Via Dolorosa: Way of Suffering

We did the Via Dolorosa on Saturday, March 25, 2023. I've decided to do this post first because is the one with the most pictures of things that I believe I will start to forget as they are all very historical.

Our tour guide was Ehab, a Jerusalem specialist with a niche in Islam but with a hefty mental database on Judaism and Christianity too. He is also a university lecturer.

We started at Lion's Gate which is the closest gate to the first station of the Via Dolorosa and opens directly into the Muslim Quarter. On the other side of the gate is Al-Aqsa Mosque or Temple Mount.

I heard a lot of stories that day and I wasn't able to record all of them so some of them will have to depend on my faulty memory. So take everything I write with a grain of salt. And please feel free to call me out (nicely) on any mistakes I've made.

But as I recall, Ehab said that this gate was not always called Lion's Gate and that there is some doubt about the carvings being lions. Another name for this gate is the Gate of Tribes and it refers to the twelve tribes of Bani Israel that were descended from the twelve sons of Jacob.

Here are the 14 stations. Some of them are only a few steps away from each other.

The 14 stations indicate where something that is mentioned in the Bible happened from the point of the trial of Jesus all the way to death and burial. Besides the place where the trial happened and the burial, the rest of the points are just commemorative and not meant to be exact locations. But as it is, even the place where the trial happened and the burial have room for debate.

I realized during the walk that that it is impossible to preserve the landscape of history particularly if it was thousands of years ago and the landscape is being actively used. However, even when there are two supposed locations for one event, it is 15 minutes walking distance from each other, less than a mile. For us to be certain that these events took place somewhere within a mile radius, nearly 2000 years later is....astounding.

Almost every station is marked by a church. I don't think I have pictures of each church and I don't remember all of their names. There were a lot.

My memory seems to tell me that we actually didn't start with the first station. We started with the Pools of Bethesda where Jesus cured a paralytic. We didn't go all the way inside. It was crowded and the lines for tickets were long but I've seen pictures and it's the coolest thing ever.

There's a cool story about how the Bible said this pool had five walls and how people argued for ages about what kind of freaking pool has five walls, was it a pentagon or something, and then they found the remains and it's just....a rectangle with a wall down the middle, making it into two sections. Five walls! I laughed at that.

The pools are presumably behind those trees.

Right next to the pools is St. Anne's Church which commemorates where the Virgin Mary was born. If you go inside, there's even a little space that they'll say is where she was specifically born. Probably not real, but an estimation since there are traditions that her parents lived next to the Temple.

Mind you at this point we've moved one minute walking distance away from Lion's Gate. So I'm just assuming that at every step I took something Biblical happened and I'm probably 95% of the time right. A lot of business went down around the Temple.

Shuffle a few steps over and you hit the Church of Condemnation and the Church of the Flagellation. There was a Christian tour group here with a tour guide enthusiastically trying to get the group excited about the difference between flogging and flagellation. I didn't understand what he was getting at and a brief Google search is no more illuminating. Someone tell me if they know.

This is where Jesus was condemned to death, then given the cross, and flogged. There is historical evidence indicating that this really might be where this event happened. Except a fairly recent discovery indicates that perhaps Herod's Palace was 15 minutes away. Back in those days, the Roman governor would come stay with Herod and then step out into the courtyard and give his judgement. There's new archeological evidence that stones were taken from Herod's courtyard and then moved here to build something else which is why they thought THIS was Herod's Palace. Who knows. Let's just say it was around here somewhere.

By the way, Herod was the King of Judea, and Pontius Pilate was the Roman governor for those of you like me who are less familiar with the Bible. (I just committed names to memory and then Googled them later when I had time.)

The place that may or may not be Herod's Palace is now used as a school. This building here:

Ok so now, Jesus has been beaten. He has the cross. He's on the move. Presumably his followers and detractors are on the move. We are no longer shuffling. It's a brisk pace now.

 Some visual on how steep these roads were. And the stones were polished like glass because of all of the millions of feet walking over them all of these years. I'm not saying these stones are from the time of Jesus, but I'm not saying they're not.

Things are going to get kind of hazy in my memory now, because I was trying to keep up with the group, avoid accidentally joining someone else's group, not slip on the slippery slanted stones, and also see what I was supposed to be seeing.

Some older people not from my group but I figured we were all going to the same place:

Found my group:

Church commemorating where Jesus was imprisoned. Might have actually happened here, might not have. (Theme of the day.)

The place commemorating where Jesus met his mother during the walk comes then here is where Simon helped carry the cross for a while.

The place commemorating where Veronica wiped Jesus' face. Apparently, she just popped out of her house to do this which is certainly not how I envisioned it happening. I'd been envisioning a lot of wilderness. This place is either her home or a representation of her home. I have it on good authority that there was no Veronica in the Bible. Google says it might refer to a woman for whom Jesus performed a miracle.

Her house:

This tiny staircase that went up and then down leading nowhere until my friend pointed out there's a door. I didn't notice the door. I did go up and down the stairs. My claustrophobia was ok but there were some people who were not ok.

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher. This is the spot where Jesus is believed to have been crucified, died, and then anointed nearby. His empty tomb is also there. They took that whole space and made it into a giant church.

There are currently 6 denominations of Christians that take care of this church. They are: Catholic, Armenian, Copts, Assyrians, Greek Orthodox, and Franciscan. (Please correct me if I'm wrong about this. I'm getting different information on Google.) I got pictures of two kinds but I don't know who is who. Please tell me if you know.

There is much competition between the various denominations over caretaking of the church and responsibilities are split. For example, one denomination cleans the outside plaza, while the other cleans the staircase but there are arguments about whether the last stair counts as the plaza or the staircase. To keep the arguments at a minimum, one Muslim family was entrusted as doorkeeper and another Muslim family was entrusted as key holder. It's been 800+ years since the same families have been doing this job. Usually they are there at the church but we were unable to meet them that day. 

We kept being told THIS is where the crucifixion happened and then people would point at this part of the church. That's the coveted staircase mentioned above.

Once we got inside, this is what would be pointed at to refer to the place of crucifixion. It did correspond with what was being pointed to outside.

There's a mural depicting the 14 stations. Do you see them all? I don't.

Here's the Anointment Stone. This is representative of the slab upon which Jesus was anointed after death. There are some oils poured over the slab that are the same oils that were used for anointment back then. They smelled very nice. People had brought clothes to rub in the oil and take back home.

By the way, we DO know this slab is not the slab from the time of Jesus. It is purely representative.

 

Back there, behind all of the people, is the tomb. There was no way we could have gotten closer in a reasonable amount of time, so we didn't.

Once outside, on the other side of the courtyard is Masjid Omar. As the story goes, when Jerusalem came under Muslim rule, the various leaders of Jerusalem demanded that the Muslim caliph Omar come get the keys himself. When he arrived, he asked the church leaders for a place to pray and they said he could pray inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Omar was afraid that if he prayed there, Muslims would see this as an indication that they could turn the church into a mosque. To prevent that, he prayed in the courtyard instead where a mosque was later built. 

That was it for the Via Dolorosa. We went to Mount Olives and the Gardens of Gethsemane the next day, so that will be another post. 

The whole experience was striking in a way I can't quite describe. The short distance between the beginning and the end makes you sense what it must have occurred for that walk to have taken a few hours. As you push through the crowds, you can feel the push of the crowds around Jesus. Followers, observers, people who cared, people who didn't. You get a sense of mob. Some of the roads are so narrow that you must walk single file. None is wide enough for more than six people side by side. When you're trying not to fall, you can imagine how easy it would have been for someone who was carrying heavy wood after having been beaten and then being pushed and prodded on all sides to fall. 

As people reenact the walk, as entire groups are on their knees praying or singing in the middle of the street, it's possible to feel the height of emotion and drama this was back then. And since there are palpable politics now, it gives you a great sense of the tension of the politics back then. 

And then you think, despite the theological differences between Jews, Christians, and Muslims, everyone is pretty agreed that these events occurred in some shape or the other. The significance of the death of one man all of these thousands of years later is awe-inspiring.

*I may edit later, but it's mostly all here, now.*