Looking for Jesus in Jerusalem
Gethsemane, a garden across the Kidron Valley on the Mount of Olives, a mile-long ridge paralleling eastern Jerusalem, where Jesus is said to have prayed on the night of his arrest before his Crucifixion. Though the exact location of Gethsemane cannot be confirmed, Armenian, Greek, Latin, and Russian churches have accepted an olive grove on the western slope of the Mount of Olives as the authentic site, which was regarded to be the location by the empress Helena, mother of Constantine, the first Christian emperor, in the early 4th century AD.
Walking the solemn path Jesus took to his crucifixion along The Way of the Cross – Via Dolorosa, with pilgrims and tourist wishing to step closer to ancient history and religion. Twist and turn your way through narrow stone paths lined with shops, following the nine stations of the cross marking Christ’s sacred journey to his crucifixion. There are a couple of versions marked as the city has built up over two thousand years burying many of the old streets.
The Church of the Holy Sepulcher, also called the Church of the Resurrection or Church of the Anastasis by Eastern Christians. It is a church in the Christian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. The church contains, according to traditions dating back to at least the fourth century, the two holiest sites in Christianity: On the hill in the upper level of the churec is the site where Jesus was crucified, at a place known as Calvary or Golgotha, and below Jesus’s empty tomb, where he is said to have been buried and resurrected. The tomb is enclosed by a 19th-century shrine called the Aedicula. The Status Quo, an understanding between several religious communities dating to 1757, applies to the site.
One of the more significant rooms in the religious world is located in the southern part of the Old City of Jerusalem up on Mount Zion. History and tradition claim that it was within this room where Jesus had the Last Supper and later it was here that the risen Jesus made visible his wounds to see and touch by the disciples, and the room where Thomas accepted Jesus as divine.
The Upper Room, also known as the Cenacle in its current structure dates approximately from the fourteenth century and is adorned with Gothic-era columns and a golden olive tree statue representing the tree of life. Muslims consider it to be a mosque and the Israelis consider the lower level of this structure to be the Tomb of David. On special occasions, Christians are permitted to celebrate Mass in the Upper Room, but it is not common and is done only with permission.
The Wailing Wall, also referred to as the Kotel, the Western Wall, or Solomon’s Wall, and whose lower sections date to about the first century BCE, is located in the Old Quarter of East Jerusalem in Israel. Built of thick, corroded limestone, it is about 60 feet (20 meters) high and close to 160 feet (50 meters) long, though most of it is engulfed in other structures. The wall is believed to be the Western Wall of the Second Temple of Jerusalem (destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD), and the only surviving structure of the Herodian Temple built during the reign of Herod Agrippa (37 BC–4 AD).
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