Episode 142: Mark 70 The Mockers, the Passerby, and Where Do We Fit in?

Something that generally goes unnoticed in chapter fifteen is that Yeshua/Jesus has ceased to be the main character, replaced by a multitude of “they” references. He is no longer the actor but the acted upon. What does this have to do with the forces of chaos, evil, sin, and death? And where exactly did the crucifixion take place?

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¹⁶ And the soldiers led him away inside the palace (that is, the governor’s headquarters), and they called together the whole battalion. ¹⁷ And they clothed him in a purple cloak, and twisting together a crown of thorns, they put it on him. ¹⁸ And they began to salute him, “Hail, King of the Jews!” ¹⁹ And they were striking his head with a reed and spitting on him and kneeling down in homage to him. ²⁰ And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the purple cloak and put his own clothes on him. And they led him out to crucify him. ²¹ And they compelled a passerby, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to carry his cross. ²² And they brought him to the place called Golgotha (which means Place of a Skull). 

Did you notice who the star of chapter fifteen is? Yeshua/Jesus? No. Simon of Cyrene, the Libyan who carried the Cross? Nope. It would help if I hadn’t mislead you because I should have asked if you know who the stars are. Who is the action centered around? They. They called. They clothed Him. They twisted a crown and placed it on His head. They saluted and mocked. They struck Him with a reed, spat on Him and knelt before Him. They stripped Him and forced clothing back onto His torn flesh. They led Him to Golgotha. They compelled Simon to carry the Cross. Why the emphasis on others all of a sudden? With very few exceptions, Yeshua has always been the focal point of the narrative but now He has moved into the background and it actually began in last week’s lesson where Pilate, the chief priests, and the crowd command most of the attention. It’s why I entitled last week’s episode, “Pilate, Barrabas, and the Pawn.” In fact, He hasn’t said anything since verse two with His quizzical answer To Pilate’s question as to whether or not He is the King of the Jews, and we won’t hear Him again until verse thirty-four. And yet, despite Yeshua fading somewhat into the background, Pilate uttered the phrase King of the Jews three times; Yeshua is even more damningly contrasted with a violent insurrectionist and murderer who better represented the sort of Messiah they wanted—a violent Messiah who would destroy their enemies, end their taxation and persecution, and make Israel great again. They wanted a nationalistic Messiah, not the sort that loves and brings their enemies into the fold.

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have eight years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids (affiliate link) and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com. If you have kids, I also have a weekly broadcast where I teach them Bible context in a way that shows them why they can trust God and how He wants to have a relationship with them through the Messiah.

All Scripture this week comes courtesy of the ESV, the English Standard Version but you can follow along with whatever Bible you want. A list of my resources can be found attached to the transcript for Part two of this series at theancientbridge.com.

As I touched upon earlier, let’s pay attention to the focus of the narrative—the actions of “they” because that’s who the author of Mark wants us to notice. It’s very deliberate. In the past I have focused heavily on Yeshua and what He is enduring for our sake, and have teachings on that, but it is also important to locate ourselves in the narrative. And although we might like to see ourselves as Simon carrying the Cross, we have to recognize that he was forced to do it by “they” and isn’t exactly a hero—although, he evidently was quite well known to the church later. Mark has no good guys in this narrative and so I believe He wants us to see ourselves very clearly as people who are devastatingly in need of the absolute mercy of God. And one other thing, instead of the long stories we are used to, we’re just going to see a bunch of short little blurbs because the author wants us to see everything from now on in terms of absolute chaos. It’s actually designed this way to produce a sense of powerlessness and anxiety in us as we read it because there is nothing to latch on to before the scenes change. Let’s pick this back up in Mark Chapter 15:16–

¹⁶ And the soldiers led him away inside the palace (that is, the governor’s headquarters), and they called together the whole battalion. 

So, let’s look at some of the Greek words here and the translation choices. Side note—truth is that even though some people think that you can understand everything if you just know the original languages, that is absolutely untrue. It helps, of course, a lot because there are words in Greek and Hebrew that don’t translate well—at least not without a whole paragraph to accomplish it, which we just can’t do. And then there are some words, that when we look at how they translated the Hebrew into the Greek in the Septuagint, a few hundred years before the time of Yeshua, well I think we can see what the author is trying to say and fair warning, I didn’t notice this in any of my commentaries—I just picked it up this morning while looking at the words again. Maybe this is just wishful thinking!! The word translated soldier here is stratiotes  and that word does mean soldier, it’s what we find twenty-six times in the NT, all but one of those in the Gospels and Acts. And it is always translated as soldiers in the NT, but, in the Septuagint stratiotes is only used once—and that is to translate the sort of killing that comes at the end of a spear. It was used, hundreds of years before Yeshua, to translate the killing that comes by way of being pierced (2 Sam 23:8). And I find it no coincidence that it is used in the Gospels to label those who in fact did pierce Yeshua.

Our next word, aules (ow-lays), is going to be translated differently based on where the translator decides the Praetorium is located. If they are among those who believe that the Praetorium (the governor’s headquarters) was in or adjacent to Herod’s palace, then they will translate it as palace, courtyard, or hall but if they believe the Praetorium was at the fortress Antonia overlooking the Temple Mount, then they might use courtyard, court, or hall. It’s really a judgment call among translators and always remember that every translation is also an interpretation because the text is really never entirely crystal clear. Not even in Hebrew and Greek, sorry to say. And even if you do read it in the original languages, you are interpreting it as you read based upon what you do and do not know, your experiences, beliefs, agendas, etc. An objective interpreter is about as real as the tooth fairy or an honest politician. Praetorium (pri-toe-ree-own) is translated as governor’s headquarters, which is what it was so this is just the literal explanation of the word. Speira (spay-rah) is translated several different ways, depending on the specific context but it always refers to this or that specific division of the Roman army—battalion, cohort, band—that sort of thing. Some are more formal and others more ad hoc, thrown together on the spot to do this or that. Obviously, you don’t send a whole battalion every time there is something that needs to be done. Sometimes five is more than enough. This is a good example of why we can’t simply use all the Strong’s words for a specific lemma and just choose which one we want, it’s way more complicated than that.

So, let’s look at this again, And the soldiers—what soldiers?—the ones who had scourged Him right then and there for the crowd to witness. They took Yeshua inside the Praetorium, and they called all their buddies. It says the whole battalion, but this might simply be Pilate’s auxiliary escort which travelled everywhere with him. Think bodyguards. I think it is self-evident that there wasn’t a group of a thousand or five hundred inside the palace or even in the courtyard and this was a festival day and the soldiers were busy trying to keep their eyes out for trouble. We are simply meant to understand the context of what is about to happen here. It isn’t enough for them to have scourged him brutally, naked, in front of the crowds, now they are calling in spectators so that they can have some more fun. And if we think we are nothing like this, we are dead wrong. One of the reasons that social media and YouTube are so popular is that it gives us the opportunity to live vicariously through those who mercilessly mock, demean, and destroy the lives of others without even an iota of regret. People enjoy watching other people get hurt, get made fun of, made fools of, etc. You see here that there were perpetrators and an audience. The first action of they is to call spectators to what they are about to do to Yeshua, on top of what they had already done. I mean, the truth is that none of these guys wanted to be stationed in Judea, and more than just a few of these guys might have been Samaritans—and of course they and the Jews hated one another with a passion.

¹⁷ And they clothed him in a purple cloak, and twisting together a crown of thorns, they put it on him. 

Okay, so here we get into the mockery of a Roman Triumph. Do you remember how the triumphal entry wasn’t all that triumphant because the leaders of the city, the very ones who would be expected to greet their new ruler so that everyone didn’t die horribly, snubbed Yeshua when He entered Jerusalem? Let’s talk about a Triumph and how they are using it to shame Him. So, unlike the Biblical festivals during Temple times, where everything was always performed the exact same way because it was a religious ritual, triumphs could really vary a lot in what they looked like because they were really about honoring a King, or an Emperor, or a General, or whoever, after a victorious battle. At least until the time of Augustus and then all of a sudden no one outside of the Royal Family could be honored in this way. And this was the context of Yeshua’s day, during the reign of Tiberias, the successor to Augustus. Because there were no set rules for triumphs, they could just do whatever amused them. And it amused them because here was this pretender king, rejected by his own priests, who was now at their mercy. Instead of triumphant, He was conquered. Instead of being a judge over His Kingdom (which all kings were) He was judged and condemned.

I am going to point out here that the Jews mocked Him by abusing Him blindfolded and demanding He prophesy as to who was doing it. That’s not the context of this mocking because the soldiers are mocking Him as a failed challenger to Caesar. When we see men in positions of power being relatively unrestrained, they will often go beyond that which is merely cruel as they become accustomed to it. Roman soldiers were notorious for being incredibly creative before and during executions. Power is incredibly compromising. And so they clothed Him in a purple robe, most certainly Tyrian purple, produced in Lebanon from Murex snails. I will link a picture of the different colors in the transcript. A robe like this was very valuable, and Yeshua was bleeding profusely, and just having the robe thrown onto His body immediately after being scourged would have been excruciating and His reaction certainly would have entertained the bored, resentful, Jew-hating soldiers.

And they twisted together a crown of thorns—probably made of acanthus syriacus or date palm—and both of which are just horrifying to think of. It is very unlikely that the person making it came out unscathed. I am linking pictures of both and especially with the date palm thorns, they are also somewhat poisonous and injuries to those who work with them are not uncommon. The “crown” would have had thorns both on the inside and also on the outside. And I put crown in quotation marks because it was more likely designed to look like a laurel wreath of a conqueror, or the radiate or radiant crowns we see in portraits of Alexander the Great or Roman Emperors. With them, it was supposed to signify their divine status, or the divine status of their “father” who was emperor before they were, making them the divi filius, son of god. And this was the claim of Yeshua, to be the son of God—which in their eyes was impossible. If you go and look at these pictures, these crowns are pretty impressive and really big, but not twisted. The fronds went upwards from the head like solar rays and especially when the Roman cult of Sol Invictus became popular in  later centuries but during the time of Yeshua, they were patterned after what was worn by Alexander the Great three hundred years earlier—the last great world empire before the Roman Empire (as far as the Romans were aware of anyway, or cared about).

¹⁸ And they began to salute him, “Hail, King of the Jews!” 

And you might be thinking of the salute we see portrayed in movies and modern art, the one that begins with smacking your right fist against your upper left chest and then extending it like a Nazi salute, with the palm down and the arm outstretched but the truth is that salute isn’t portrayed in any Roman art or described by anyone of the day so it’s very much an invention of an artist in the late 18^th century. Hitler picked it up because the Italian Fascists had started using it in 1923, and as he saw himself as the leader of a new and better Roman Empire, Hitler used a lot of Roman imagery. Anyone going back to the late 19^th century schools here in America would be shocked to see children performing this salute during the Pledge of Allegiance before it was picked up by fascist groups in the early 20^th century (which is why people place their hands over their hearts now). And so we have no idea what this salute looked like but we can imagine that it was the same salute they would extend toward Caesar, only in mockery–mocking a defeated Yeshua as the king of a conquered people. That is, if they were actually saluting Him because the word is only translated as salute just this once in the Gospel of Mark, otherwise it means to greet someone. However, given the context, it is almost certainly appropriate—after all, they were going all out with their theatrics. They usually only had boring people to torment and execute, and so this was a novelty.

The Romans’ ideas about kingship and authority were not very much different than those of the Jews of Judea and Galilee. Kingship and authority were about power and power was about overcoming your enemies, taking vengeance in order to reverse shaming, and humiliating the enemy in order to destroy any memory of him. Do you remember James and John and what they wanted back in chapter 10? ³⁵ James and John, the sons of Zebedee, approached him and said, “Teacher, we want you to do whatever we ask you.” ³⁶ “What do you want me to do for you?” he asked them. ³⁷ They answered him, “Allow us to sit at your right and at your left in your glory.” ³⁸ Jesus said to them, “You don’t know what you’re asking. Are you able to drink the cup I drink or to be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?” ³⁹ “We are able,” they told him. Jesus said to them, “You will drink the cup I drink, and you will be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with. ⁴⁰ But to sit at my right or left is not mine to give; instead, it is for those for whom it has been prepared.” ⁴¹ When the ten disciples heard this, they began to be indignant with James and John. ⁴² Jesus called them over and said to them, “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those in high positions act as tyrants over them. ⁴³ But it is not so among you. On the contrary, whoever wants to become great among you will be your servant, ⁴⁴ and whoever wants to be first among you will be a slave to all. ⁴⁵ For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

No one wants that sort of king and certainly not Americans. Name a President that has been anything like him—all we can do is really comment on how unlike Him they all were and some more so than others. Americans do a lot of talking about the price of freedom being violence but we do not understand how far that attitude is from the first three centuries of the church, where they expected death and persecution and even the Gospels are telling these people to expect it. They had no power until Constantine, and power is very quickly addictive and all of a sudden we wonder how we ever lived without it or why anyone would want to. We are a church frightened of its own shadow because we are used to depending on violence instead of upon Yahweh. Our attitudes and sins are no different in this area than the ancient Israelites who depended on their own chariots and horses and soldiers and whatever allies they could buy and were given over time and again to their enemies because they were more fearful of Babylon and Assyria than they were of snubbing Yahweh. We do not serve a God who tells us to survive but to pick up our crosses and die. Would WWI and WWII have even been world wars if all the Christians refused to take up arms against one another, or against the Jews, or against anyone? The thing is that we have no idea.

America isn’t a Christian country and never really has been. Apart from the persecution, oppression, enslavement, and even slaughter of other image-bearers, our faith is and has always been in our guns and not in our God and although we come up with pithy little mantras to make it out to be serving God by carrying guns and by having as many as possible, the truth is that our faith is very much more in those guns than in God and what He might want us to do instead. Don’t get me wrong, my husband and sons have guns and I am not anti-gun but I am anti-idolatry and the second amendment and guns are most certainly an idol. Just as an experiment once, I posted on social media that the Sermon on the Mount was a million times greater than the US Constitution and that should not have triggered any arguments, but it did. Anyway, back to this week’s lesson—I told you that we are “they”.

¹⁹ And they were striking his head with a reed and spitting on him and kneeling down in homage to him. 

And we read this and we are often so focused on what they are doing to Yeshua that we forget He still hasn’t said anything since speaking briefly to Pilate. There’s nothing more to say. Should He heap abuse on these men who have been reduced to behaving like animals? What about the crowds calling for His crucifixion? They were being manipulated by the chief priests just as they were trapped by their own Nationalistic Messianic expectations. He had already spoken judgement on the power players who were behind this, the only ones who could even remotely be expected to be just in their dealings with Him by right of their priestly office. The others were, quite literally, sheep without a shepherd. There was absolutely no reason for Yeshua to speak because He had long since resigned Himself to Yahweh’s rescue plan for humanity. He was the ultimate Passover Lamb who would conquer peacefully in His own blood—as we see throughout Revelation. Remember that there is no lion in Revelation—one reference to a lion but instead a Lamb shows up. A warrior with a sword for a tongue and who is covered in His own blood before the battle even begins. A true King of kings who is a Savior instead of the power-hungry butcher of their dreams.

So, we have this mock coronation ceremony where they are striking Him on the read with a reed, which could have been anything from a measuring rod to a flogging baton, to the pole for a vexillium, (a military standard)—given the setting, a military baton seems most likely as they would all carry one while in the service of Pilate. The spitting seems indicative of the mock anointing of an incoming monarch, and of course, they were on their knees and bowing before Him, calling Him the King of the Jews—how ironic that in the end, every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that He is Lord (Isaiah 45:23). Despite how weak He appears here, this actually takes more strength than anyone has ever been required to show. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth. Like a lamb led to the slaughter and like a sheep silent before her shearers, he did not open his mouth (Isaiah 53:7). I haven’t spoken of it in quite a while but remember that Mark is showing Yeshua to be the Yahweh-Warrior of Isaiah in addition to the Suffering Servant of the Lord. He is a warrior who conquers our true enemies, the enemies of Israel and the world, sin and death, by taking a fall.

²⁰ And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the purple cloak and put his own clothes on him. And they led him out to crucify him.

We haven’t done a Markan sandwich in quite a while but this is one here. Remember that in a Markan sandwich, you have three sections where the two outer sections are related but where they both need the middle section in order to be understood. The mocking of Yeshua as king is finished at this point, and in verse 39 the Centurion will declare Him the Son of God, divi filius, a title reserved for Caesar.

As embarrassed as the Jewish believers in the audience were as chapter fourteen was being read aloud, appalled at the injustice and brutality that their faith was designed to eradicate and yet was being perpetrated in the name of maintaining first-century Jewish hopes, this would be hard for the Roman Gentiles in the audience and especially those who were citizens and/or wealthy and living off of the oppression inflicted by the Empire on the surrounding provinces, including the Syrian province where Judea was located. No one is feeling culturally superior or proud, no matter where or to whom this is being read. They understand full well who “they” is. They are the crowds, they are the priests, they are the Romans. They are sitting listening to this horrifying injustice and maybe they believe they would have done differently but when even the Twelve have abandoned Him, indeed everyone except a handful of women, who can credit themselves with delusions of behaving any better? Certainly, having all been partakers of the New Creation life, many of them would remember full well who they were and how inured to violence and suffering they had been under Roman rule (not that it was better anywhere else, mind you, the Romans were just more efficient about it). How about you? I remember who I was.

I guess they tired of playing with Yeshua as though they were pulling legs off a bug or tormenting a trapped animal, and especially since He wasn’t begging or groveling, or maybe they were just on a tight schedule or maybe the crossbeam arrived and they wanted to get going before it got too hot and the crowds in the street were just too thick with everyone being there for the Festival. They ripped the cloak off of Him and put His own clothes back on, which would have been beyond excruciating over his ripped flesh front and back, probably from head to toe. And it says they led Him out to crucify Him as though it was an afterthought, something casual. Remember, these vignettes in Mark 15 are very disjointed and chaotic. The other Gospels go into more detail but Mark is really going to great lengths to show how chaos has surrounded the Servant, the Yahweh-Warrior, the Arm of the Lord. It’s as though the entire world of sin, death and evil has taken over Jerusalem and is determined to kill the Son of God. Because that is exactly what is happening here. There are no reminders of what Scripture promised about the Messiah, no quotes. It feels surreal because it is. It feels unbliblical, for lack of a better term. It reads as though God has lost and the forces of evil have won. There is no hope in reading this account and remember it was the very first Gospel written. They didn’t have the others with the quotes and reminders that it will all be good in the end. It’s just dark and frustrating. And they just take Him to be crucified as they are talking about taking Him anywhere else in the world, as though this was normal.

²¹ And they compelled a passerby, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to carry his cross. 

Yeshua was likely struggling to even walk without the Cross. There is no way that these soldiers who mocked Him so brutally hadn’t also probably beaten Him to within an inch of His life. He would have been bleeding, the pain would have been unimaginable. Lugging a crossbeam would have been difficult for a man who wasn’t wounded. Although Yeshua had grown up a laborer, He hadn’t been doing physical work for quite some time, and he hadn’t eaten or had anything to drink since the night before. Nor had He slept. And so, they forced a man in the streets, Cyrus of Cyrene to carry the crossbeam. Cyrene was a Roman colony in Libya which was the home of many African Jews—hence his name being Simon or Shimon. Quoting Laura Salah Nasrallah, in her book Archaeology and the Letters of Paul, (affiliate link) talks about people being forced into labor by Roman soldiers and I do not have the book because I just found out about it today while reading a review by Bruce Longenecker, which I will quote from and link in the transcript, “an inscription from Galatian Sagalassos ( SEG 26:1392) notably “seeks to protect locals against abuses [of hospitality]” by those embedded in the Roman imperial system (e.g., soldiers and imperial post deliverers). Nasrallah comments: “Demands upon locals were not a mere inconvenience for those who lived at or near subsistence level… [Locals] might [in fact] have to leave their ancestral lands” to accommodate the expectations of hospitality. Nasrallah proposes that resentment against travelers who impose on the indigenous is conjured in Paul’s charge against Cephas and “certain people from James” (Gal 2:11-14) and his charge against those who are currently disrupting the Galatian communities (4:14). Even though Paul “admits that even he was an imposition to those whom he addresses”, his “rhetorical point is that [he] seeks to act differently from other imposing travelers”.

So, this inscription from Sagalassos really fills us in on the severe demands that Roman soldiers and messengers could and did place on local populations. Right before the American Revolution the British soldiers demanded to be lodged and fed for free so this isn’t unique to the Romans or probably any occupying force. Yeshua also addresses this in the Sermon on the Mount when advising people who are compelled to go one mile to go two, and to give to whomever asks. You know, lose your life for the Gospel but not for talking smack to a Centurion with a sword and a flail! In actuality, what Simon was forced to do, although profound and difficult and evidently prophetic since he and his sons are well known among the believers of Rome, it could have been a lot worse and I am sure it often was worse. Occupying soldiers are not likely to be pleasant houseguests. Paul worked so that he would not be an imposition on those putting him up. Soldiers did and took what they wanted.

Unless Simon was originally from Cyrene and had come to live in Judea, it is unlikely that he was coming in from the countryside or agricultural fields, which agros can mean. Because there is no definite article in front of agros, in Greek it reads “coming in from country” and not from “the country” so the author might be saying that he had come in from Libya, his country. It isn’t clear. Nor does it matter. The names of his sons, Alexander being a Greek name and Rufus being a Latin name meaning red, wouldn’t be uncommon for a family from Cyrene, not even in a Jewish family. Rufus might even be the man Paul was greeting in Romans 16:13 and especially since the author of Mark is making it clear that Rufus son of Simon is known to them.

I spoke before about the Roman Triumph motif, which was essentially a victory parade, and we need to see the journey to the cross in that light. The defeated and mocked King of the Jews being forced to stagger along the roads of Jerusalem, during a festival celebrating their freedom from slavery and the irony could not be crueler. He is the Passover, in bondage to Roman occupiers, and another Jew is temporarily enslaved to carry His stauron, in Latin patibulum, in English we would call it the crossbeam. It’s rather as though Pharaoh’s taskmasters are making a mockery of the Jews during their own celebration of freedom. The soldiers would not have been ignorant about the meaning of the Passover.

²² And they brought him to the place called Golgotha (which means Place of a Skull). 

Our final mention of “they” this week is in them bringing Him to Golgotha. And I want to talk about a popular misconception about Golgotha. Yes, it means “Place of a Skull”, however, Charles Gordon’s 1884 claim to have identified this site that looked somewhat like a skull because of a dream he had is pretty much bogus. Not only was he not the first to notice this site but there is the additional problem that the erosion causing this “skulish” appearance occurred long after Yeshua’s crucifixion. In addition, he had no archaeological education or training and so his claims probably rank only slightly higher in credibility than the countless relics of the One True Cross on display around the world, or many of the other popular tourist sites.

Early church Fathers and the author of the Gospel of John make it clear that Golgotha wasn’t a site but instead a larger region, and if you recall the scholar from whom we learned about Gethsemane and the wine press cave, Joan Taylor, she has some fascinating ideas about where the crucifixion site was—not Gordon’s site, or at the Constantinian era site known as the Martyrium Basilica. Anyway, she has an online article through biblicalarchaeology.org that is really great and I will link it in the transcript so you can read it yourself if you would like. It isn’t like I come up with this stuff I teach on my own. Good thing too because that would be pretty awful.

Anyway, one of the things she points out, which I was unaware of, is that the whole idea of Yeshua being crucified on a hill is nowhere to be found in the Bible! It’s completely traditional. And you might say, but the author of Mark says that Centurion saw the Temple veil split, that is incorrect—he said that the Centurion was facing Yeshua as He died. John said that the garden tomb, in a garden, was in the area in which He was crucified (19:41). However, if Golgotha is an area and not a small spot, then we have no idea how far apart the crucifixion was from the garden tomb, only that they were in the same region. Now, the interesting thing about the site she chose for both the burial and crucifixion is that the southeastern point was situated at the Gennath gate which intersected the first and second walls with two roads leading into the city and then splitting into three roads. Pilgrims coming into the city from Bethlehem, Hebron, Gaza, Emmaus and Joppa would have walked right by in full view of Yeshua. And the site she proposes was not that far from the Praetorium if it was indeed just north of Herod’s Palace. Early Church Fathers held to the concept of Golgotha being a region as well, and Taylor’s choice of the entire area as being Golgotha has the added advantage of being atop an Iron Age rock quarry (if you want an easy way to locate the Iron Age historically, it is roughly the same time period as the monarchy age of ancient Israel. From about a hundred years before David to right after the Fall of Jerusalem. Obviously, a good place for a rock quarry with all of the building going on within the boundaries of a much smaller Jerusalem. And a very good and convenient place for executions because of how people were stoned, namely, they were pushed over a rock cliff and then huge rocks were thrown down onto them from above, or so claims the Mishnah. It is honestly something I have not delved deeply into yet.

When we get to verse twenty-nine, Mark will say that people passing by were mocking Him and no one was going to go out of their way to pass by a crucified man during a festival for fear of acquiring corpse impurity. So, it would have been on a main thoroughfare. Hebrews 13:12 tells us that Yeshua was crucified outside the gate. Anyway, we are running out of time—the article is by Joan Taylor and is called, Golgotha: A Reconsideration of the Evidence for the Site of Jesus’s Crucifixion and Burial and it will be linked in the transcript.