Ha’aretz, Israel
April 12 2009

Book: Way to crucifixion began in Armenian Quarter parking lot

Where is the real Via Dolorosa?

By Ofri Ilani, Haaretz COrrespodnet

In 29 C.E., the first year of Pontius Pilate as Roman procurator in
Jerusalem, a young Jewish man from the Galilee, who had come to
Jerusalem shortly before, was brought before him. According to the New
Testament, the man, Jesus of Nazareth, had aroused the ire of the
city’s Sanhedrin because of his messianic declarations, and they
turned him over to the Roman authorities on charges of
subversion. Jesus’ trial, which took place around Passover, was short:
when he stood before Pilate, the Roman asked him "Are you the king of
the Jews?" Jesus responded: "It is as you say." According to the
Gospel accounts, after an exchange with the Jews who had gathered
outside the place of Jesus’ judgment, Pilate ordered Jesus crucified.

The place where Jesus’ trial before Pilate was held, the Antonia
Fortress, became one of Christianity’s most sacred sites, and was
eventually identified as the first of the 14 stations of the cross on
the Via Dolorosa, which leads through the Old City to Golgotha – the
place of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial, at what is now the Church of
the Holy Sepulchre, where Catholics celebrate Easter on Sunday.

For the past thousand years, the Antonia Fortress has been pinpointed
at a site in the Muslim Quarter overlooking the Temple Mount from the
north, where the Muslim Ormariyah boys’ school is now located.
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However, an Israeli archaeologist now claims that the accepted
location of the Antonia Fortress north of the Temple Mount is
mistaken, and that the Via Dolorosa is not where tradition has located
it for centuries.

According to Dr. Shimon Gibson of Jerusalem’s Albright Institute, the
site where Jesus was tried by Pontius Pilate and condemned to death is
located near the Old City’s western wall, next to the so-called Tower
of David. Thus, the Via Dolorosa should actually begin at what is now
a parking lot tucked away in the Old City’s Armenian Quarter, where
Gibson has identified the stone pavement (gabbata is the Aramaic word
used in the New Testament) where procurators held their trials. From
there, Gibson says, the real Via Dolorosa continued to where the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre now stands.

The Roman fortress itself was apparently destroyed during Titus’
conquest of Jerusalem in 70 C.E.

Gibson, who presents his arguments in his recently published
English-language book, "The Final Days of Jesus," says the tradition
about the real location of the Via Dolorosa was distorted during the
Crusader era. The Crusaders massacred many of the city’s Muslims, Jews
and Orthodox Christians, leading to the effacing of centuries-old
traditions. The city’s "sacred geography" was reorganized, and a
chapel was built on the site now identified by most people as the
Antonia Fortress. But according to Gibson, excavations at the site
show that the structure that stood there in Roman times was small and
could not have held the palace of the Roman procurators.

However, Professor Meir Ben-Dov, a senior archaeologist who has
excavated in Jerusalem’s Western Wall Tunnel, calls Gibson’s arguments
"utter nonsense." Ben-Dov says the description by the contemporaneous
historian Josephus Flavius "attests like a thousand witnesses that the
Antonia Fortress was located at the corner of the Temple Mount, not
anywhere else. I myself unearthed the foundations of its towers in the
1980s." According to Ben-Dov, Roman soldiers did not enter the Temple
Mount, and therefore the fortress was situated next to it. "Josephus
describes how Roman soldiers stood on the Antonia’s ramparts and
mooned Jewish worshippers on the Temple Mount."

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress