What does Golgotha mean?

A word the Gospels translate

The Gospels were written in Greek, but they keep a handful of words in the language Jesus spoke, usually with a translation attached: talitha cumi, Eloi, Eloi, Rabboni. Golgotha is one of them. Mark and Matthew both write it and gloss it, “that is to say, ‘The place of a skull’” (Matthew 27:33). John puts the translation first:

He went out, bearing his cross, to the place called “The Place of a Skull”, which is called in Hebrew, “Golgotha”,

By “Hebrew” John means the Aramaic spoken in Judea, as when he gives Gabbatha, the Pavement, as a Hebrew name (John 19:13). The Aramaic word is gulgulta; Greek mouths smoothed away one of its l’s. Luke, writing for Greek readers, drops the foreign word and gives only the meaning, Kranion, “The Skull” (Luke 23:33), the word behind English cranium.

An everyday word for a head

The Hebrew cousin, gulgolet, turns up in the Hebrew Bible for the bony head itself, often in grim moments.

A certain woman cast an upper millstone on Abimelech’s head, and broke his skull.

When Jezebel is thrown from a window, those sent to bury her find “no more of her than the skull, the feet, and the palms of her hands” (2 Kings 9:35). The same word counts people the way English says “per head.” The manna is gathered “an omer a head” (Exodus 16:16), and Moses takes the census “one by one” (Numbers 1:2), literally by their skulls. Nothing poetic, then: Golgotha was simply Skull.

From Calvaria to Calvary

When Jerome made the Latin Bible in the late fourth century, he kept Golgotha and rendered the gloss Calvariae locus, the place of a skull. In Luke, with no Aramaic to keep, the place is just Calvariae. Latin calvaria comes from calvus, bald. English took the word from that Latin, and the King James Bible of 1611 uses “Calvary” exactly once, in Luke 23:33; everywhere else it says Golgotha.

The word kept traveling. Churches and cemeteries named Calvary are everywhere. In Brittany, a calvaire is a carved stone crucifixion scene at a crossroads. And in English a lowercase calvary can mean any ordeal of suffering.

Why “skull”?

The Gospels never explain the name, and later writers offered three answers:

• The shape. Perhaps a bare, rounded knob of rock. The pilgrim from Bordeaux who came in 333 called it “the little hill of Golgotha,” an early step toward “Mount Calvary”; the Gospels call it only a place. Cecil Frances Alexander’s children’s hymn of 1848 made it “a green hill far away, without a city wall,” where without means outside.
• Executions. Jerome thought it was named as the place where the condemned were beheaded.
• Adam. Origen, in the third century, reported a Hebrew tradition that Adam was buried there, so the blood of the cross fell on the first man’s skull. Jerome called that reading pleasing to the ear but not true. Painters loved it anyway, which is why a skull so often lies at the foot of the cross.

Where the place actually was, and why it now stands inside the Old City walls, is a separate question: where was Jesus crucified?