HoT News About jim caviezel

The description of Jesus’s triumphal, palm-strewn procession into Jerusalem, his clash with Pontius Pilate and the Temple authorities, his agonised prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, his arrest by Roman guards, his torture, trial, Crucifixion and Resurrection is the most important Christian story of all.

Its power as a parable of suffering, sacrifice and transcendence is peerless, and this explains its extraordinary hold on billions of people all over the world.

Yet we don’t really know what happened when Christ was crucified. How can we separate myth from fact? How closely can we rely on the Bible’s account of those few days 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem? These are questions that have fascinated me over the many years I worked on my biography of the Holy City. With perfect timing, film-maker Simcha Jacobovici claimed this week that he had discovered the nails used in the Crucifixion in what is believed to be the tomb of Caiaphas, the Jewish High Priest in Jerusalem.

Though his claims are unlikely, there are certainly some archaeological finds that can tell us more about the momentous events that first Easter.Jesus always knew he was likely to die in Jerusalem. As we are told in the Bible, he informed his disciples how he ‘must go unto Jerusalem and suffer many things . . . and be killed and be raised again on the third day’.

Jerusalem was the place where Jewish prophets died and where Judgement Day would come.

Like thousands of other Jews from all over the world, he arrived there for the great festival of Passover in AD33.

During his three days in Jerusalem, Jesus preached in the Temple, making three key points: that the Temple would be destroyed; the Apocalypse was imminent; and the Temple aristocracy — which included Caiaphas and prince Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee — were corrupt.

In the Royal Portico of the Temple, Jesus challenged the ruling establishment: ‘Is this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers?’

That year, the authorities were even more jumpy than usual. In a couple of little-read verses of their Gospels, Mark and Luke recount that there had just been some sort of Galilean rebellion against Roman rule in Jerusalem.

We know only that it had been suppressed by the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate, and 18 Galilean Jews had been killed. One rebel, Barabbas, had killed someone in the fight.