Gethsemane

Gethsemane (ɡɛθˈsɛməni) is a garden at the foot of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem where, according to the four Gospels of the New Testament, Jesus Christ underwent the agony in the garden and was arrested before his crucifixion. It is a place of great resonance in Christianity. There are several small olive groves in church property, all adjacent to each other and identified with biblical Gethsemane. Gethsemane appears in the Greek original of the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Mark as Γεθσημανή (Gethsēmanḗ). The name is derived from the Aramaic ܓܕܣܡܢ (Gaḏ-Šmānê), meaning "oil press". and call it χωρίον (chōríon), meaning a place or estate. The Gospel of John says Jesus entered a garden (κῆπος kêpos) with his disciples. According to the New Testament it was a place that Jesus and his disciples customarily visited, which allowed Judas Iscariot to find him on the night Jesus was arrested. There are four locations, all of them at or near the western foot of the Mount of Olives, officially claimed by different denominations to be the place where Jesus prayed on the night he was betrayed. The garden at the Catholic Church of All Nations, built over the "Rock of the Agony". The location near the Tomb of the Virgin Mary to the north. The Greek Orthodox location to the east. The Russian Orthodox orchard, next to the Church of Mary Magdalene. William McClure Thomson, author of The Land and the Book, first published in 1880, wrote: "When I first came to Jerusalem, and for many years afterward, this plot of ground was open to all whenever they chose to come and meditate beneath its very old olive trees. The Latins, however, have within the last few years succeeded in gaining sole possession, and have built a high wall around it. The Greeks have invented another site a little to the north of it. My own impression is that both are wrong. The position is too near the city, and so close to what must have always been the great thoroughfare eastward, that our Lord would scarcely have selected it for retirement on that dangerous and dismal night.