Gethsemane

     The garden of Gethsemane, near the foot of the Mount of Olives, is named in the New Testament as the place where Jesus went with his disciples to pray the night before he was crucified.

    The garden, about 1200 square metres in area, was well known to the disciples as it is close to the natural route from the Temple to the summit of the Mount of Olives and the ridge leading to Bethany.

       The name in Hebrew means “oil press”. Oil is still pressed from the fruit of eight ancient and gnarledolive trees that give the garden a timeless character.

  Beside the garden is the Church of All Nations, built over the rock on which Jesus is believed to have prayed in agony before he was betrayed by Judas Iscariot and arrested.

        About 100 metres north of the church is the Grotto of Gethsemane, where Jesus and his disciples often camped at night. In this natural grotto, it is believed, the disciples slept while Jesus prayed.Near the grotto is the Tomb of Mary, where a Christian tradition holds that the Mother of Jesus was buried after she “fell asleep” in death.

        

How old are the trees?

In the garden of Gethsemane, behind a fence of iron tracery with Byzantinemotifs, stand the gnarled trunks of eight hoary olive trees. They create aspiritual atmosphere for visitors to the garden of Gethsemane, although the flower beds and paths around them introduce an artificial element.

The trees also generate conjecture about theirage. Were they silent witnesses to the Agony of Jesus the night before he died?

Israel has many ancient olive trees. Two in the town of Arraba and five in Deir Hanna have been determined to be over 3000 years old.

The present Gethsemane trees, however, were not standing at the time of Christ. The historian Flavius Josephus reports that all the trees around Jerusalem were cut down by the Romans for their siege equipment before they captured the city in AD 70.

Research reported in 2012 showed that three of the eight ancient trees (the only ones on which it was technically possible to carry out the study) dated from the middle of the 12th century, and all eight originated as cuttings from a single parent tree.

The Gethsemane olives are possibly descendants of one that was in the garden at the time of Christ. This is because when an olive tree is cut down, shoots will come back from the roots to create a new tree.

In 1982 the University of California carried out radiocarbon-dating tests on some root material from Gethsemane. The results indicated that some of the wood could be dated at 2300 years old.

What happens to the fruit from the Gethsemane olive trees? When it is harvested each year, the oil is pressed for Gethsemane’s sanctuary lamps and the pits are used to make rosary beads, given by the Franciscan Custos of the Holy Land to notable pilgrims.