GETHSEMANI (Hebr. Gath-šēmānim “oil press”).—Place (Lk. 22:40), garden (Jn. 18:1), estate (Mk. 14:32; Mt. 26:36. Vulg. villa, praedium) in Jerusalem, beyond the Kidron Valley, at the foot of the Mount of Olives (Lk. 22:39; Jn. 18:1–2), where Jesus prayed, underwent his agony, and was arrested.
It may be envisioned, according to the Oriental type, as a rustic property planted with olive trees and enclosed by a dry-stone wall, with a cave adapted as a dwelling, containing an oil press from which it took its name. Here Jesus, during his stays in Jerusalem, customarily spent the nights (Lk. 22:39; Jn. 18:2), as the guest of the owner, a friend or relative; and on the evening of Holy Thursday, leaving the eight disciples there to rest, he went into the garden and, separating himself also from Peter, James, and John, immersed himself in prayer, later rejoining all the disciples when Judas, who knew the place (Jn. 18:2), arrived there to have him arrested. The two places—the cave and the garden—were objects of veneration from the earliest centuries, and
Eusebius, in 330, says that the faithful “even today” gather there to pray; St. Jerome, in the Latin translation of Eusebius’s Onomasticon (390), adds “nunc ecclesia desuper aedificata” (On., 75), thus indicating that it was erected between 330 and 390, probably by the emperor Theodosius (379–95). The pilgrim Egeria or Etheria (395) reports in her itinerary that on the evening of Holy Thursday the Jerusalem clergy first went to the “elegant church” of the Prayer, where the Gospel of the agony was read, and then descended into G. (the cave), where the Gospel of the betrayal and arrest was read.
The Theodosian church, destroyed upon the arrival of the Persians (611) and rebuilt by the Crusaders under the title of St. Saviour, again fell into ruin in the 13th century. Since the local clergy had necessarily transferred the liturgical offices to the cave, a shift gradually occurred in the sacred traditions: the agony was assigned to the cave, and the betrayal and arrest to the garden.
Today the site has regained the appearance imparted to it by the original tradition. Within a garden enclosure preserving eight ancient olive trees, probably witnesses of the Passion, the new Basilica has stood since 1924,
rebuilt through the efforts of the Franciscan Fathers of the Holy Land on the foundations of the fourth-century church discovered in 1919.
About 100 m. from the garden, the cave, whose bare walls bear the marks of ancient veneration, has regained the title of “cave of the betrayal and arrest.” - Vedi tav. XXV.