Where Was Jesus Really Crucified
The tomb of Christ is located, according to the common Christian belief, in the place where the Church of the Holy Sepulcher was built. Jesus was crucified after being sentenced to death by Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea. The crucifixion took place on a hill called Golgotha, outside the city walls. After Jesus died, his body was taken down from the cross and he was buried, according to the Jewish custom of that time, in a rock-carved tomb in the plot of Joseph of Arimathea. Three days after the burial, several women led by Mary Magdalene came to visit his tomb, and discovered that the entrance to the cave was open and the tomb itself was empty. There was a sweet scent of roses in the air and an angel floating above informed the women that Jesus had resurrected.
Flavia Julia Helena, also known as Saint Helena, was the wife of Emperor Constantius Chlorus and the mother of Emperor Constantine the Great, who was one of the most important Roman emperors in history. He reunited the Roman Empire, made Christianity the official religion and even converted to Christianity himself. Helena was a devout Christian believer, and in 326 AD she went on an important journey in the Holy Land during which she met Christian communities living in Jerusalem and other cities. These communities managed to survive the waves of Christian persecution during the previous centuries, and preserved age-old traditions. With their help, Helena identified the sites and places where the events described in the Gospels took place, and sanctified them. Churches and monasteries were later built in many of these places. Among other locations, Helena also identified the place where Jesus was crucified and buried, and her son the emperor ordered a large church to be built there. The Byzantine church, which was the central and most important building in Jerusalem of that time, was destroyed at the beginning of the 7th century AD after the Persian conquest of the Land of Israel. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre that exists today was rebuilt by the crusaders in the 12th century, on top of the Byzantine church ruins.
As mentioned, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is accepted by almost all Christian churches as the place of Christ's burial, except for a number of Protestant sects. These believe that the location of the church does not correspond to what is told in the New Testament, describing a hill and a garden. Instead, they identify the location of the crucifixion and burial with the "Garden Tomb" - a rock-cut burial cave located to the north of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, outside the walls of the old city. However, this tradition regarding the location of Golgotha and the tomb of Jesus is relatively new, and it was born only at the end of the 19th century.
Charles George Gordon was a British military officer and administrator from the 19th century. He was commissioned as an officer in 1852 and began serving in the British Army in various areas throughout the empire. After England's victory in the Second Opium War in 1860, Gordon went to China and joined the fighting against the Taiping Rebellion, in which he played an important role. He took command of the "Ever Victorious Army" and led it successfully, until the suppression of the rebellion. In recognition of his service, the Emperor of China promoted him to the rank of "Tidu", the highest in the Chinese army, and awarded him the "Imperial Yellow Jacket'' decoration. Gordon's successes in China even earned him the nickname "Chinese Gordon". He continued to serve in England and other areas of the British Empire, and in 1874 arrived in Egypt which was ruled by the Khedive Isma’il who was supported by England. The Egyptians gradually expanded their rule towards the south, and Gordon was appointed governor of Sudan on behalf of the Khedive.
Gordon left Sudan in 1880 after a significant and influential period of service as governor, and spent the following years in England, India, China, Mauritius, and more. Among other things, he also spent a year in the Land of Israel. In 1883, a rebellion broke out in Sudan led by the charismatic leader Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad. The rebel army managed to defeat the Egyptian forces that were under British command, and at the end of the year the British authorities ordered Egypt to abandon Sudan. The British government asked Gordon to go to Sudan to help with the evacuation, and he arrived in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, in early 1884. The rebel forces continued to advance and besieged the capital. The British demanded that Gordon leave the city, but were unable to evacuate the Egyptian garrison. Gordon, in response, refused to evacuate and abandon his troops. The siege of Khartoum became a major issue in Britain, and the public demand to help Gordon grew stronger. Despite attempts by the British forces to reach Khartoum and rescue Gordon and his men, the rebels managed to break into the city in January 1885 and carried out a brutal massacre. Gordon himself was killed, beheaded and his body thrown into one of the wells. The news of his death caused a great shock in Britain, and the public even demanded the resignation of Prime Minister Gladstone. Gordon's life story, and especially his dramatic death, made him a hero and turned him into a martyr. Many books have been written about him, and in the epic film "Khartoum" from 1966, the Oscar-winning American actor Charlton Heston portrayed his character.
Gordon remains enigmatic and his personality controversial to this day. He was a solitary and spiritual type, despised honors and aristocratic manners, remained single and did not start a family. Gordon was a devout Christian and read extensively in the Bible, in which he searched for clues to redemption. During his stay in the Land of Israel in 1883, he toured the Jerusalem area a lot, did research and tried to find answers to questions that arose from the Holy Scriptures. Gordon claimed that the identification of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher as the place where Jesus was crucified and buried does not correspond to the New Testament, and instead, following a mystical experience he had, claimed that Golgotha is actually a hill that lies outside the city walls, north of the Damascus gate. The appearance of the hill with its caves resembles a skull, and in 1867 a burial cave was discovered and mistakenly dated to the Second Temple period (a modern archeological research from the 1970s dated the tombs to the First Temple period, hundreds of years before the time of Christ.) A number of Protestant sects adopted Gordon's view, perhaps because they could not get any hold on the Church of the Holy Sepulcher itself which had been divided for centuries between the various Christian churches. In 1894, the site was purchased by the Protestants and has been used as a place for pilgrimage ever since. It contains an open and well-kept garden that preserves, according to the Protestants, the authentic atmosphere and feeling from the days of Christ. The burial cave itself attributed to Jesus is carved out of the rock, and contains two rooms and a stone cover.
(Anecdote authored by: עמיר)
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