Good Friday

Today is Good Friday which is a Christian religious holiday commemorating the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and his death at Calvary. For those that haven’t thought about it the Crucifixion happened just after Passover. Jesus had come to Jerusalem for Passover. The last supper is believed to have a Passover connection. I was fortunate enough to have visited Jerusalem for the convergence of Easter and Passover during the very early 1980s. Since the two holidays are related obviously they will eventually come together at the same weekend. The year 2015 is one example whereas the previous time was in 2012. We will have three years, in succession, beginning in 2018. The last sequence of 3 years converging was 1998-2000.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was amazing, but also an example that there will never be full agreement in any group of people. Today the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is shared among several Christian denominations which have never been able to agree how to finish the interior in certain sections. So here we have a church constructed during the 4th century AD, and there is still no full agreement.

According to Eusebius of Caesarea, the Roman emperor Hadrian during the 2nd century AD built a temple dedicated to the goddess Aphrodite over the tomb in which Jesus had been buried to discourage the cult. Constantine the Great, ordered in 325/326AD that the pagan temple be replaced by a church. It was at that time during the construction of the Church, Helena, Constantine’s mother, is believed to have rediscovered the “True Cross”. Socrates Scholasticus (born c. 380), in his Ecclesiastical History, gives a full description of the discovery. It is claimed that Helena found three crosses at the site and she tested each by having it held over a corpse. As the account goes, when the corpse rose up under one cross from the dead, she proclaimed that was the true cross and tomb.

See, I use to have hair (No that is not my ex-wife)

Happy Easter