When you walk through the old city in Jerusalem you feel like you are walking through history… or at least the Epcot Center version of it. Pretty much every single event in the Bible is accounted for here. You can visit where Jesus stayed the night in the olive garden of Gesthemane before his death, and then later, where He was imprisoned, now a Greek Orthodox shrine. But then you walk down the street a little more and there’s a sign for a different place called Jesus’ prison, this one run by the Armenians. Hmmm…
You can visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which encloses Golgatha, the hill of Calvary where Jesus was crucified as well as the cave where He was buried. But hold on…there’s another spot a little outside of the city walls that also claims to be the spot where these events took place, that one run by the Protestants. Want to walk the Stations of the Cross? You can do that too, but keep in mind they’ve changed that path around numerous times over the years to accommodate the construction and traffic flow.
So what gives? Basically, all of the holy sites were set up by the first Christian Emperor Constatine’s mother Helena, who built churches 300 years after Christ’s death where many of the events in the Bible were believed to have taken place. These were pretty much all destroyed by the Persians, rebuilt by the crusaders, destroyed by the Ottomans, rebuilt, destroyed etc.. In modern times, all of the different denominations have bought, sold, and renovated the sites and run shrines there. There’s really not much to see, other than a church built on the place they say something important happened. The city was rebuilt so many times, that the current city is built some 50 feet on top of the remains of anything from Jesus’ time. So basically you take everything with a grain of salt. Things may not have happened exactly where they say it did, but it is still interesting to walk around knowing that a lot of those events happened somewhere nearby, and with a little imagination, you can still enjoy walking at least somewhat close to history.