Day 5 - Jerusalem (Israel Museum and Garden of Gethsamane)

Garden of Gethsamane

The garden of Gethsemane, near the foot of the Mount of Olives, is named in the New Testament as the place where Jesus went with his disciples to pray the night before he was crucified.

The garden, about 1200 square metres in area, was well known to the disciples as it is close to the natural route from the Temple to the summit of the Mount of Olives and the ridge leading to Bethany.

The name in Hebrew means “oil press”. Oil is still pressed from the fruit of eight ancient and gnarled olive trees that give the garden a timeless character.

In the garden of Gethsemane, stand the gnarled trunks of eight hoary olive trees. They create a spiritual atmosphere for visitors to the garden of Gethsemane.

Israel has many ancient olive trees, but these were not silent witnesses to the Agony of Jesus the night before he died.

The historian Flavius Josephus reported that all the trees around Jerusalem were cut down by the Romans for their siege equipment before they captured the city in AD 70.

Research reported in 2012 showed that three of the eight ancient trees (the only ones on which it was technically possible to carry out the study) dated from the middle of the 12th century, and all eight originated as cuttings from a single parent tree. The Gethsemane olive trees are possibly descendants of one that was in the garden at the time of Christ because when an olive tree is cut down, shoots will come back from the roots to create a new tree.

In Scripture:
Jesus prays in Gethsemane: Matthew 26:36-46; Mark 14:32-42; Luke 22:39-46; Mark 32-42
Jesus is arrested: Matthew 26:47-56; Mark 14:43-50; Luke 22:47-53; John 18:1-12

Church of All Nations

Beside the Garden of Gethsemane is the Church of All Nations, built over the rock on which Jesus is believed to have prayed in agony before he was betrayed by Judas Iscariot and arrested. The church is also known as the Basilica of the Agony. Completed in 1924, it is the third church on the site.

On the church facade mosaic, Christ is depicted as the mediator between God and mankind, on whose behalf he gives his very heart which an angel is shown receiving into his hands. On Christ’s left, a throng of lowly people, in tears, look to him with confidence. On his right, a group of the powerful and wise acknowledge the shortcomings of their might and learning. 

On the summit of the façade stand two stags on either side of a cross. Below the mosaic, statues of the four Evangelists are separated by three arches.

Door to the church

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke tell that Jesus and his disciples went to the Mount of Olives after the Last Supper. He left eight of the disciples together in one place and withdrew further with Peter, James and John. He asked them to stay awake with him while he prayed.

Jesus “threw himself on the ground” (Matthew 26:39) and in his anguish“his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground” (Luke 22:44). But the three disciples, all of them fishermen who were used to working through the night, could not stay awake “because of grief” (Luke 22:45).

Then a group from the chief priests and elders arrived to arrest Jesus. They were led by Judas, who betrayed his Master with a kiss.

Three mosaics dominate the interior and direct our attention to the front of the church. In the center and just above the large rock that tradition defines as the rock on which Jesus struggled in prayer is a depiction of Jesus on that rock. To the left and right are mosaics depicting Jesus’s betrayal and arrest.

Christ in Agony being Consoled by an Angel

The Kiss of Judas

The Arrest of Jesus

 The modern church (1924) beyond the garden is built above the foundation of its fourth-century predecessor. The design of the modern church re-creates the atmosphere of the fateful evening of Jesus’s struggle in prayer with its dark-purple windows and a black ceiling adorned with painted stars.

The ceiling also contains twelve seals commemorating donations from the twelve nations that contributed to the modern church construction (hence its modern name, Church of All Nations).

An atmosphere of sorrowful reverence pervades the Church of All Nations. The architect evoked the night-time of the Agony by leaving the interior in semi-darkness, relieved only by subdued natural light filtered through violet-blue alabaster windows.

The sombre blue of a star-studded night sky is recreated in the ceiling domes, the stars being surrounded by olive branches reminiscent of the Gethsemane garden.

Israel Museum

Scale model (1:50) of first-century Jerusalem. The designers have combined archaeological discoveries and ancient literary descriptions of Herodian Jerusalem to construct this three-dimensional model of the city. Here you can see the city as Jesus would have known it with the temple complex, Palace of Herod the Great, Upper City, and Golgotha.

The Shrine of the Book is the museum dedicated to the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jewish literature dating from the second century BC to the first century AD. The roof of the building is shaped like the cover of a ceramic vessel, the kind of vessel in which the famous scrolls were discovered. The rest of the structure, two-thirds of it below ground level, recalls the caves in which the scrolls were found.

Inside, you can trace the history of the scrolls (starting with their discovery in 1947), see examples of the scrolls themselves, and learn about their value. Among the scrolls are some of the earliest examples we have of the Hebrew Bible, and they help us secure more precisely the wording of the Old Testament Hebrew text that lies behind our English translations.

Cameras weren't allowed inside the museum considering the fragile scrolls so what happened in the shrine... stays in the shrine.

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