In Jesus's Footsteps 
跟随基督的脚步

Gethseman

 

Gethsemane (Hebrew: גת שמנים‎, Gat-Šmânim; "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.

 

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.

• The Church of All Nations overlooking a garden with the "Rock of the Agony."

• The location near the Tomb of the Virgin to the north.

• The Greek Orthodox location to the east.

• 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."

 

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