Gethsemane
Gethsemane (Greek: Γεθσημανή, Gethsēmanē; Hebrew: גת שמנים, Gat-Šmânim; Syriac: ܓܕܣܡܢ, Gaḏ Šmānê, lit. "oil press") is a garden at the foot of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, most famous as the place where Jesus prayed and His disciples slept the night before Jesus' crucifixion.
Garden of Gethsemane
Garden of Gethsemane, 1914
Andrea Mantegna's Agony in the Garden, circa 1460, depicts Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane
Etymology
Gethsemane appears
in the Greek of the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Mark as Γεθσημανή (Gethsēmanē).
The name is derived from the Aramaic ܓܕܣܡܢ (Gaḏ-Šmānê), meaning "oil press".Matthew (26:36) and Mark (14:32) call itχωρἰον (18:1),
a place or estate. The Gospel of John says Jesus entered a garden (κῆπος)
with his disciples.
Location
According to the New Testament it was a place that Jesus and his disciples
customarily visited, which allowed Judas to find him on the night of his arrest.
There are four locations claimed to be
the place where Jesus prayed on the night he was betrayed.
1. The Church of All Nations overlooking
a garden with the "Rock of the Agony."
2. The location near the Tomb of the Virgin to the
north.
3. The Greek Orthodox location to the east.
4. The Russian Orthodox orchard, next to the Church of Maria Magdalene by
an orchard.
Dr. William M. Thomson, author of The Land
and the Book, first published in 1880, wrote: "When I first came to
Jerusalem, and for many years afterward, this plot of ground was open to all
whenever they chose to come and meditate beneath its very old olive trees. The
Latins, however, have within the last few years succeeded in gaining sole
possession, and have built a high wall around it. The Greeks have invented
another site a little to the north of it. My own impression is that both are
wrong. The position is too near the city, and so close to what must have always
been the great thoroughfare eastward, that our Lord would scarcely have
selected it for retirement on that dangerous and dismal night. I am inclined to
place the garden in the secluded vale several hundred yards to the north-east
of the present Gethsemane."[7]
All of the foregoing is based on long-held
tradition and the conflating of the synoptic accounts of Mark (14:31) and
Matthew (26:36) with the Johannine account (John 18:1). Mark and Matthew record
that Jesus went to "a place called the oil press (Gethsemane)" and
John states he went to a garden near the Kidron Valley. Modern scholarship
acknowledges that the location of Gethsemane is unknown.
Pilgrimage
site
According to Luke 22:43–44, Jesus' anguish on the Mount of Olives (Luke does not
mention Gethsemane; Luke 22:39-40) was so deep that "his sweat was as it
were great drops of blood falling down to the ground." According to the Eastern Orthodox Church tradition,
Gethsemane is the garden where the Virgin Mary was buried and was assumed into heaven after
her dormition on Mount Zion. The Garden of Gethsemane became a focal site for
early Christian pilgrims. It was visited in 333 by the
anonymous "Pilgrim of Bordeaux", whose Itinerarium Burdigalense is
the earliest description left by a Christian traveler in the Holy Land. In hisOnomasticon, Eusebius of Caesarea notes
the site of Gethsemane located "at the foot of the Mount of Olives",
and he adds that "the faithful were accustomed to go there to pray".
Eight ancient olive trees growing in the Latin site of the garden may be 900
years old.
Olive
trees
A study conducted by the National Research Council
of Italy in 2012 found that several olive trees in the garden are amongst the oldest known to
science. Dates of 1092, 1166 and 1198 AD were obtained by carbon dating older parts of the trunks of three trees. DNA
tests show that the trees were originally planted from the same parent plant.
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