Golgotha and Galilee - linked at the roots
Around and around we go.
As fans of the young adult fiction novels of Madeleine L’Engle will be aware, the Greek language has two different words for time, both of which appear in Scripture. In Greek, χρόνος refers to time in sequence, of events in a particular linear order; whereas καιρός refers to what is appointed, a ‘right moment’—or, as the final title in L’Engle’s Kairos series puts it, ‘an acceptable time’.
We can see the differences of usage from two passages in the Gospel of John: τοσοῦτον χρόνον μεθ᾽ ὑμῶν εἰμι καὶ οὐκ ἔγνωκάς με Φίλιππε ‘Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not know me, Philip?’ (John 14:9) And: Ὁ καιρὸς ὁ ἐμὸς οὔπω πάρεστιν ‘My time has not yet come.’ (John 7:6) The first refers to a duration, and a movement between two states, from lack of knowledge to (supposed) knowledge. Jesus is talking about the length of time they had been together. The second, which Jesus utters before the Feast of Booths, refers to a ripening, a fruition, something that occurs in the fullness of time.
I point out this dichotomy in Greek because we modern ‘Judaeo-Christians’ carry with us a certain set of false assumptions back into Scripture about how time in Scripture is supposed to work. Unfortunately, it looks like those of us in the West must once again lay that problem at the feet of Saint Augustine.
One of the primary problems the New Testament authors attempted to address—especially Saint Luke, who by nature of his intellectual training was acutely aware of it—was the tendency of contemporary followers of the Tanakh to want to interpret it in terms that would make it palatable or respectable among the Greco-Roman governing class; i.e. presenting the Tanakh to them as historical. The New Testament authors saw it as their project to liberate the teaching of the Tanakh from those like Josephus, who would make it an antiquarian interest meant to bolster particular political claims within a Roman context.
As I mentioned in my commentary on John 5[1], even Christian redactors and transmitters of Scripture were unfortunately not immune from the temptation to historicise the texts which were entrusted to them! Someone who had been given the task of transcribing Saint John, at some point, mis-transcribed Βηθζαθά (‘the house of the olive tree’, the form in which the toponym appears in the Codex Sinaiticus) as Βηθεσδά (‘the house of mercy’, ‘the house of reproach’, occurring in later transcriptions of the Gospel). My interpretation of this mistranscription, is that the hand which did it was attempting to harmonise Saint John’s Gospel with the toponymy of Jerusalem, the better to establish historical grounds for a Christian political claim to the holy places of that city. Such mishandlings of Scripture routinely result in horrific distortions of the teaching, which have century after century resulted in fanaticism and communalist violence.
A larger-scale distortion of the same kind occurs when we fix literary events in Scripture to discrete periods and times in human history, pillaging God’s καιρός and stashing it like footpads and thieves into man’s χρόνος. Bishop James Ussher’s seventeenth-century claim that the events that began the Book of Genesis occurred at two in the afternoon on the twenty-third of October, 4004 BC, is only the most infamous example of a genre of eisegesis inaugurated by Augustine’s Civitas Dei. Augustine, who (like Job!) asks how such evil as the Gothic sack of Rome could have befallen the Empire, takes that human perspective as the starting-point for a grand theory of history. He periodises human history into six discrete ages, each one a ‘progression’ from the one which proceeded it, each one unfolding a further stage in God’s ultimate plan.
But we are dealing with an Asian textual tradition. Herodotos did not write the Tanakh; West Asians did. Scripture’s approach to history is unlike Augustine’s, or James Ussher’s, or Francis Fukuyama’s concept of history. It is cyclical, not linear or progressive. The authors of Scripture came out of the same cultural context that the Sumerians and Akkadians did, who believed that history must always make an amar-gi, a return to the mother.
When a Semitic ear hears in John 19 the mention of a place called Golgotha (Γολγοθᾶ = Aram. Gûlgaltā’ גולגלתא), they would be reminded of another toponym which is rooted in the Semitic triliteral g-l-l ג-ל-ל: Galilee (Γαλιλαία = Aram. Gǝlîlā’ גלילא). The recursive duplication of the root in Golgotha (a ‘skull’ that rolls around and around) resonates with Galilee: the ‘circuit’ where Jesus took His first disciples and worked His first miracles. This linguistic echo underscores the cyclical completion of Jesus’s work in the world. The doubled root in Golgotha also alludes to the completion of His Father’s purpose, in the καιρός-sense of the ‘fullness of time’.
If we are following the four Evangelists, whose four books in fact all tell the same repeated narrative four different times, then, we need to put away both Augustine’s thoughts about a progressive unfolding of God’s will in human history, and also the thoughts of Ussher and those who followed him, that God’s irruption of history can be predicted and anticipated according to human political designs. As Fr Paul Tarazi notes (and he makes his case quite convincingly!), the entire narrative ‘arc’ of Scripture, all of its basic premises and the Semitic vocabulary needed to interpret them, are already present between Genesis 1:1 and 2:4, with an elaboration extending from Genesis 5:1 to 6:8. What follows are all variations on the basic themes already present: that God’s provision has been made very good and sufficient for all, and human beings’ attempts to limit, control and usurp that provision all end in ignominious failure[2]. Yet human beings in their civilisations persist in making such attempts against God’s provision—leading to cycles of confident rise, hubris, decadence and fall.
And what is happening here? God has sent His Son into Galilee to do His deeds: turning water into wine, healing human beings of their illnesses and disabilities, overturning moneychangers’ tables, feeding multitudes, freeing men of their debts, saving poor women from eviction, even raising the dead. And how do we human beings repay Him? We want to maintain control over our Temple, our Imperium, our claims on the debt-money of our fellow-servant. So we crucify Him at Golgotha. Jesus shows through His deeds how God’s provision is very good and sufficient for us all. But we can’t have nice things. There is no new thing under the sun (Eccl 1:9).
[1] Matthew Franklin Cooper, The Lamb Before Its Shearers (OCABS Press, 2025), 124-128.
[2] Fr Paul Tarazi, Decoding Genesis 1-11 (OCABS Press, 2020), 34-35.