Place names can be exotic, like Xanadu, or prosaic, like Bümpliz. Yet if we look behind the name, we can often learn a lot.
So it is with Jerusalem. In the earliest documents we know of, it was called ur-salem, city of peace. In Old Testament times, it was often simply called Salem. After Alexander had brought it within the Greek empire, it came to be known as iero-solyma - holy Salem, just as later the Arabs were to call it simply al-Quds, the holy place.
Holy it still is, but peaceful perhaps not. Unsuccessfully besieged by Sennacherib in 701 BC, captured and destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 598 and 586 BC, laid waste by the Romans in 70 AD, fought over by Crusaders and Saracens in the middle ages, and still fought over today, the City of Peace recalls Jesus' lament as he drew near to it on his last journey: "Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace!" (Luke 19:42)
The events of Holy Week took place partly within this holy city, and partly without. All four gospel writers tell us that Jesus spent this week lodging at Bethany, which was to Jerusalem rather like Zollikofen or Ostermundigen once were to Berne - the last village on the main road before one reached one's destination. (Another village, Bethphage, was apparently close by.)
Bethany means `house of dates', and we can imagine it as a pleasant village among the date-groves. Its modern name, al-Azariyah, reminds us that Lazarus lived there together with his sisters Martha and Mary, and, according to Matthew and Mark, so did one Simon the Leper. Here in Bethany the expensive jar of ointment was poured over Jesus, a sign of care and love and concern to some, a waste of money to others.
Going eastwards from Jerusalem to Bethany meant crossing a wadi. Jerusalem, like Berne, was surrounded on three sides by valleys, though the streams that ran through them were certainly no rivers. To the south and west was the Hinnom, the valley used as a rubbish-pit, whose fires reminded people of the final fate of the worthless - gehenna. But to the east, the way crossed another wadi, the Kidron, before winding on through olive groves and past a mountain, the Mount of Olives.
The Kidron was a natural boundary to Jerusalem (and it too was used as a rubbish dump). Crossing it meant leaving Jerusalem, as David did when he fled from Absalom (2 Sam 15:23), or as Solomon forbade the troublemaker Shimei to do (1 Kings 2:37). John mentions how Jesus and his disciples crossed the Kidron, and surely this is to emphasize that what happened next was on the slopes of the Mount of Olives, outside the city.
Near the foot of the mountain was a "garden". It had a geth, a press, in it for producing seman, olive oil. John tells us that "Jesus often met there with his disciples" (18:2), and we can think of it as a cool place to spend an evening, especially if the stream was running after the spring rains. It was here that Jesus prayed on the night before his death, and it was here that Judas came, "leading a crowd", and betrayed the Son of Man with a kiss.
We do not know where Jesus died, or where he was buried. Only after the conversion of the Emperor Constantine at the beginning of the fourth century did anybody take an interest in the actual places where Jesus had lived and died. We know that Jesus was crucified at "the Skull" - Golgotha in Hebrew, Calvaria in Latin. None of the gospel writers call it a hill - all four use the word "place". The writer to the Hebrews says that it was "outside the gate" (Heb 13:12), and the references to passers-by suggests that it was near a road. We know it was near to Joseph of Arimathea's garden, where they laid Jesus in a freshly-hewn tomb, but we do not know where that was either.
Whether the place was called the Skull because executions regularly took place there, or because there was an old cemetery nearby, or because the contour of the land there looked like a human skull, we may never know. Later legend had it that Adam's skull had been buried there - but again we do not know for certain where.
To the Gospel writers, Bethany, Kidron, Gethsemane and Golgotha were real places - as real as Ostermundigen and the Hirschengraben. But we today can build up only a shadowy picture of our Lord's last days, and perhaps it is best so. The faith that fills in the detail stems from an individual relationship with the Lord who rose from the tomb in the garden. That is what matters.
HD