Every Friday in Jerusalem, Franciscan monks lead a procession along the Via Dolorosa to Golgotha. According to tradition, the route comprises the path of sorrows along which Jesus dragged a cross to the Roman execution grounds where he was gruesomely crucified.
Today’s route links the Antonia Fortress, where Jesus was tried before Roman procurator Pontius Pilate, to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Scholars dismiss this east-to-west route along Old Jerusalem’s alleys as a pious fraud formalized by the Franciscans eight centuries ago. In truth, today’s Via Crucis with its 14 Stations of the Cross was only finalized in the 18th century.
Rodney Aist’s book Walking the Jerusalem Circuit: In the Footsteps of Pilgrims before the Crusades traces the footsteps of Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem in the millennium before the Crusades. Aist, the course director at St. George’s College in Jerusalem, documents the 16 stations along the four-kilometer-long circuit, weaving together the relevant Bible passages; pilgrim texts; information about Roman, Byzantine, Muslim, and Crusader archaeology; and thoughts for reflection.
His scholarship incorporates four texts: writings of Sophronius, a Greek-speaking monk who served as the patriarch of the Holy City before the genocidal Persian conquest in 614; The Armenian Guide, a book composed circa 630 that was used by pilgrims walking the Circuit; Willibald, a Latin volume dictated by an Anglo-Saxon pilgrim in the 720s, some 90 years after the Muslim conquest in 638; and writings of Bernard, a French pilgrim writing in Latin, who describes Jerusalem in 870.
While these texts don’t provide a standardized route, they all begin at the Holy Sepulchre, proceed south to Mount Zion, and then east to Gethsemane before ascending the Mount of Olives. Pilgrims hiked the circuit in a single day, guided by monks who led language-specific or multilingual tours.
While modern pilgrims take a bus to the top of the Mount of Olives and walk down, the original circuit required visitors to climb nearly 800 steps to the crest of the hill. There, they prayed at the Eleona and the Church of the Ascension.
The Eleona, one of Roman emperor Constantine’s original churches, was built over a cave where Jesus instructed his disciples about the end of time and commemorated the Lord’s Prayer since the Crusader period.
The Church of the Ascension, an open-air shrine built around Jesus’s last footprints before his ascent, marked the end of the circuit. There, pilgrims took in the breathtaking view and contemplated the promise of his return.
“Walking the Jerusalem Circuit brings together Bible, history, and tradition as a living experience through the streets and shrines of Jerusalem, while offering a virtual journey for distant readers,” Aist said at an event to launch the book.
– Gil Zohar