mentioned a particular Bethlehem cave as the spot where Jesus was born. When Constantine’s mother, Helena, came to the region hunting for holy sites in 324 CE, she built a church over the cave.
The best days to visit the Church of the Nativity are December 24-25, Christmas Eve and Christmas.
Capernaum, Where Jesus Lived
Capernaum, a village on the northwest coast of the Sea of Galilee, served as Jesus’s home base during his Galilean ministry, probably because his first disciples lived there (see Chapters 10 and 13). Excavations from the 20th century to the present day have uncovered the black basalt walls of a synagogue and an octagonal structure superimposed over a room. Lower rooms are usually older rooms, and this one dates to the first century CE. Graffiti in the room associate it with Jesus, and a fourth-century pilgrim account identifies it as the site of Peter’s house, where his mother-in-law was cured (Mark 1:29-31).
The Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes
Heptapegon (Greek for “Seven Springs,” which in Arabic was shortened to “Tabgha”) was identified as the place where Jesus multiplied loaves of bread and fishes to feed thousands (Mark 6:34-44; see Chapter 12). According to the fourth-century pilgrim Egeria, the site actually did triple duty, because it was also associated with the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) and Jesus’s resurrection appearance where he rehabilitates Peter (John 21). Each location has a separate church today.
The Mount of Transfiguration
There’s a tradition in the gospels that Jesus took some of his disciples up a mountain and was transformed before their eyes, appearing in dazzling white clothes and speaking with two biblical figures from the past, Moses and Elijah (Mark 9:1-13; see Chapter 12). The site associated with this transfiguration of Jesus moved around a lot in the first four Christian centuries, but in 348 CE Cyril of Jerusalem picked Mount Tabor as the most likely spot. Three chapels (one each for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah) were built, and their ruins are still visible under a Catholic basilica built in 1924. If you visit in early August, your trip may coincide with the annual feast of the Transfiguration.
Temple Mount
Herod the Great expanded both the Jerusalem Temple and the hilltop on which it stood, building massive retaining walls and filling them with earth (Chapter 7 has more on his building program). Even though the Romans destroyed the Temple and the buildings on top in 70 CE, they left the retaining walls of the platform (like the Western Wall, where Jews have mourned the loss of the Temple for centuries). Along the south wall, you can still see the monumental staircase that led to the Temple platform in Jesus’s day (see Chapter 14). That wall also bears a carbon imprint of the arches of shops and stalls burned onto the stone when the Romans destroyed the city.
The Upper Room
The Upper Room, which is the supposed site of the Last Supper (Mark 14:15; see Chapter 14) and the descent of the Holy Spirit on the disciples (Acts 2:1-4), is the least reliable of the ten places in this chapter. Excavations on Jerusalem’s Mount Zion have exposed a Roman-period building there, but nobody mentions a church at the site until the 300s CE, and it wasn’t associated with Last Supper until the fifth century. There’s no church there now, only some ruins beneath the floor of the Tomb of David.
The Garden of Gethsemane
This garden, on the Mount of Olives east of Temple Mount in Jerusalem, is where Jesus went to pray after his last supper with the disciples, and it’s where he was betrayed and arrested. The synoptic gospels call the garden Gethsemane (Mark 14:32; see Chapter 14). This site has a decent claim to early veneration because Christian pilgrimages to the site predate Constantine. The present church on the site is the Church of All Nations.
The Way of the Cross
When Jesus’s verdict was decided, he was loaded with the patibulum or crossbeam on which he’d be crucified and was marched to Golgotha, which was just outside the walls of Jerusalem (see Chapter 14). His actual path most likely took him from the Citadel near the Jaffa Gate to a quarry where the present Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands (see the next section for more on this site). The Citadel was the high point of the city (Gabbatha in Aramaic means high point; see John 19:13). It was where Pilate usually held court when he visited Jerusalem. But early Christians living in Jerusalem developed different notions of the sites associated with Jesus’s final journey, which led them to replicate his way of the cross along various paths during the first millennium.
In the 1300s, the Franciscans (a Roman Catholic religious order) organized a devotional walk in Jerusalem with 8 (then 14) stations marking events on Jesus’s final walk. The path is called the Via Dolorosa, or “Way of Sorrows.” If you visit, try to time it with either the Catholic or Orthodox celebration of Good Friday in early spring (the day commemorating Jesus’s crucifixion) — as long as you don’t mind huge crowds packed into narrow places!
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is the holiest site in Christendom and is a designated basilica. It houses the traditional site of both the crucifixion and the empty tomb (sepulchre is Latin for tomb; see Chapter 14 for more on Jesus’s crucifixion).
Christians of the first generation worshipped at this location until the First Jewish Revolt disrupted things in 66 CE. After the Second Jewish Revolt from 132-135 CE, Roman Emperor Hadrian filled in the quarry where the crucifixions had taken place to provide a base for his Capitoline Temple. But Christians remembered the site, and when Constantine’s mother, Helena, came to find the holy places (325-327 CE), the Jerusalem Christians told her this was where Jesus had been crucified. Constantine built a church there even though he had to excavate the whole ancient quarry to do so.
Constantine’s Church didn’t survive the Crusades intact, and subsequent earthquakes, fires, and destructions led to its current hodgepodge of architecture. But underneath the various building layers lies a holy site that has a strong claim to authenticity.