GETHSEMANE (Hebrew *Gath-šēmānīm* «oil press»). — A place (Lk. 22:40), garden (Jn. 18:1), estate (Mk. 14:32; Mt. 26:36). Vulgate: villa, *pradium*) in Jerusalem, beyond the Kidron valley, at the foot of the Mount of Olives (Lk. 22:39; Jn. 18:1-2), where Jesus prayed, agonized, and was arrested.
It may be depicted, in the Eastern manner, as a rustic property with olive trees enclosed by a dry-stone wall, containing a cave adapted as a dwelling where there was an oil press from which it took its name. Here Jesus, during his stays in Jerusalem, was accustomed to spend the nights (Lk. 22:39; Jn. 18:2) as a guest of the owner, a friend or relative; and on the evening of Holy Thursday, having left eight disciples to rest, he withdrew into the garden and took with him Peter, James, and John, immersing himself in prayer, then rejoining all the disciples when Judas, who knew the place (Jn. 18:2), arrived to have him arrested. Both sites—the cave and the garden—were from the earliest centuries objects of veneration, and
Eusebius in 330 says that the faithful “still today” gathered there to pray; St Jerome, in his Latin translation of Eusebius’ *Onomasticon* (390), adds “nunc ecclesia desuper aedificata” (On., 75), a church therefore built between 330 and 390, probably by the emperor Theodosius (379–95). The pilgrim Egeria (395) reports in her *Itinerarium* that on Holy Thursday evening the Jerusalem clergy first went to the “elegant church” of the Agony, where the Gospel of the Agony was read, and then descended to Gethsemane (the cave), where the Gospel of the Betrayal and Arrest was read.
The Theodosian church, destroyed at the Persian invasion (611), was rebuilt by the Crusaders under the title of St Saviour, only to fall into ruin again in the 13th century. As the local clergy had necessarily transferred the liturgy to the cave, a gradual shift occurred in the sacred memories: the Agony was placed in the cave, the Betrayal and Arrest in the garden.
Today the site has resumed the appearance impressed upon it by the primitive tradition. Within an enclosed garden that preserves eight centuries of olive trees, probably witnesses of the Passion, stands since 1924
the new Basilica, rebuilt by the Franciscan Fathers of the Holy Land on the plan of the 4th-century church discovered in 1919.
About 100 m from the garden, the cave, whose bare walls bear the marks of ancient veneration, has resumed the title of “Cave of the Betrayal and Arrest.” See pl. XXV.