Calvary Means Skull: It Is the Latin for Golgotha, and It Is One Verse

Calvary means skull. It is the Latin word Calvaria, translating the Greek Kranion, translating the Aramaic Golgotha — and it appears in the English Bible exactly once, in Luke, in the King James translation. Every other Gospel calls it Golgotha, and most modern versions simply call it the Skull.

So the tenderest word we own is not a place name at all. It is somebody’s description of a rock.

Luke writes that when they came to the place called the Skull, they crucified him there with the criminals, one on the right and one on the left. Jerome, rendering that into Latin, used Calvariae Locus. The King James translators carried the Latin across instead of translating the Greek, and so Calvary entered English and stayed.

Matthew, Mark and John keep the Aramaic and gloss it for their readers: Golgotha, which means the place of a skull. The Gospel writers evidently expected that their audiences would not know the word, and would want to.

Why it was called that, nobody wrote down. We are left with two guesses — the shape of the outcrop, or the nature of the business done there — and a medieval tradition that Adam’s skull lay buried underneath, which is beautiful, and late, and not in the text.

What the text does insist on is the location, and the insistence is theological rather than geographical. The letter to the Hebrews says that Jesus suffered outside the gate — outside the city, outside the camp, in the place where the bodies of the sin offerings were burned.

Romans crucified people beside roads, at eye level, where the traffic was. It was designed to be seen on the way to market, by people carrying shopping. Whatever else Golgotha was, it was public and it was outside the wall, and we should not let either fact go by: he was put where the city threw things, and where everyone could watch.

The traditional site lies inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, identified in the 320s when Helena, mother of Constantine, came to Jerusalem looking for it. The identification is not as fragile as it sounds. The site was outside the city wall in the first century and was brought inside by a later wall; a temple to Venus had been built over it, which is the kind of thing that preserves a memory rather than erasing it; and excavation has found first-century quarrying and tombs beneath the building, which is what the Gospels describe — a garden with a new tomb in it, close by.

The other candidate is the Garden Tomb, north of the Damascus Gate, where a cliff face looks convincingly like a skull. It was proposed in the nineteenth century and has been loved by visitors ever since, partly because it is quiet and green and the Holy Sepulchre is neither. Archaeologically it is much weaker: the tombs there appear to be several centuries older than the first century, which is the wrong direction for a tomb the Gospels call new.

Both are worth standing in, and most of us who have stood in either were thinking about something else entirely at the time. Only one of them is likely.

Is Calvary the same place as Golgotha?

Yes, exactly the same. Golgotha is the Aramaic, Calvary is the Latin, and both mean skull. The two words have never referred to different places; they are one hill in two languages.

Why does Calvary appear only once in the Bible?

Because it is a Latin word that entered English through the King James Version’s handling of Luke. Matthew, Mark and John all use Golgotha, and most modern translations render the Greek directly as “the Skull”, so Calvary disappears from them entirely.

Was Calvary a hill?

The Gospels never say so. They call it a place, not a hill, and the elevation we all picture comes from hymns and paintings rather than from the text. The traditional site is a modest rocky rise, not a mountain.

What does “Mount Calvary” mean, then?

It is devotional language rather than biblical. The phrase took hold in Christian hymnody and art, where a raised silhouette against the sky says something the flat truth does not. It is a good image. It is not a citation.

We have set the word to music for centuries. It is in our hymns, on our churches, over the doors of hospitals. It has become one of the tenderest words the faith owns.

And underneath all of that it still means skull. A bare place outside a city wall, named by somebody for the shape of the stone, used by an empire for the deaths it wanted people to walk past and see.

That is where it happened. Not in a sanctuary, not on an altar prepared for the purpose, but at the side of a road, on rubbish ground, in full view of anyone going home for supper.

Which is the whole of it, really. He went out to the place where things are thrown away, and did not come back the same way.

• Where Was Jesus Crucified?
• Bible Verses About Eternal Life
• Where Is the Tomb of Jesus?