why the Golgotha (or Place of the Skull) ?

[Giuseppe]

In my view, the best possible answer is given by Hyppolytus (5:7):

The expression rock, he says, he uses of Adam. This, he affirms, is Adam: The chief corner-stone become the head of the corner. For that in the head the substance is the formative brain from which the entire family is fashioned. (Ephesians 3:15) Whom, he says, I place as a rock at the foundations of Zion. Allegorizing, he says, he speaks of the creation of the man. The rock is interposed (within) the teeth, as Homer says, enclosure of teeth, that is, a wall and fortress, in which exists the inner man, who there has fallen from Adam, the primal man above. And he has been severed without hands to effect the division, and has been borne down into the image of oblivion, being earthly and clayish.

http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/050105.htm

This myth talks about a Primal Man who was imprisoned in the material world. This his prison was allegorized by the cranial dome, place of the brain.

To break the cranial dome was necessary to free the Primal Man imprisoned in it.

So the cross, planted on the Golgotha (i.e., on the skull) like a sword (cfr. Matthew 10:34), effectively performed that operation of liberation.

So this interpretation betrayes the fact that the evangelists drew from previous Gnostic Gentile myths the fundamental idea of the Jesus' death, even if the myth of Jesus was essentially jewish.

[Secret Alias]

Let me guess, the reason you think this is the 'best answer' is because it references a myth. Don't you ever want to break from routines? Don't you ever wonder, doesn't the thought emerge in your head that all your inquiries lead to the same conclusion? I know for you with each 'discovery' it 'convinces' you more and more that 'it's all a myth.' And so you want to share that 'increased certainty' with us to convince us and make us more certain. But to the rest of us you just look like - here is a gnostic myth for you - God looking down at the primordial waters and seeing his own reflection and saying "I am God; there is no other." Since you are interested in myths, the early Christians meant this adaption of Genesis 1 and Isaiah 46 as a cautionary tale. It wasn't laid out to 'encourage' such behavior among 'researchers' trying to learn about them in the future.

[Giuseppe]

Do you have any other serious alternative explanation about the presence of Golgotha in that point of the Gospel, seriously?

[Secret Alias]

Adam was buried there so Jerusalem was center of the universe and the events at the end of the gospel were taking place at a location of deep cosmic significance rather than as Celsus says - some stupid backwater place at the periphery of the world of no importance. That would be the most common and best received explanation. http://www.vision.org/visionmedia/histo ... d/620.aspx

[Giuseppe]

But the your ''common'' explanation is a mere corollary of the words of Hyppolytus, where ''Zion'' is mentioned as a simple effect.

You are confusing the effect (the euhemerizing reference to Zion) with the cause (the meaning of the ''skull'' in the Gnostic myth that talks about the creation/death of the Primal Man).

[Giuseppe]

Whom, he says, I place as a rock at the foundations of Zion. Allegorizing, he says, he speaks of the creation of the man

who is ''allegorizing'' what?

the earthly Jerusalem (hence, an earthly Golgotha) is ''allegorizing'' the ''creation of the man''.

This is named: euhemerization.

[Charles Wilson]

Do you have any other serious alternative explanation about the presence of Golgotha in that point of the Gospel, seriously?

"Golgotha":

The most popular of several sites proposed is that of Otto Thenius (1849), better known as Gordon's Calvary, and styled by the latter, "Skull Hill", because of its shape. Conder is the chief supporter of this view. This site is the elevation over Jeremiah's Grotto, not far from the Damascus Gate. In default of an historic basis, and owing to the insufficiency of the Gospel data ... These affirmations all bear the mark of fitness; but until documents are produced to confirm them, they must inevitably fall short as proof of facts...

So the Catholic Group does not vouch for a particular place for "Golgotha" that they know.

Sorta' reminds me of John:

John 19: 13 (Moffatt):

[13] On hearing this, Pilate brought Jesus out and seated him on the tribunal at a spot known as the 'mosaic pavement'
[14] -the Hebrew name is Gabbatha (it was the day of Preparation, about noon). "There is your king", he said to the Jews.

Where is the "Mosaic Pavement" in Jerusalem? I know of tiled mosaics in Caesarea but I haven't seen any tourist pictures of any in Jerusalem.

The 2 verses quoted from John are simply full in info you won't find in the Synoptics, as if John were "correcting" Mark and the boys. "Gabbatha", a word found no where else in the Bible occurs within a few verses of "Golgotha" in John. As a Transliteration into Greek, it works in one direction only, so I've heard.

Perhaps, before we look to the skies, we should see if, AS MARYHELENA ADVOCATES, there is something else in "Golgotha" and "Gabbatha" (Shhhhh!...There may be something Hasmonean somewhere...). The explanation might not even be found in Jerusalem.

(Don't tell anybody. It's a secret...)

CW

[FransJVermeiren]

Do you have any other serious alternative explanation about the presence of Golgotha in that point of the Gospel, seriously?

Sometimes places undergo a radical change, and because of this change the place receives a corresponding new name. In our times ‘Ground Zero’ is the most renowned example of this kind of renaming. Something similar is going on with Golgotha, the ‘place of the skull’ in the sense of the baldness of a skull. The Latin equivalent calvaria points in the same direction, as this word is derived from calvus, bald.

Just like ‘Ground Zero’ finds its origin in a major conflict of our times, so did ‘Golgotha’ in its era. When the Romans started the siege of Jerusalem, they levelled a vast area north and north-west of the city because the defenders of Jerusalem organized annoying sorties in this garden district. After the profound transformation of this zone it deserved a new name, and because all vegetation (trees, bushes, hedges) had been removed like hair from a head, as well as all fences and rocky projections, they called it ‘the area of the bald skull’, Golgotha. It was a huge undertaking carried out by thousands of laborers, almost the whole Roman force present before the walls of Jerusalem (Josephus, War V, 106-107).

‘Golgotha’ is one of the countless hints that the great battle for world dominion between the Jews and the Romans, culminating in the siege and fall of Jerusalem, is the ground layer of the gospels. No myth, it’s all about history.

[Secret Alias]

Well to be technical about it. It's a myth that was (perhaps) taken as some sort of history. When you talk to Samaritans today it's not like they really think that Adam and Eve were real people. Still though they calculate their chronology (or at least 'sometimes' calculate their chronologies) from AM. I think my point with Giuseppe is to remind him that 'myths' don't all lead back to the annoying 'cosmic Jesus' myth he is trying to construct out of any defenseless scrap of evidence he happens to come across and defiles. You are trying to reconstruct what I consider to be 'mythical history' by shifting the Jesus story into an (untenable) era. All myths don't lead to Jesus wearing a space suit. That's my point. The fact he can bend shitty pieces of evidence into a shitty theory doesn't prove very much. He's got to find evidence from early sources which confirms his multiple rape felonies against the evidence was somehow justified. That he was an 'inspired rapist.' A champion molester of manuscripts. A dignified defiler of ancient source material. The proverbial monkey aggressively hitting on random keys to produce Shakespeare. You get the picture.

[Giuseppe]

You are trying to reconstruct what I consider to be 'mythical history' by shifting the Jesus story into an (untenable) era.

Are you saying that the Jesus story appeared only after the 70?

I understand that you like to explain any evidence as a reaction to the Fall of Jerusalem.

The fact he can bend shitty pieces of evidence into a shitty theory doesn't prove very much.

I understand that you assume an entirely falsified Paul. But I like to assume that Paul is authentic, since it is basically the colossal amazing silence of Paul about Jesus that has always galvanized me about mythicism from the first time I read Doherty.

I think my point with Giuseppe is to remind him that 'myths' don't all lead back to the annoying 'cosmic Jesus' myth he is trying to construct out of any defenseless scrap of evidence he happens to come across and defiles

Frankly I don't understand you on this particular point. You are in my eyes a suggestive scholar just as Robert M. Price. But (one of) the difference between you and Price is that the latter may be able to recognize rapidly the my particular point in this thread:

just as the evangelists had to invent 'Nazaret' to explain the fact that Jesus was called 'Nazarene' (and they didn't know the reason)...,

...so they had to invent a hill near Jerusalem named Golgotha and call it the 'place of skull'', because they didn't know the real origin of the name ''Golgotha'' in reference to Jesus: that he, as the Primal Adam, was killed by the demiurge before the creation of the world, to give rise to the world. (Or something of similar but always of cosmic proportions).

The other great difference between you and Price, obviously, is that the latter called Detering ''the greatest scholar of the his generation''.