No Calvary in Ancient Jerusalem
By Pinchas Shir
You might be surprised to find, that there was no place called Calvary in ancient Jerusalem. You can search all over and you will not find it. You will not find it in any of the gospel passages, describing how Jesus was executed. Mark, Matthew and John all mention Golgotha - a word which according to them translates as “the place of the skull”. Luke also mentions the “skull place” too without using the original Semitic name. The gospels say that Golgotha is a Hebrew word, though no one is certain if it was Hebrew, Aramaic or some mixture of the two.
Golgotha was a real place situated somewhere outside the walls of the 1st century Jerusalem, not far from the garden with tombs of Jerusalem’s elite. But the name Calvary, comes from the Latin word calvaria which translates as “skull”. The term was not in use in Jesus’s day and no one called the place where Christ died Calvary then. Only when Jerome created the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible (late 4th century) the word came into gradual Christian use. Today people joyfully sing songs about Calvary but is not even a biblical word. The 1st century inhabitants of Jerusalem and the gospel writers themselves have never heard of a place called Calvary, they however, knew Golgotha.
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