Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Jesus's agony at Gethsemane probably wasn't at all what you think it is. So archaeology has revealed that the suffering in Gethsemane may not have actually taken place in a grove of olive trees like a lot of people think.
But when you understand a more realistic setting for the Garden of Gethsemane, I actually think it opens up some really cool symbolism about Jesus Christ's atonement. So welcome to Informed Saints. I'm Jasmine Rapley. Neil Rapley, Steven Smoot. And today we're joined by a special guest, Matthew Gray. Welcome.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: Hey, thank you. It's great to be here.
[00:00:29] Speaker A: I'm so glad you're joining us today because we are going to be covering this new book, A Place Called Gethsemane, which breaks down the archeology of Gethsemane, but also the scriptural accounts in really cool ways. Now, Matthew Gray is a professor of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University. You have a Master's in archeology from Andrews University, Oxford. You got your PhD at UNC Chapel Hill in Archaeology and Second Temple Judaism or the early history of Judaism. And you're widely published in the field of archaeology, the early history of Judaism and Judaism, Jesus's Jewish and Roman context. And you supervise an active archaeological site in Galilee, right?
[00:01:05] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:01:05] Speaker A: Okay. So you are the person to go to when it comes to Jesus in archeology. So when I think of Gethsemane, so Jesus has the Last Supper, the disciples in him go over across the Mount of Olives, and he goes and prays and suffers in Gethsemane before getting arrested. When I envision that, I always think of Jesus praying at a rock surrounded by olive trees, because that's how it's depicted in a lot of Christian and Latter Day Saint art. That's just my natural default. So the question is like, is that what really happened? What assumptions are we maybe baking into that picture right there?
[00:01:35] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, that's a great question. Thanks for asking and thanks for having me. It's really wonderful to be with you. Well, I think you said it exactly right. I think that for most modern readers of the Bible, and that includes Latter Day Saint readers of the Bible, I think for the most part, when we read these stories and think about them, we're most often informed not by any kind of historical or archaeological realities. We're more informed by modern art and sometimes modern film. So we're far more used to the way in which artists in the, say, the European Renaissance and Onward or films of the 20th century have depicted these scenes.
And usually that's kind of the default way we imagine it. And so I think you're right. I think actually, since the Middle Ages, really, traditional art of Gethsemane has always depicted Jesus kneeling next to a rock, partially because one of the traditional sites on the Mount of Olives that's venerated with Gethsemane is in fact a rock called the Rock of Agony. And so there's been a long standing tradition of Jesus kneeling next to a rock that you can still see in the modern Church of All nations. And just the general sense that it's a garden of some kind. So I think artists have always imagined that just it's a garden with a rock, Jesus is praying. And then that scene had been replicated in films of the 20th century. So I think that's for most people, the default imagination.
[00:02:48] Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, even the kind of garden that people envision has been influenced by, like, their own.
Like their own backyard, I guess, quite literally. Right. Like, what does, you know, mid 20th century English garden.
[00:03:01] Speaker A: Right.
[00:03:01] Speaker C: Is like how you might get it depicted or described Sometimes.
[00:03:04] Speaker B: Sometimes you'll see these white picket fences.
Exactly.
[00:03:08] Speaker A: Though, like, really not even just like the archeology, but even the phrase garden of Gethsemane, like, where does that even come from in the scriptures?
[00:03:15] Speaker B: Right. Yeah. So there's obviously a lot to unpack here between how archaeology can help us understand it and also even where the phrase itself comes from and. And what the phrase itself could tell us about it. So maybe we could start with the phrase. So the phrase garden of Gethsemane is a fascinating one. We've traditionally used it for a long, long time. But the fascinating thing is actually that phrase doesn't appear as a phrase in the text of the New Testament Gospels. That phrase comes from a conflation of Matthew and Mark, who use the word Gethsemane. Jesus went to a place called Gethsemane, and. And the Gospel of John's account of the arrest of Jesus, where he says that Jesus went to a garden. And so over the centuries, there was eventually a conflation of those two where we just combined John's garden with the synoptic Gethsemane. And thus we just say the garden of Gethsemane, which is fair. I mean, probably referring to the same location.
But technically speaking, that phrase doesn't appear in the text. So what happens is, over the centuries, artists, filmmakers, start to imagine Jesus in a garden that's simply called Gethsemane. But in the hundred or so Years, work, exploration, and eventually archaeological excavations in the land of Israel, Palestine, have actually started to really understand how ancient oil press, olive press facilities worked, which is exactly what we would expect to find, because the name Gethsemane from Mark and Matthew's account actually means the place of the oil press. Right. Gat means to press or to crush, and shemin is the oil. So a Gethsemane seems to be an agricultural facility where they would harvest olives and press the olives to extract the oil. Thus, a Gethsemane or an oil press and then use oil for all the things that it's used for in the first place.
[00:05:05] Speaker A: And a lot of people just still hear that and are like, oh, yeah, Gethsemane means oil press. But like, we're still in a garden of olive trees. Close enough.
[00:05:12] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. And that's where the archeologists come in. So starting in the early 20th century, as Western scholars and explorers started to ask more academic and historically interested questions in the land of Palestine, especially some early German scholars, like in the early 20th century, there was a scholar named Gustav Dahlmann who was really interested in just kind of the mechanics of how bread production and wine production and oil production would have worked in antiquity. And so in the early 20th century, for the first time, scholars started asking the question, how did these types of facilities actually function? What did they look like? How did an oil press like Gethsemane actually work? And so starting at that time, scholars started to develop ideas about what these processes would have looked like. But then, starting in the mid to late 20th century, as archaeology in the region really started to blossom and started to uncover dozens and dozens of sites that turn out to be ancient agricultural facilities.
Starting in that late 20th century period, archeologists started to get a really clear view of how an ancient oil press facility would have looked like and how it would have worked from the time of Jesus and from other times of the biblical period as well. So it's those archeological excavations that have really given us a good sense of how this type of setting would have looked, how it would have functioned. And once we can understand that, I think that gives us a very new and kind of fresh lens through which we can view the gospel narratives of Jesus spending that last night in Gethseman.
[00:06:45] Speaker A: So what have we discovered on the Mount of Olives that can kind of flesh out the archeological picture of Gethsemane for us?
[00:06:50] Speaker B: Yeah, when Mark and Matthew, our earliest Gospel accounts of this story, when they tell us that Jesus went after the Last Supper to the Mount of olives to a place called Gethsemane. As we said, the word Gethsemane is a Greek transliteration of two probably Hebrew words, right? Gat, meaning to press or to crush, and shemin, meaning the oil. So that's our clue that what we're looking at is an oil press facility. And those types of facilities are now well, well attested throughout the land of Israel, Palestine. And so based on these archeology discoveries of these types of sites, we now know that a Gethsemane or an oil processing facility, actually has several components to it. One would be an orchard of olive trees. And all throughout the land of Israel, Palestine, Olives, of course, was a major crop and a major production, major resource.
And so we know that all throughout the land we had orchards of olive trees being cultivated. Sometimes it would just be in and open fields and rows of olive trees like we'd imagine today. But a lot of times, because Jerusalem is located in the Judean hill country, it's very hilly. It's very hilly. You don't have the nice flat plains to lay out a more traditional orchard that we would understand. So to take advantage of the landscape, often in this Judean hill country, we now know that they would create a terracing system that goes up the slopes of the hill, a terracing system where you had retaining walls and then just layers going up where you could have rows of olive trees kind of ascending the hillside. And it would be that row of olive trees on these terraces that would then be harvested during the fall, the fall season. So when the olives are ripe, ready to harvest during the fall season, late September, early October, into November, ish, at that point, all the workers are going to descend onto that orchard of olive trees, the agricultural space or the garden.
And there they would pluck the olives, they would beat the branches and let the olives fall, or they'd climb up in ladders and pluck the olives.
They might wash them there on the.
But that's only the first step. So the idea of a garden or an orchard of olive trees is only one part of a much more complex process of extracting the olive oil.
So what archaeology has now shown us is that after the workers would harvest the olive trees, they would then bring those olives in baskets down to a facility that was the actual oil press.
And in that facility, which by the way, is often with kind of indoors, it's some kind of indoor facility. The reason being that once you start processing the olives, once you start extracting the oil, you really want it to all be done in a more climate controlled environment, because as you know, in Israel, Palestine, days are very hot, nights can get really chilly. And that type of fluctuation in temperature and climate can really wreak havoc on your oil production. And so typically, to actually process the olives and extract the oil, you would have to create some kind of indoor facility to do that type of work. And sometimes it would just be man made structures. But in the hill country, you would often take advantage of caves. Exactly. You take advantage of natural caves, where if there was a natural cave that was just part of the sloping hill, you could actually repurpose that cave. You could have workers go in there and carve out the backside to make more room. Then you could bring in the implements that are necessary to actually process the olives and the olive oil. And that's exactly what we see in excavations throughout the entire region. So usually there would be an orchard of olive trees, usually on step terraces, but then the facility itself would often be inside of a grotto, a repurposed cave.
[00:10:24] Speaker D: And it's right there next to the orchard. Right.
[00:10:26] Speaker B: Usually right there adjacent to the orchard, so that workers could go immediately from the trees over to the facility. And these facilities typically have a number of shared common features. One is usually a large circular crushing basin about the size of this table, where you could dump the olives into this crushing basin and through a large grinding wheel, you could wheel that around and around, over and over and over again, literally crushing the olives that you've harvested. And in that crushing, which ends up happening is the olives turn into this. Like a mash, almost like a pulp. Like a pulp, almost. Yeah, exactly. With that heavy weight just going around and around. And so once that's done, either by animal labor with donkeys, or just human labor as servants are moving, I'm just
[00:11:14] Speaker C: thinking about how huge and how much
[00:11:17] Speaker B: force it would take.
[00:11:17] Speaker C: If we're talking something the size of this table, wow.
[00:11:20] Speaker B: It's a significant amount of work. And that's really only the first step of processing the olives. Once you've crushed the olives, you now have them in a pulpy mash. Then the workers will have to go in and scoop out the mash from the basin and put them into a series of small bags made of kind of thin rope called frails. And once you fill up these frails with the olive mash, you then bring those frails, the olive mash, you bring that over to the next implement, which is a press, which is the actual oil press. And in the time of Jesus, the most standard type of oil press is what is called a beam press, which you have a large wooden beam that's anchored into the wall of the facility, like the back wall of the cave, perhaps. There's a little niche on the wa. You anchor the large beam into that niche, and you stack the frails, the rope bags, underneath that press.
And then through applying a massive amount of weight through large stones, either that you're hanging on the end of the beam or that you're using with a winching system to take advantage of the weight of these stones, you're basically then lowering the beam, exerting an enormous amount of pressure onto the bags that had been stacked up underneath. And as that pressure is exerted, the individual pores of the bag open up and the oil starts oozing out the side. So that mash is being pressed, the oil is oozing out of the side into a cut basin below the press that then serves as a receptacle. Right. You're collecting the oil now that is oozing out of the bags, and you press those several times, Then you remove the bags and do the whole process again. And as that basin underneath gets filled with the olive oil, which initially comes out still with some pulpy material in it, so you need to let it settle a little bit. When it first comes out, it's like a dark brownish color that kind of comes out. And then as the pulpy remains settled to the bottom of that basin, then you've got that nice, clear olive oil on top. Then workers take jugglets and will scoop out the oil from the basin, put it into large storage jars, store those jars in a storage room somewhere in the facility. And that's the.
There you go. After you've got your storage, your supply, at that point, you then have to bring it out to the market or to the temple distribution, et cetera. So there's a whole large complex process that we never would have guessed before the 20th century, because it's archaeology that's uncovered for us how that process works. And once we can see how that process works, we now have a much broader sense of what we would expect to find in a place like this.
Exactly right. Where you have an orchard of olive trees on the terraces, the facility with the press. And all of a sudden, that opens up some fascinating possibilities as to how we could read the Jesus story and what we might now want to look for if we were to visit the site of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives today.
[00:14:17] Speaker A: So if we would expect to find a facility of some kind in a place like Gethsemane, do we find that there?
[00:14:24] Speaker B: In the case of Gethsemane, if we're looking for that site since the 4th century, the beginnings of Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land, it's pretty clear that it's on the western slopes of the Mount of Olives. And the Mount of Olives is not massive. It's not an infinite amount of space. That could be the possibility. So we actually, in this case, do have a fairly narrow window of space that we could imagine. And since the 4th century, Byzantine pilgrims had imagined that there's this location just on the kind of the lower part of the western slope of the Mount of Olives, right across from the Temple Mount, that since the 4th century, had been venerated as the location where Jesus and the disciples go, where Jesus utters his prayer, where he's arrested, and so forth. And so since the 4th century, there have been two features on the Mount of Olives that pilgrims have venerated.
One has been a grotto, where it is a natural cave that had been repurposed and since the Byzantine period had been turned into a chapel where pilgrims could, you know, remember, commemorate some of the stories of Jesus in Gethsemane. And then right across the street from that grotto, from that cave, is an area that a church had been built up to also commemorate the story. And over the centuries, that church, which today is called the Church of All nations, is a church that encased both an outcropping of bedrock, hence the idea that Jesus was kneeling next to a rock. And on the grounds of that church, over the centuries, the owners of the land have planted eight olive trees. Probably sometime they were planted in the Middle Ages. And ever since, that's been the place where tourists and pilgrims go to to think about Gethsemane.
[00:16:03] Speaker A: It's a beautiful place and like the garden.
And so you can see how that can really help connect spiritually and imaginatively to those stories.
[00:16:13] Speaker B: No question about it. And so, yeah, it is a wonderful place to visit. It's a beautiful church. Those traditional sites themselves are enriching and inspiring and all that.
Today, I would say, between those two sites, most pilgrims go to the church and just take a look at the eight old olive trees. And depending on who their tour guide is, might be told that these go back to the time of Jesus, or
[00:16:34] Speaker A: they witnessed it, maybe not.
[00:16:37] Speaker B: And sadly, that's actually not the case case. They seem to have been planted in the Middle Ages, but no beautiful Place to go. Very few pilgrims, especially Western Protestant and Latter Day Saint tourists, go to the grotto across the street.
Historically that had been a Catholic chapel, Franciscan chapel, and so more Eastern Orthodox and Catholic Christians do tend to visit that grotto. But that's what you would see if you go to the site today. And so now, in light of the questions of archeology and the evidence that we have for how these things work, the. The really next question is, so what can we say about the site?
And it turns out, obviously there's so many details we could go into, and if you want to unpack certain specifics, we can. But generally speaking, I would say this. I'd say that based on the archeological evidence, there really is not a lot of strong connection between the church and the eight old olive trees that actually probably was in an area that had some first century tombs, which would probably disqualify that whole side of the road.
[00:17:33] Speaker D: Probably not. Yeah. Hang around a graveyard if you're a pious first century Jew.
[00:17:38] Speaker B: Exactly. And that's part of how we can start to narrow our location is based on the attested features on the mount from the first century. We can start doing a bit of a process of elimination. If we know that there are tombs in that area of the church and further to the south, and we know that there are other tombs quite a bit further to the north, that does start to open up a space where there are no tombs. And it turns out that that space where there are no tombs has some really interesting features that from an archaeological perspective are very intriguing. And I don't want to over sensationalize or over claim, but basically on the north side of that road that separates the church from the cave, on the north side of that road, really just a little bit to the south of the Orson Hyde Gardens. Right. If you've ever been there, in between the church and the Orson Hyde Gardens, basically we have some features that really are telling. I think one feature is, for example, it does seem that since antiquity, that zone on the Mount of Olives did have, in fact, terraces of olive altars. Yeah, exactly Right. And those terraces are visible with some of the earliest photographs. And just in the last few decades, the Israel Parks Authority have kind of, you know, tightened those things up a little bit almost some way reconstructed the terraces. And so today you can get really nice sense of that one space. We've got rows of terraced olive trees that probably do go back to antiquity. So that is a very intriguing candidate for where the garden could be, where the agricultural space could be but then we also have the grotto. And I know that as Western tourists, Protestants, Latter Day Saints, we often are so dismissive of sites that are cherished by our Catholic and Greek Orthodox friends that a lot of. I think a lot of Western tourists just hadn't even paid attention to the grotto. But as it turns out, the grotto might itself be the linchpin to the entire site.
And that is because we now know that it's exactly that type of grotto, that type of natural cave that was repurposed to actually produce and process the olives and the olive oil. So there's a whole fascinating story about this grotto. For years, it had just been a pilgrimage chapel.
And then in the 1950s, so the winter of 1955, 1956, there was a torrential downpour. If you've been to Israel in the wintertime, you know that you'll just get these torrential rains. And in that winter of 1955, 1956, one of these torrential downpours actually flooded the chapel that was in that grotto. And so the whole chapel was damaged. And the Franciscan order realized they needed to clearly renovate and restore the chapel.
But that flood actually gave the Franciscan order an opportunity to do all the things you would need to do to renovate the chapel, like pull up the floors and remove the medieval altars and to kind of just do all that stuff.
And in the process, they also recognized a very rare opportunity to bring in a brief archaeological team, bring in an archeological team for a brief excavation of what's underneath the chapel floors, what would have been the features of the original grotto, quickly excavate them, quickly uncover them, quickly document them, and then cover all of it back up with the floor and the features that we would now see if we went to the cave. So it's a fascinating story. The archaeologist that they had asked to do that quick salvage excavation was a Franciscan who was also an archaeologist named Virgilio Corbeau. And as it turns out, a lot of what he found dating to the first century did seem to confirm that that grotto was in fact, used as an olive press facility adjacent to the terraces, which are right outside the cave.
[00:21:10] Speaker A: So what kind of things would indicate that it was an olive press?
[00:21:13] Speaker B: Yeah, so Corbeau found two or three items that he thought in the 1950s really did seem to be connected to an oil press.
Probably the most important thing that he found, that he recognized was that right in the back of the cave, kind of where the altar is in that grotto area, Today, on the east wall was a niche in the wall that had the exact same dimensions, features, wearing height and everything that we'd expect to find for an oil press facility where you had the niche anchoring the beam for the press.
And even though obviously the beam and the ropes and all the other features had long since deteriorated, he found just enough to suggest that, that this really does seem to be where an oil press, a beam press would have been anchored into the wall. And with that observation, he then noted that there's a water reservoir that he suggested was a cistern. And he pointed out a few other features. But altogether it really did feel like this is what you'd expect to find at an oil press facility that we're now starting to uncover all over the area. And so this is where my work comes into the picture.
What I've tried to do in the last 15, 20 years, just because I've always had an interest in this site, is we can now take his reports, Corbeau's excavation reports, and now re evaluate them in light of more recent discoveries of oil presses at other sites. At other sites. And so in that process, what I've tried to do is re identify different features that he uncovered. And in some cases I think he accurately interpreted, I think he's correct about the niche for the beam press.
Clearly he did find a water basin of some kind.
But I've now tried to reinterpret these different features in light of what we now know, and in the process have tried to give a necessarily tentative reconstruction of what that grotto probably looked like and how it actually functioned in the time of Jesus. And if that reconstruction is even close to being correct, then I think what that does is give us a really nice profile of what that space looked like in the time of Jesus. What the orchard of olive trees would have looked like, Grotto itself, the Gethsemane itself may have looked like. And again, not trying to be sensationalistic and over claim things, but there's not a lot of alternative candidates on the Mount of Olives for that type of arrangement. And so I think this might be one case where we have a reasonable probability that we might actually have the location.
[00:23:39] Speaker D: No, I agree. From reading your material, it seems as good, as viable a candidate as any others, if not better for the actual, potentially the actual site where Jesus suffered as described in the Gospel.
[00:23:49] Speaker B: Yeah, and I should point out, by the way, that even though I have done a significant amount of work on this, that I have built on the work of other scholars, so I Don't want to give the impression that I'm the first one to ask this question.
A colleague of ours, Joan Taylor, has done some wonderful work, and back in the 90s, I think she was maybe the first one to revisit Corbeau's reports and just kind of give some general assessments of the reports. And that is what helped catch my attention to the site.
[00:24:14] Speaker C: I do think it's really instructive on the tentative nature of it that like, in the particular case we're talking about, like, you couldn't have more ideal circumstances. Well, if you had an. Had Byzantine churches built on top of. I suppose, but. But like, the narratives are clear enough that like, we have a pretty confined, as you mentioned, a pretty confined geographical range of locations of where this must have taken place. From a historical standpoint, you couldn't have more ideal circumstances for an archaeologist to go in and say we can identify where it is. And yet we, we still have to be careful about over claiming what we can.
[00:24:46] Speaker B: Really. Yeah, Short. Short of an inscription over the cave. Jesus was here. The place called Gethsemane.
[00:24:50] Speaker C: Right.
[00:24:51] Speaker B: Jesus was here.
Short of that, we do have to be cautious, but I think in some cases we can be reasonably optimistic as well.
[00:24:57] Speaker C: What I'm wondering, maybe now is a good time to transition to talking about now that we have that. How does understanding all of this maybe illuminate what we read in the Gospel accounts?
[00:25:11] Speaker B: So I'll just. Obviously there's so much we could do here. I'll probably start by saying that it's important to note, by the way, that four different gospel accounts, they do all share some similarities and they all share some significant differences.
So this is not like it's just archaeology and the Bible. It's actually the archaeological site in conversation with four different accounts. And we're always kind of trying to triangulate without trying to artificially harmonize. So there's very. Just careful work that we want to do there. But generally speaking, yeah, I think that if you look at the earliest accounts of Jesus last night, Mark and Matthew, you have a story of Jesus and the disciples going to.
From the Last Supper across the Kidron Valley to the Mount of Olives into a place called Gethsemane. And that's where the disciples fall asleep. It says that Jesus goes in a little further and there he utters his prayer in agony. And actually Mark and Matthew don't use the word agony, but just he's clearly suffering. He's anticipating his death on the cross the next day. And it's In Mark and Matthew that Jesus utters this just iconic prayer, Father, remove this cup from me. But nevertheless, not what I want, but what you want. And so clearly there's a suffering, this prayer, this very, very kind of human moment.
[00:26:23] Speaker D: We see pathos in this.
[00:26:24] Speaker B: Very much so, yeah. That's the earliest accounts of Mark and Matthew and they really do focus on this place called Gethsemane.
And then you move on to Luke. And Luke shares the same basic synoptic framework, adds a few details that are not in Mark and Matthew. It's Luke that actually kind of downplays a little bit the disciples falling asleep. He kind of downplays a little bit the suffering of Jesus. And I know that sounds a little odd, but Luke's account does in fact talk about. He adds this detail of an angel came to strengthen him.
Jesus was in agonia in Greek, there's some kind of agony and he was sweating as if it were great drops of blood. Right. So he has a story that I know to modern readers might seem like it's amping up, intensifying the suffering. But. But I think if we wanted to unpack this, we can. But I think what Luke actually is doing there is actually just the opposite. I think he's in a 1st century Greco Roman context, which is his cultural background. Yeah, that's who he's writing to. That's who he's writing to.
[00:27:24] Speaker C: That's his audience.
[00:27:24] Speaker B: He uses a cluster of images and even vocabulary that actually wouldn't call to their mind intensifying suffering, but actually calls to their mind something more like an athlete getting ready for the great competition, an athlete getting ready for the great contest and all that cluster of an attendant strengthening you the word agonia, which we hear that word agony and we think, oh, he's suffering. But in the Greco Roman context, that literary context, that's more like the anticipation of an athlete getting ready to hyping himself up for the race start, hype himself up and even the heavy sweat, which Luke uses as a simile. Right. So Luke doesn't literalize it. He doesn't say that Jesus does sweat drops of blood. He says his sweat was heavy. And then he uses that word hos in Greek as if it were great drops of blood. And all of that to a Greco Roman.
[00:28:12] Speaker A: Yeah, the Latter Day Saint bleeding from every pore more comes from the Book of Mormon in the Doctrine of Covenants.
[00:28:17] Speaker B: Exactly. So that's our unique Latter Day Saint vantage point from modern restoration scripture. But from a 1st century Greco Roman context that would have Been Luke's audience really does seem to be the story of Jesus is getting ready for the great conflict and the. The attendant is there to strengthen him. He's sweating and then he gets up and now is ready to face that competition, that contest with sin and death, which he does then in the next few hours on the cross.
So that's the synoptic tradition.
[00:28:45] Speaker C: On the subject of Luke, though, there was something you were talking about when you were talking about the oil press itself that I thought maybe was a pretty striking image is you talked about the bags being stacked up and you talked about the oil coming out of the pores of the bags. And I immediately thought of the sweating as it were, great drops of blood and maybe there a visual image. And I don't know how much, because Luke, like you said, he's kind of coming from a Greco Roman context.
[00:29:08] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:29:08] Speaker C: So I don't know how much he would have been tying that in, but I just thought, wow, that's kind of
[00:29:13] Speaker D: a. I thought the exact same thing, Neil.
[00:29:14] Speaker B: That is an interesting image. So interesting. The interesting response to that is that Luke, as it turns out of the Synoptic Gospels, is the one who removes the name Gethsemane.
[00:29:24] Speaker C: Yeah, that's true.
[00:29:26] Speaker B: So Mark and Matthew say, go into a place called Gethsemane. Luke removes the image of an oil press and just simply says that Jesus went to the place, removing the oil press imagery. And so as a result of that, it does raise the question, did Luke intend that symbolism in his first century context? And the answer there might be maybe not. But having said that, clearly in the modern commentary tradition, the conflation or the configuration of the oil press, Luke's description of bleeding from every pore, especially when we add Latter Day Saint scripture onto that of doctrine and Covenants 19 Mosiah 3, where Restoration Scripture does seem to literalize it to some extent and then add a major kind of theological weight to that episode. So it's been very natural, I think, for modern Latter Day Saints, and I'll emphasize modern. This has really been only an interpretive move, I think last like 50 years, since the 1980s. I know that sounds strange, but if you, if you actually do the legwork to try to understand the interpretive tradition here, I really think it was with. I think it starts with Truman Manson, where Truman was one of the first to start putting all these pieces together for a Latter Day Saint. The Markan and Matthian image of Gethsemane, the Luke idea of the sweating blood, the Latter Day Saint theology of Jesus sweating blood. And then now that in the 1980s, now that we know how oil presses work, Truman then added that. And that's exactly what we would see in an oil press. Jesus is the olive being crushed and he's like the frails bleeding from every pore.
[00:30:58] Speaker A: And you see like Marion G. Romney and Bruce, like lean into that a lot.
[00:31:02] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:31:03] Speaker A: It's very important for a lot of new saints, the garden, so that we put a lot of theological emphasis and it's very important. But yeah, if you go back to like Joseph Smith's first writings, he emphasizes more like the passion of the sacrifice
[00:31:15] Speaker D: of cross, the cross as crucifixion. John Hilton iii, our friend and colleague, has written on this and others that, yeah, this idea of refocusing on the cross as a place of atonement as much as the garden and the interplay between. Cause there's two locations where this plays out.
[00:31:28] Speaker A: And that's not to like, discredit or downplay either one, because we believe in ongoing revelation. We believe that, you know, Gethsemane is a beautiful, theological, important place for us. But I love that different emphasis of like Luke maybe playing with athlete imagery like, as you were describing that I'm like, oh, I'm like feeling very empowered. Like this is not like the Savior of suffering, though that was true as well. Like Luke is portraying a savior of being ready to conquer death and being ready to conquer. Conquer sin. And that is an inspiring image as well. And we just get so many beautiful reflections of the Savior through different gospels and lenses.
[00:32:00] Speaker B: Exactly. Including through the modern Latter Day Saint lens. So I'm not sure I would never want to dismiss those beautiful connections. That's a beautiful, inspiring Latter Day Saint way, given our resources to envision this moment. And so I wouldn't want to dismiss that. But I think what you said is exactly right. I think that what we can do is layer our texts, layer our understandings, and just enjoy the richness of all the layers. So I don't think it takes away from a Latter Day Saint experience at Gethsemane to recognize that for his audience, Luke seems to have had a different image because that image itself is actually really, as you said, inspiring and intriguing. So I think that when we're putting the archeological site into conversation with the texts, we need to remember that there are different texts, I mean, different experiences. And we haven't even talked yet about John's. Should we talk about John's? We can just mention quickly and then maybe we can return back to the. The archaeology and how we can envision the scene.
So John, who's obviously not one of the Synoptic gospels because it really does not look like the others, John reframes the story entirely. Right. John also has Jesus and the disciples leaving the room of the Last Supper, going across the Kidron Valley. Like Luke, John does not use the word Gethsemane.
Instead, John says that they go to a kepos, a garden or an agricultural space. Right. Presumably an olive orchard. And then John goes right to the story of the arrest of Jesus. And John completely reframes the whole encounter, right? Where Judas leads the arresting party.
Jesus and his other disciples are there at the garden. And when they encounter each other, Jesus. In John's account, Jesus initiates the discussion with the arresting party by saying, who do you seek? And they say, we seek Jesus of Nazareth. And in Greek, John has Jesus responding, ego, e me, right? I am. And in response to this, ego, e me, I am, the whole arresting party falls on the ground, fall backwards.
It's a fascinating story that in context, seems to be related not to Jesus's humanness and his suffering like we saw in Mark and Matthew. John seems to reframe the story. It's almost like it's a revelation of Jesus's divine nature. Yeah, totally. Almost evoking the ego, eh? Me, I am that I am. It's like a theist three.
Exactly. Right. And so that might explain the falling to the ground because, you know, prostration at the utterance of the divine name. And so there's all sorts of rich theology about Jesus's divine nature that John highlights, which is. That's just not an idea.
Completely different framing from Mark and Matthew. And again, it's a matter of layered narratives. They're all great. Right. I love the Markan and Matthian humanness of Jesus literally on his face on the ground, begging the Father to remove the cup and then reconciling his will to the will. That's a beautiful scene in Gethsemane. Luke's athlete story, I think, is a great. And I think John's emphasis of divine nature is powerful too. So these are the four different accounts, all of which I think, in their own way can be put into conversation with the site.
And I know we've gone a little longer now on those accounts, but I think that to then circle back to the site itself, I think the site gives us a much broader range of possibilities of how we can envision each one of these episodes. And again, I don't want to overstate because in this case, the text, I don't think, does allow us to overstate the details of movement. Who goes where and who's doing what are just vague enough accounts that we would not want to overstate. Well, clearly.
[00:35:37] Speaker D: So we can't do a play by play recreation of every step.
[00:35:40] Speaker B: But my sense is, and I'm just throwing this out there as a. As a way to, I think, read the text is with the archeology, we now know that the site is more dynamic. There's a terraced orchard of olive trees. Outside, there's a grotto with the crushing basin and with the beam press and other features. And now I think that gives us some interpretive options. Right? So when Mark and Matthew say that Jesus goes to a place called Gethsemane, sets his disciples up in a certain setting, and then goes in a little further, if Mark and Matthew really are emphasizing the Gethsemane part of the narrative, then I think it's very reasonable to think that they imagine Jesus going into the grotto, going into the gate. That is where the Gethsemane was. That's where the oil press would have existed. So I think it's very possible from their perspectives, to imagine a story where the disciples are set maybe out in the orchard somewhere, maybe out into the entrance of that enclosed olive orchard area, saying them to watch and to pray. And even that idea of watching. Watching for what? Maybe watching for other pilgrims late at night. Privacy, privacy while Jesus goes in a little further.
That seems suggestive to me that maybe he is going into the grotto. And if we do imagine that, I think that opens up some really beautiful interpretive possibilities. Imagine Jesus, his isolation in this grotto, just dimly lit with a few oil lamps and literally among the dormant olive press installations, because the story takes place in the spring, so these wouldn't have been in use, they would have been used in the fall.
But imagine him among the oil press and he's feeling the weight of feeling pressed down.
At some point, Matthew says he feels very heavy. So I think that there's some intriguing details there with the possibility that then when Jesus is done, he comes out and the arresting party shows up, the disciples wake up, and then off we go to the next story. Having said that, if we look at John's account, he doesn't really go into the grotto, he doesn't really go into the grotto. So that seems to emphasize more the garden. And so is it possible then we could flip the narrative where we could imagine, now, maybe they go into this place and maybe the disciples go into the cave, and maybe that's where they're sleeping. And we could talk about why they might have fallen asleep in a grotto like this, if you'd like. And maybe we could imagine Jesus going into the orchard a little further. Maybe he's up among the terraced rows of olive trees and that's where he's praying. So I think there's a couple different ways we could imagine it. But I just love how the archeology opens up new interpretive possibilities that I think can really enrich our imagination, our understanding, our engagement with the story, and as you said earlier, add some of that really nice texture to the story that we wouldn't get otherwise. And I just think it's a really enriching way to read these accounts, especially as we're moving now into Holy Week, thinking about the last week of Jesus life, this type of thing that we've done here for Gethsemane, we can do this for the Last Supper, we can do that for the Crucifixion, we can do it for the tomb and just really understand the accounts in historical context. And, yeah, it's just a wonderful way to approach the text and I think get to know Jesus through the lens or through the eyes of his earliest followers.
[00:38:40] Speaker A: I think that's wonderful. I felt inspired through the minutia of our archeological discussion today and shout out to our friends at Messages of Christ. They've done a video that does a visual reconstruction of this grotto that, like, you help consult with. It's really, really cool. And if you want to learn a lot more, like why the disciples may have been sleeping over at the Mount of Olives to begin with, and a lot more, check out the book A Place Called Gethsemane, written by Matthew Gray and Richard Holzoff.
Remember, you can study deeply and believe boldly. We'll see you next time.
