Murder at Golgotha Revisiting the Most Famous Crime Scene in History

Chapter One A Crime Scene Gone Cold? Nearly two thousand years ago Jesus Christ was murdered in full public view, during daylight hours, in what was most likely the year a.d. 30. The crime scene was a hill called Golgotha, the "Place of the Skull," just outside the city of Jerusalem in the then Roman-occupied province of Judaea. In ways that no one could have anticipated at the time, the murder would turn out to be the most famous in all history. In the course of subsequent centuries it changed the lives of millions of people on every continent of the world. It inspired Michelangelo to sculpt his Pieta, Leonardo to paint his Last Supper, and Handel to write his Messiah. In ways that Jesus could never have wanted, it also led to the persecution of Jews, to Christians killing fellow Christians over doctrinal differences, and to ongoing strife with the younger religion called Islam. Jesus' murder would also become the most reenacted in all history. Beginning with humble miracle plays back in the Middle Ages, such reenactments developed in our own time into highly developed dramatizations for cinema audiences. And never was any reenactment more dramatic and realistic than Mel Gibson's 2004 movie The Passion of the Christ. I am still in a state of shock, having sat through two hours of almost uninterrupted, gratuitous brutality." "Graphic beyond belief . . . How anyone will be able to sit through this thing is the real mystery." "The film is unrelentingly violent. It's blood-soaked. Jesus gets so whipped you can see his ribs, blood spatters all over the cobblestones, and the sound is frighteningly realistic. And it doesn't stop after a pivotal scene or twoit goes on and on and on. These are just a small sample of reviewer reactions to a film whose maker intended it to be as true and accurate a re-creation of the original events as humanly possible, a re-creation "directed by the Holy Ghost." But was Gibson's The Passion of the Christ truly divinely inspired? Was it the closest that we can ever get to a re-creation of the last hours leading up to the Golgotha crime scene? Mel Gibson's chief inspiration, and the bloody imagery that caused such revulsion amongst cinema audiences, derived not from the Christian gospels or historical sources but from the mystic visions of an early nineteenth-century German nun, Anne Catherine Emmerich, as recorded by a poet, Clemens Brentano. And, very sadly for Gibson's otherwise brilliant achievement re-creating on celluloid what Emmerich "saw" in her mind, any critical evaluation of these visions reveals them as lurid, hyperimaginative fantasies typical of the type of personality psychologists define as "hysteric." They have no sound historical or medical foundation. What makes this situation all the sadder, given the huge energy and investment that went into the Gibson movie, is that today more than at any time in history we have forensic technologies that can reveal so much of what truly happened. Gibson was actually offered such forensic expertise, but turned it down in favor of the Emmerich fiction. The fact is that, even after such a long time lapse, the Golgotha of around a.d. 30 has far from gone entirely cold as a crime scene. Written testimony, topographic data, medical expertise, forensic techniques, and archaeology can all shed some surprisingly strong light on what really happened. Accordingly, a searching revisit to the original events is the prime purpose of this book. As if from the viewpoint of a crime scene investigator, we will be questioning and reexamining every assumption about the last hours of Jesus&Wilson, Ian is the author of 'Murder at Golgotha Revisiting the Most Famous Crime Scene in History', published 2006 under ISBN 9780312349325 and ISBN 0312349327.