Gethsemane

Five things about this site are not in dispute. There was a garden or grove across the Kidron on the western slope of the Mount of Olives, and Jesus used it regularly. The name Gethsemane means oil press, and an oil press implies a grove. Christians were being shown a specific rock on this slope by 333 and were walking down here at night on Holy Thursday by the 380s, which is earlier than the surviving identification of most sites in the city. A ritual bath of the Second Temple period stands on the spot. The eight olive trees in the enclosure are one genotype, and the three trunks that could be dated began in the twelfth century. The dispute is the boundary: no excavated object fixes the extent of the first-century grove or proves that the Church of All Nations stands on the ground of Matthew 26:36 rather than a hundred metres from it. One honesty note goes with that. The western site is owned, excavated and published by the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, and the account of the churches given here is the Custodia of the Holy Land's own. That is said plainly rather than presenting either as neutral ground, and it is said without a word against them. Until 2020 the site had produced nothing from the New Testament period. That changed during work on a visitors' tunnel beside the church. David Yeger directed the excavation for the Israel Antiquities Authority, working alongside the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, which holds the western site, and the results were announced in December 2020. Three things came out of the ground. A ritual bath, a mikveh, dated to the Second Temple period on stratigraphy and on typological comparison, standing with no building beside it. A church of the late Byzantine period, sixth century and in use into the eighth, at the foot of the valley, with a Greek inscription on its floor asking that the offering of the servants be accepted for the memory and repose of the lovers of Christ. And a medieval monastery of several chambers with two large cisterns cut with crosses, probably destroyed when Saladin took the city in 1187. Amit Re'em of the Israel Antiquities Authority gave the excavators' reading of the bath: "According to the Jewish law, when you are producing wine or olive oil, you need to be purified. So there is a high probability that during the time of Jesus, at this place was an oil press." A ritual bath standing alone in open ground fits an installation that had to keep its produce ritually pure, and the name of the place says oil press. That convergence is real and it is worth stating. It is not proof that the grove of Matthew 26:36 stood at this exact spot. The 2020 material was announced by the Israel Antiquities Authority and reported in the press before peer review or full publication, and the dating is presented here with that qualification attached. The eight ancient olive trees in the enclosure are the most photographed thing at the site, and visitors are often told they are the trees Jesus prayed under. Two published studies bear on that. R. Petruccelli and colleagues, writing in Comptes Rendus Biologies in 2014, gave the first morphological and genetic characterisation of the eight trees and found that all of them carry an identical profile at every microsatellite locus analysed. They are one genotype, propagated from a single mother plant, and the results were made public in 2012 ahead of formal publication. Mauro Bernabei, in the Journal of Archaeological Science in 2015, radiocarbon dated the trunks and reported the limit plainly: all the trunks are hollow, so the central and older wood is missing. Only three of the eight could be dated at all, and those three began life through the twelfth century, returning 1092, 1166 and 1198. That is the period of the Crusader church on the spot. Josephus settles the outer question on his own, before any laboratory is consulted. Writing of the siege of AD 70 in the sixth book of The Jewish War, he records that the legions cut down all the trees in the country adjoining the city for ninety furlongs around, and that places once adorned with trees and pleasant gardens became a desolate country. Gethsemane is well inside ninety furlongs of the wall. No tree standing in the enclosure today can be a tree of the Gospels. What the evidence cannot rule out is that the present stock was propagated from a root already growing on the site, because an olive regenerates from its own root and stump and the dated wood is trunk rather than root. That possibility is what the data leaves open, not what the data supports. The trees are a Crusader-era planting, all from one parent, and they are old and genuine as that, and people have prayed among them for eight hundred years. Two other traditions stand within a few minutes' walk and are named here for what they are. The Grotto of Gethsemane has been shown since the Byzantine period as a shelter connected with the night, holds traces of an oil-press installation and Byzantine and later wall painting, and has been in Franciscan hands since 1361. The Tomb of Mary beside it is under the guardianship of the Greek and Armenian Orthodox, with the Franciscans keeping a right of procession once a year, and that tradition is a separate question from this garden. In the valley below stands a row of monumental rock-cut tombs of the Second Temple period, long called Absalom's Pillar, the Tomb of Zechariah and the Tomb of Bnei Hezir. They are genuine funerary monuments of the last century BC and the first century AD. The names attached to them are medieval and are not archaeological identifications. The Jewish sources light up the scene and are named, dated and placed. The Mishnah, the earliest layer of rabbinic law, compiled about AD 200, sets out the Passover night in tractate Pesahim chapter 10: four cups of wine, a dispute between the house of Shammai and the house of Hillel over how far the Hallel is recited before the meal, and the leader completing the Hallel over the fourth cup. The Hallel is Psalms 113 to 118, so on that arrangement the hymn of Matthew 26:30 was the second half of it. These sources are contemporary with and later than the Gospels, and they are strong background rather than a report of what was sung in that room. On the oil, Mishnah Menahot 8:3 makes a correction worth carrying: it names Tekoa as the primary source of oil for the meal offerings, with Regev on the east bank of the Jordan second, and it does not name the Mount of Olives. What it does establish is the framework the 2020 mikveh sits inside, since oil for the sanctuary was graded and had to be produced in ritual purity. That is why a bath would stand beside a press with no house near it. Nothing in this material touches an essential of the Christian faith. The pseudepigraphon 1 Enoch does not name Gethsemane, and neither does any other Second Temple work known to this page. Two verses of Luke's account, the angel and the sweat, stand differently in the manuscript tradition from everything else in this scene, and the site's own word-level text already shows it with double brackets. The papyri P69 and P75, Codex Vaticanus, Codex Alexandrinus, Codex Washingtonianus, the Sinaitic Syriac and the Sahidic Coptic lack the two verses. The first hand of Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Bezae, family 1, the great majority of later Greek manuscripts, the Latin Vulgate, most Syriac versions, Armenian and Ethiopic carry them. Sinaiticus shows the whole argument inside one codex, with the passage written by the original hand, marked by a corrector and restored by a later one, and a group of manuscripts keeps the verses while marking them with the scribal signs for a doubtful reading. Bruce Metzger, reporting the editorial committee's decision, and Bart Ehrman with Mark Plunkett in 1983 hold that the verses were added early against those who denied Christ a real body; Kurt Aland pointed to the instability of the passage in the tradition. Lincoln Blumell in 2014 and Claire Clivaz argue that the evidence fits an early deliberate omission better than an early addition, and Joel Green and Scot McKnight point to the Lukan vocabulary. Both sides agree on one fact: Justin Martyr quotes the sweat like drops of blood about AD 165 and Irenaeus uses it against the Docetae later in the same century, which is earlier than any manuscript on either side. The standard critical editions keep the verses in the text inside double square brackets, and no verdict is stamped here.