How Far Did Jesus Carry His Cross? About 500 to 650 Metres, by Tradition

Jesus carried his cross only a short way. By the usual estimates the traditional route runs about 500 to 650 metres, which is under half a mile. The Gospels give no distance, though, historians disagree about where the walk began, and for part of the way a passer-by, Simon of Cyrene, carried the cross for him.

That is 0.5 to 0.65 kilometres, or about 1,640 to 2,130 feet (0.31 to 0.40 miles), and here is where those figures come from:

So it was a road of a few hundred metres, and the Gospels remember it for who walked it. Luke says the soldiers laid the cross on Simon “that he might bear it after Jesus” (Luke 23:26), and that is the very picture Jesus had given his disciples: “whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:27, KJV). A stranger coming in from the country did it on his own shoulders, and the rest of us are asked to walk the same way, behind the same Lord.

How long is the Via Dolorosa?

The route pilgrims walk is called the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Sorrows. It begins in the courtyard of the Umariyya School near the Lions’ Gate, where tradition places the Antonia Fortress, and winds west through narrow market streets to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It is a short walk: Travel Palestine, the Palestinian tourism ministry’s site, and See the Holy Land, a Catholic guide to the holy places, both make it 500 metres, and the Spanish newspaper El Debate about 600. A 1986 paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association puts it a little longer. It was written by William Edwards, a Mayo Clinic pathologist, with a pastor and a medical illustrator, and they gave the distance “from the Praetorium to the site of the crucifixion” as “one third of a mile (600 to 650 m),” taking the Praetorium to be the Antonia Fortress. A third of a mile is about 536 metres, though, so the paper’s two figures do not quite match.

Fourteen stations mark the way, nine in the streets and the last five inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Five of the street stations come from tradition rather than the Gospels: Jesus’s three falls, his meeting with his mother and Veronica wiping his face. The other nine, including all five inside the church, recall events the Gospels describe. Pilgrims of the 4th and 5th centuries already walked in procession from the Mount of Olives to Calvary along much the same line, but the route in its present form dates from the 18th century, and some stations reached their present places only in the 19th. Every Friday afternoon the Franciscan friars, who have been custodians of most of the holy places since the 13th century, lead a procession along it.

Where did Jesus begin carrying the cross?

In the Gospels the walk starts from the Roman governor’s headquarters. Mark says the soldiers led Jesus “into the hall, called Praetorium” (Mark 15:16), and John calls it “the hall of judgment” (John 18:28). There Pilate “sat down in the judgment seat in a place that is called the Pavement, but in the Hebrew, Gabbatha” (John 19:13), and then “they took Jesus, and led him away” (John 19:16). But none of the Gospels says where in Jerusalem the hall stood.

A tradition going back to the Middle Ages put it in the Antonia Fortress, which Herod the Great built beside the Temple, and that is why the Via Dolorosa starts there. Most scholars now place it at Herod’s palace on the western side of the city, near today’s Jaffa Gate. The Biblical Archaeology Society sums up their case: the Antonia “would have been too small to be the residence and headquarters of the governor,” and “Scholarly consensus today associates the praetorium with Herod’s palace on the western side of the city.” The archaeologist Shimon Gibson writes that when Pilate stayed in Jerusalem, “particularly during the Jewish festivities, he took up residence at Herod’s old palace.”

Near the first stations an arch spans the street, and Roman paving lies beneath a convent. For a long time both were shown to pilgrims, the arch as the place where Pilate presented Jesus and the paving as John’s Pavement, but archaeologists date them to the plaza the emperor Hadrian built when he rebuilt the city in AD 135, a century after the crucifixion.

If the walk began at Herod’s palace, it went by different streets from the Via Dolorosa, and since nobody knows which streets they were, nobody can measure it. We can be surer of where it ended. John says that “the place where Jesus was crucified was nigh to the city” (John 19:20), and Hebrews says that Jesus “suffered without the gate” (Hebrews 13:12), so on either reading the walk ran from a building inside the walls to a place just outside them. Where that place was is a question of its own, and it is taken up in where exactly Jesus was crucified.

Did Jesus carry his cross the whole way?

John says that Jesus, “bearing his cross went forth into a place called the place of a skull, which is called in the Hebrew Golgotha” (John 19:17). Matthew, Mark and Luke add that the soldiers made another man carry it, and Mark gives his name and family: “they compel one Simon a Cyrenian, who passed by, coming out of the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to bear his cross” (Mark 15:21). Matthew says this happened “as they came out” (Matthew 27:32), and Luke says the soldiers laid the cross on Simon “that he might bear it after Jesus” (Luke 23:26). There is more about Simon himself in who helped Jesus carry the cross.

No Gospel says how far Jesus went before Simon took the cross, but read together, the accounts suggest that Jesus set out carrying it and that Simon carried it for the rest of the way; the Via Dolorosa marks the change at its fifth station. Nor do the Gospels say why the soldiers seized a stranger. Edwards and his co-authors took it as evidence that after the scourging “Jesus was too weakened to carry the crossbar (patibulum) to Golgotha.”

On the usual view, what Jesus carried was the crossbeam alone, with the upright post already standing at the place of execution; its size and weight are set out in how big Jesus’s cross was and how much it weighed.

How far did Jesus walk before he took up the cross?

By the time he set out for Golgotha, Jesus had already come through a long night on foot. After the Last Supper, he and his disciples “went out into the mount of Olives” (Mark 14:26) to “a place which was named Gethsemane” (Mark 14:32). From there he was led “away to the high priest” (Mark 14:53), and in the morning the chief priests “bound Jesus, and carried him away, and delivered him to Pilate” (Mark 15:1). Luke adds that Pilate sent him to Herod Antipas, “who himself also was at Jerusalem at that time,” and that Herod “sent him again to Pilate” (Luke 23:7, 23:11).

Edwards and his co-authors reckoned that in the night he “had been forced to walk more than 2.5 miles (4.0 km) to and from the sites of the various trials.” This estimate, like their figure for the route, assumes that Pilate judged him at the Antonia Fortress, so the true figure depends on where the high priest’s house stood, where Herod Antipas was staying and where Pilate’s headquarters were.

How long did the walk to the cross take?

The Gospels give hours for the trial and for the crucifixion, but none of them says how long the walk between them took. John says Pilate sat in judgment “about the sixth hour” (John 19:14), while Mark says “it was the third hour, and they crucified him” (Mark 15:25). How those two times of day fit together belongs to the question of what time Jesus was crucified.

What happened on the way to Golgotha?

Only Luke records anything said on the way. A crowd went along: “there followed him a great company of people, and of women, which also bewailed and lamented him,” and Jesus turned to them and said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children” (Luke 23:27–28). Two others, “malefactors,” were “led with him to be put to death” (Luke 23:32).

So the road was under half a mile long, through streets no one can now be sure of, and what the Gospels keep for us instead of a measurement is a picture: the weeping women, the two condemned men, and Simon of Cyrene with the cross on his shoulder, walking “after Jesus.”

Related reading

• How big Jesus’s cross was, and how much it weighed
• Who helped Jesus carry the cross?
• Where exactly was Jesus crucified?
• What time was Jesus crucified?
• How big Jerusalem was in Jesus’s time
• What it means to take up your cross