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Bible Notes - Tabernacle Commentaries
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John 19:17
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There is no contradiction in the Gospels. The humiliated flogged individual who was to be crucified person bore his own cross because he was beneath help; nobody normally would be able to help him. The Lord Jesus dragged his cross out of the city of Jerusalem and it seems that, once outside the city, a person was appointed to help him carry it. Not out of courtesy but because that flogging was so terrible he could carry it no further and he had to be assisted on the final phase of the journey. He ‘went forth into a place called the place of a skull, which is called in the Hebrew Golgotha.’ We don’t really know where it was – whether it was a hillside that looked like a skull. There is such a place, but whether it was that or whether it was the common place of execution and skulls were littered around nobody really knows, but this was the name of it.
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Three English Gospels including John use the Hebrew-Aramaic name ‘Golgotha’, and add the explanation in Greek that this means ‘the place of a skull’. In English, Luke alone uses the word ‘Calvary’ which is taken from a later Latin word meaning skull, a translation of the Greek name ‘Cranion’ found in Luke. So it is only in the Gospel of Luke in the King James Version that we ever find Calvary. Yet isn’t it remarkable that that has become the popular and the well-known and the best-loved term for the place of a skull - derived from the Latin rather than the Greek ‘Cranion’ or the Hebrew-Aramaic ‘Golgotha’.
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