Where was Jesus crucified?

What the Gospels say

All four Gospels name the place, and three translate it.

They brought him to the place called Golgotha, which is, being interpreted, “The place of a skull.”

Gulgolta is Aramaic for skull. Luke gives only the translation, “The Skull” (Luke 23:33), which the Latin Bible rendered Calvaria, the source of Calvary. Why a skull? Perhaps a bare, rounded knob of rock; perhaps a place of executions. An old Christian legend said Adam’s skull lay buried there, which is why so many crucifixes and paintings put a skull at the foot of the cross.

The other clues fit together. The place was “near the city” (John 19:20), and Jesus “suffered outside of the gate” (Hebrews 13:12). People passing by mocked him (Matthew 27:39), so it lay beside a road. A garden with a new tomb was close by (John 19:41). That was Roman practice: crucify where the most people will see. Jewish law, too, carried executions outside the camp (Leviticus 24:14).

Why the site is now inside the walls

The traditional site lies deep inside the walled Old City, which puzzles visitors. The walls moved. Jesus’s Jerusalem ended at the so-called second wall. Around AD 41–44 King Herod Agrippa I began a third wall farther north that brought the area inside, and the walls standing today were built by the Ottoman sultan Suleiman between 1537 and 1541. Excavations under the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and its neighbors found an old limestone quarry with first-century tombs cut into its sides: a place outside the city in Jesus’s time.

The Rock of Calvary

Just inside the church entrance, steep stairs climb to the Rock of Calvary, a knob of stone about five meters high that the quarrymen left standing, probably because it was cracked and useless. Through glass panels you can see the bare rock, and a silver disc under the Greek Orthodox altar marks where the cross is said to have stood. Below, in the Chapel of Adam, a crack runs through the same rock. Constantine’s workmen cleared a Roman temple off the area in the 320s because, the historian Eusebius says, it had been built over the holy place (Life of Constantine 3.26). Most archaeologists think local Christians had kept the memory. The tomb and the church’s later history are in Where is Jesus’s tomb?

Skull Hill

In 1842 the German scholar Otto Thenius proposed another Golgotha: a rocky cliff north of the Damascus Gate, outside the present walls, whose hollows look like the eye sockets of a skull. In 1883 the British general Charles Gordon championed it, and some still call it Gordon’s Calvary. Beside it lies the Garden Tomb, a peaceful garden many Protestant pilgrims love. Most archaeologists prefer the Holy Sepulchre, which lay outside the wall in Jesus’s day and whose tradition is far older. Today the cliff looks down on a bus station.

The road there

The Via Dolorosa, the Way of Sorrows, starts near the site of the old Antonia fortress and winds west for about 600 meters to the church, where its last five stations stand. Its route was shaped by centuries of pilgrims. Most historians now think Pilate judged Jesus at Herod’s palace, on the city’s west side, so the real walk probably came from another direction. Either way, it ended at a rock outside a gate, beside a road.