Gospel of Gamaliel

Introduction

There are books that survive the centuries by sheer institutional force — copied by monks, endorsed by councils, sheltered in the great libraries of Christendom. And then there are books that survive despite everything: despite fire, despite suppression, despite the deliberate and systematic effort of powerful men who believed that certain perspectives on sacred events were too dangerous, too inconvenient, or simply too human to be allowed to circulate freely. The text you are about to encounter belongs to the second category. It arrives in your hands not as a triumphant rediscovery but as a fragment of a much larger conversation — one that was interrupted almost two thousand years ago and has never, until now, been properly resumed.

To understand why this document matters, you need to first appreciate the world in which it was almost certainly composed. The first century of the Common Era was not a time of settled religious certainty. It was a time of extraordinary ferment, of competing messianisms and rival interpretations of Jewish law, of Roman power pressing down on a people who had learned, across generations of conquest and exile, to find meaning in suffering and transcendence in catastrophe. Into this world came a man from Galilee whose teachings, whose execution, and whose reported resurrection would split the Jewish world and eventually transform the entire Mediterranean basin. But that transformation did not happen cleanly or quickly. It happened through argument, through community, through the painful negotiation of memory — and through texts, many of which did not survive.

The figure of Gamaliel stands at one of the most fascinating crossroads in the entire history of early religion. He is not an obscure character. He appears in the canonical Acts of the Apostles, where he is portrayed as a voice of cautious wisdom within the Sanhedrin — a Pharisaic teacher of the law who counsels restraint when his colleagues are ready to move against the nascent Jesus movement. 'If this plan or this undertaking is of human origin,' he famously argues, 'it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them.' It is one of the most remarkable speeches in the entire New Testament, and it comes from a man who is never, in the canonical tradition, described as a follower of Jesus. He is a witness. He is a bystander. He is, in some profound sense, the most credible observer in the room — precisely because he has no obvious stake in the outcome.

Jewish tradition remembers Gamaliel the Elder, also known as Rabban Gamaliel I, as one of the great sages of the Second Temple period. He was the grandson of the legendary Hillel, the head of the most respected Pharisaic school of his age, and a man whose legal opinions shaped the development of rabbinic Judaism for generations. The Mishnah preserves his rulings on matters ranging from divorce law to the treatment of Gentiles. He was, by any measure, one of the most educated and perceptive religious minds of his era. He would have known the Jerusalem priestly establishment intimately. He would have had opinions — carefully considered, deeply informed opinions — about the trial and execution of Jesus of Nazareth. He would have known people on every side of that event. And yet his voice, in the surviving historical record, is almost entirely absent from the central drama.

This is the silence that the text presented in this volume breaks open.

The manuscript tradition behind what scholars have come to call the Gospel of Gamaliel is complex, contested, and in some respects deliberately obscured. The full story of its transmission — from the ancient world through the medieval period and into the hands of the modern scholars who have worked to reconstruct and translate it — is itself a kind of detective story, one that touches on some of the most sensitive fault lines in the history of Jewish-Christian relations. It involves libraries in Cairo and Constantinople, a Coptic fragment that sat unrecognized in a European university collection for nearly a century, and the painstaking work of philologists and historians who were willing to follow the evidence wherever it led, even when it led somewhere uncomfortable.

What makes this text so extraordinary is not simply its claimed authorship or its antiquity, though both of those things matter enormously. What makes it extraordinary is its perspective. The canonical Gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — were written from within the Jesus movement, by people who believed in the resurrection and were trying to communicate that belief to others. They are documents of faith, shaped by the theological needs of communities that were defining themselves in opposition to both Roman power and the Jewish establishment from which they had emerged. They are not, and were never intended to be, neutral historical accounts. They are proclamations. They are arguments. They are, in the deepest sense, acts of persuasion.

The text you are about to read is something different. It is the account of a man who was present — or who had access to those who were present — but who did not become a believer, at least not in any simple or straightforward sense. It is the account of a man who was trying to understand what had happened, not to proclaim it. And that distinction, seemingly subtle, turns out to make an enormous difference to what gets noticed, what gets emphasized, and what gets said.

Consider, for a moment, what it would mean to have an account of the Passion and its aftermath written by someone of Gamaliel's background and position. He would have understood the legal proceedings against Jesus in a way that none of the Gospel writers — most of whom were Galilean fishermen and craftsmen — could have matched. He would have known the members of the Sanhedrin personally. He would have understood the precise nature of the charges, the procedural irregularities, the political pressures that shaped the outcome. He would have had access to testimony that never made it into the canonical accounts, because the canonical accounts were written by people who were not in the room when the most consequential decisions were being made.

He would also have brought to his observations a theological framework that was simultaneously deeply Jewish and surprisingly open. The Hillelite tradition to which Gamaliel belonged was, by the standards of its time, notably humanistic. It emphasized the dignity of every person, the importance of mercy in the interpretation of law, and the possibility that God's purposes might work themselves out in ways that human institutions could not fully anticipate or control. These were not the instincts of a man who would simply dismiss what he had witnessed. These were the instincts of a man who would sit with it, turn it over, and try to find a way to make sense of it that honored both his tradition and his experience.

None of this is to say that the text is without its difficulties. Any document that claims to preserve the perspective of a first-century Jewish sage on the events surrounding the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus is going to raise profound questions about authenticity, transmission, and interpretation. The scholarly debates surrounding this manuscript are genuine and ongoing. There are serious historians who believe that what we have is a composite document — that the core of it may indeed preserve very early traditions, possibly even traditions that go back to eyewitness accounts, but that it has been supplemented and shaped by later hands, perhaps in the second or third century, perhaps even later. There are other scholars who argue for a much earlier and more unified composition. This volume presents the evidence honestly and does not pretend to a certainty that the evidence does not support.

What the evidence does support, overwhelmingly, is that this text deserves to be read. Whatever its precise origins, it preserves perspectives on the central events of early Christianity that are found nowhere else in the surviving literature. It raises questions that the canonical tradition does not raise. It notices things that the canonical tradition does not notice. And it does so from a vantage point — that of a learned, compassionate, politically sophisticated Jewish observer — that is almost entirely absent from the documents that have shaped Western civilization for two millennia.

The World Behind the Text

To read this document well, you need to inhabit, as fully as possible, the world in which it was produced. That world is not the world of medieval Christianity, with its soaring cathedrals and its settled doctrines. It is not even the world of the early church fathers, with their Greek philosophical frameworks and their increasingly systematic theologies. It is the world of first-century Jerusalem — a city of perhaps eighty thousand souls, dominated by the vast platform of Herod's Temple, governed by a priestly aristocracy that was itself governed by the ever-present reality of Roman occupation, and alive with the kind of intense, passionate, often violent religious debate that only happens when people believe that the stakes are genuinely cosmic.

The Pharisees, of whom Gamaliel was the most distinguished representative of his generation, are often misunderstood by modern readers who know them primarily from the polemical passages in the Gospels. The Pharisees of the canonical tradition are hypocrites and legalists, men who strain out gnats and swallow camels. But this portrait, shaped by the bitter conflicts of a later period when the Jesus movement and the rabbinic movement were competing for the loyalty of diaspora Jewish communities, does not do justice to the actual Pharisees of the first century. They were, in many respects, the progressive reformers of their age — democratizing access to religious practice, insisting that the law belonged to the whole people and not just to the priestly elite, developing the oral tradition that would eventually become the Talmud as a living, adaptive response to the challenges of a changing world.

Gamaliel stood at the apex of this tradition. His school was the most prestigious in Jerusalem. His students included, according to the Acts of the Apostles, a young man named Saul of Tarsus — who would later become Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles and arguably the most important single figure in the spread of Christianity beyond its Jewish origins. The fact that Paul was Gamaliel's student is one of the most tantalizing details in the entire early Christian record. It suggests a connection, however indirect, between the Pharisaic tradition and the new movement that is far more intimate than the canonical Gospels generally acknowledge. And it raises the question — which this text addresses with extraordinary directness — of what Gamaliel himself made of the events that set his most famous student on such a different path.

The Jerusalem that Gamaliel inhabited was also a city under enormous pressure. The decades leading up to the Jewish revolt of 66 CE were marked by escalating tension between the Jewish population and their Roman overlords, by a succession of increasingly incompetent and brutal Roman governors, and by the rise of multiple messianic movements that promised liberation and ended in massacre. In this context, the execution of Jesus of Nazareth was not an isolated event. It was one episode in a long and bloody story of Roman suppression of Jewish religious and political aspirations. Gamaliel would have seen it in that context. He would have understood it as part of a pattern, not as a singular rupture in the fabric of history — and yet, as this text makes clear, something about this particular episode refused to fit the pattern.

The resurrection tradition is, of course, the central puzzle. For the followers of Jesus, the resurrection was the event that transformed everything — that turned a failed messianic movement into the foundation of a new faith. For their opponents, it was a fabrication, a story invented by desperate disciples to save face after their leader's humiliating death. For Gamaliel, as this text reveals, it was neither of these things. It was a problem. A serious, unresolvable, philosophically and theologically vexing problem that demanded to be engaged with the same rigor and honesty that he brought to every other question of law and scripture. The way he engages with it — the questions he asks, the witnesses he consults, the frameworks he brings to bear — is unlike anything in the existing literature, and it is one of the great intellectual adventures that this book offers its readers.

It is also worth noting what Gamaliel would have known about the trial itself that the Gospel writers could not have known, or chose not to record. The legal proceedings against Jesus, as described in the canonical Gospels, have puzzled historians and legal scholars for centuries. The timing, the procedures, the charges — none of them quite fit what we know about how the Sanhedrin actually operated. Some scholars have concluded that the Gospel accounts are simply unreliable on these points, shaped more by theological necessity than by historical memory. Others have argued that the irregularities themselves are evidence of authenticity — that the trial was irregular precisely because it was conducted under extraordinary pressure and in extraordinary haste. The perspective offered in this text cuts through much of this debate in ways that are both illuminating and, at times, deeply unsettling.

The political dimensions of the crucifixion — the role of Pontius Pilate, the relationship between the Roman governor and the Jerusalem priestly establishment, the question of who really wanted Jesus dead and why — are treated here with a sophistication that reflects Gamaliel's unique position as a man who moved in the highest circles of Jerusalem's religious and political life. He knew Caiaphas. He knew the dynamics of the high priestly families. He understood the complex, often corrupt relationship between the Temple establishment and the Roman occupation. And he was not, unlike the Gospel writers, invested in protecting any of these figures from scrutiny. His account of what happened in those days before and after the Passover of approximately 30 CE is the account of a man with no axe to grind — or rather, a man whose only axe is the truth, however uncomfortable it might prove.

The physical world of the text also rewards careful attention. Jerusalem in this period was a city of extraordinary sensory intensity — the smell of the Temple sacrifices, the noise of pilgrims from across the diaspora crowding into the city for the great festivals, the constant low-level anxiety of a people living under occupation. Gamaliel's account is grounded in this physical reality in a way that the more theologically elevated passages of the canonical Gospels sometimes are not. He notices the weather. He notices the behavior of crowds. He notices the small human details — a gesture, a hesitation, a moment of unexpected kindness — that get lost when events are filtered through the lens of cosmic significance. Reading his account, you feel the weight of those days in a new way. You feel how contingent everything was, how easily it might have gone differently, and how strange it is that these particular events, in this particular corner of the Roman Empire, became the hinge on which so much of subsequent history turned.

Reading Across the Silence

There is a concept in musicology called the generative rest — the silence in a piece of music that is not merely an absence of sound but an active, meaning-producing pause, a space in which the listener's imagination and anticipation do essential work. The historical record of early Christianity is full of generative rests. The years between the crucifixion and the writing of the earliest Gospel. The decades between Paul's letters and the composition of Acts. The vast, largely undocumented process by which a small Jewish sect in first-century Palestine became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. Into these silences, historians and theologians have poured enormous amounts of energy, speculation, and faith. The text presented in this volume speaks into one of the most significant of those silences — and what it says changes the acoustics of everything around it.

One of the most important things to understand about this document is what it is not. It is not a Gospel in the traditional sense — it does not present itself as good news, as proclamation, as the authoritative account of a divine intervention in human history. It is closer, in its form and its ambitions, to what we might today call a memoir or a philosophical reflection — the attempt of a highly intelligent, deeply learned man to make sense of events that he witnessed or learned about at first hand, events that troubled him profoundly and that he could not simply file away and forget. The genre is unusual for its period, though not without precedent. The Jewish tradition had a long history of reflective literature — from the wisdom writings of the Hebrew Bible to the philosophical essays of Philo of Alexandria — and Gamaliel writes very much within that tradition, even as he is grappling with something that pushes its boundaries.

The question of what Gamaliel believed — whether he came, in the end, to some form of faith in the resurrection, or whether he remained a skeptical but deeply engaged observer — is one that the text itself refuses to answer simply. This ambiguity is not a weakness of the document. It is, arguably, its greatest strength. It reflects the genuine complexity of a thoughtful person's encounter with an event that defies easy categorization. The either/or framework that later Christianity would impose on the resurrection — you either believe it happened or you don't, and everything follows from that choice — was not yet fully formed in Gamaliel's world. He was operating in a more fluid intellectual and spiritual space, one in which the boundaries between the natural and the supernatural, between the human and the divine, between history and eschatology, were drawn very differently than they would be in later centuries.

This fluidity is one of the things that makes the text so valuable for anyone trying to understand the origins of Christianity from the outside — or rather, from the inside of a tradition that was adjacent to and deeply entangled with the Jesus movement without being identical to it. Gamaliel's Judaism and the emerging Christianity of the first century shared a vast amount — scripture, prayer, ethical framework, eschatological expectation — and were divided by what might seem, from a distance, like a relatively small number of specific claims. Reading his account, you begin to appreciate just how narrow that original divide was, and how much of what later became an unbridgeable chasm was the product of subsequent history rather than original difference.

The implications of this for Jewish-Christian relations — for the long, painful history of a relationship that has included persecution, forced conversion, expulsion, and genocide — are not something this volume addresses directly. That is not its purpose. But they are impossible to ignore. One of the things that the recovery of voices like Gamaliel's does is to remind us that the story of early Christianity was not a story of two clearly defined communities in opposition. It was a story of a single community in the process of a painful and contested division — a division in which the people on both sides were, for a long time, genuinely uncertain about where the lines were being drawn and why. Recovering that uncertainty, honoring it rather than papering over it with the confident categories of later centuries, is one of the most important things that historical scholarship can do.

For readers coming to this text from a Christian background, it may be challenging in ways that are ultimately productive. Gamaliel does not see Jesus through the lens of Christian theology. He sees him through the lens of first-century Jewish messianism, of Torah interpretation, of the complex political situation of occupied Judea. The Jesus he describes is recognizable — recognizable as the figure of the Gospels, as a teacher and healer and provocateur of extraordinary power — but he is also subtly different, seen from an angle that the canonical tradition does not provide. Some of what Gamaliel notices will confirm what Christian readers already believe. Some of it will complicate it. All of it will deepen it.

For readers coming from a Jewish background, the text offers something different but equally valuable — a window into a moment before the definitive parting of the ways, when it was still possible for a man of Gamaliel's stature and learning to engage seriously and openly with the claims of the Jesus movement without it constituting a betrayal of his tradition. The Gamaliel of this text is not a proto-Christian. He is a Jew, deeply and unambiguously. But he is a Jew who takes seriously the possibility that God might be doing something unexpected, something that the existing categories of his tradition are not quite adequate to contain. That openness — that willingness to sit with the unresolvable — is itself a kind of witness.

For readers who come to this text with no particular religious commitment, as historians or as simply curious human beings trying to understand one of the most consequential series of events in the history of the world, the document offers something that is perhaps most valuable of all: a perspective that is neither inside nor outside the emerging faith, neither a believer's proclamation nor a skeptic's dismissal, but something rarer and more honest — the account of a genuinely uncertain, genuinely engaged, genuinely brilliant mind trying to make sense of something that resisted sense-making. In an age when religious questions are so often reduced to tribal affiliations and culture-war positions, there is something almost radical about that kind of honest, rigorous, open-ended inquiry. Gamaliel models it. And in modeling it, he invites us to do the same.

The pages that follow will take you into one of the most consequential weeks in human history, seen through eyes that have never before been available to us. You will walk the streets of Jerusalem with a man who knew its secrets. You will sit in the councils where decisions were made that changed the world. You will stand at the edge of a tomb and face the same questions that have haunted Western civilization for two thousand years — questions about death and life, about justice and power, about what it means for the human and the divine to meet in history. You will not be given easy answers. But you will be given something better: the company of a mind that refused to look away, refused to settle for comfortable certainties, and refused to stop asking the questions that matter most. That, in the end, is what this recovered voice offers us. Not resolution, but the courage to keep asking. Not certainty, but the wisdom to live faithfully in its absence. Open the text. The conversation that was interrupted two thousand years ago is about to resume.

The Gospel of Gamaliel

Chapter 1

The weeping of Jacob, head of the Patriarchs, has been renewed today, O my beloved. Why then should the Virgin Mary not weep over her Son whom she conceived in virginity? Why should she not weep over the one for whom she endured the pangs of childbirth? Why should she not weep over the one to whose divine mouth she offered her virginal breast? Why should the Virgin not weep over the manger in Bethlehem? Why should she not weep over her beloved Son whom she carried through nine months? Why should she not weep over the one she brought forth and nursed? If Rachel weeps over children she never held in her arms, why should the Virgin not weep over the one she carried in her arms as all mothers carry their babes? If Rachel weeps over children for whom she never ran from place to place, why should the Virgin not weep over her child with whom she fled from country to country? If Rachel weeps over children whose tombs she never saw, why should the Virgin not weep at the door of her only Son's tomb?

The weeping of a venerable old man has been renewed today for a young virgin woman. Jacob did not see Joseph bound by his brothers, but the Virgin saw her Son nailed to the wood of the cross. Jacob did not see Joseph when his brothers threw him, hungry, into the depths of the pit, that he might weep over him; but the Virgin saw her Son hanging on the cross between two criminals, before all the Jews. Jacob did not see Joseph when his brothers stripped him of his clothes, but the Virgin saw her Son naked in the midst of Jews devoid of understanding. Jacob did not see Joseph being sold to Egyptian merchants for thirty denarii, but the Virgin saw her Son when Judas sold him for thirty pieces of silver. Jacob wept over a stranger's blood and over a robe that had not truly been torn by wild beasts; but it is over a divine blood smeared on the rock of Golgotha that the Virgin weeps, and over the outer robe her Son had been wearing, which they had divided among themselves. The brothers of Joseph wept and repented that they had sold their brother, but the children of Israel did not weep when they sold their Lord. The sons of Jacob rejoiced when their brother reigned over Egypt, but the Jews did not rejoice when their Lord rose from the dead.

O pure Virgin, your wailing over the tomb of your beloved Son is truly sweet, and your voice is melodious among the angels, when they brought you the sorrowful news and said: "O Mary, why do you sit here, while your Son stands before the Governor and is being judged and insulted by the High Priest of the Jews? O Mary, why do you sit here, while your Son is being stripped in the courtyard of the garment stained with his blood? O daughter of Joiakim, why do you sit here, while your Son carries a cross alone through the streets of Jerusalem and no one comes near him? O dove of Hannah, why do you sit here, while your Son is being crucified at the place of Golgotha? O seed of David, why have they lifted your Son upon the cross?"

O my pure and Virgin Lady, your wailing is truly sweet today in the house of John, as you cry out: "Oh, how bitter is this messenger who came to me today! He is more bitter than the messenger of death who came to Job and to Jacob Israel. Oh, how cruel is the bearer of news who came to me today, O my child! He is more cruel than the one who announced to Lot the burning of his city. Oh, how painful is the news that came to me today, O my child! It is more painful than the news of the death of the valiant men of Israel. Oh, how cruel is the messenger who brought me this evil news, O my child! This child has comforted me for thirty years, and never once gave me cause to rebuke or scold him. And what makes the news more bitter still is that the one who brought it to me is Salome!

All my sorrow has begun again. O my child, I have never gone before a governor, nor have I ever stood before a judge. I have never seen a criminal put to death, nor have I ever gone to the Kranion, nor do I know the place of Golgotha. O my child, I have never stood by while men argued their cases before a court, so that I might understand the false reasoning they have used against you; nor have I ever been present in a law court, so that I might grasp the injustice that has been done to you. O my child, I am inside the house of John, and you are in the house of the High Priest Annas. O my child, this cruel news about you has outweighed all the sadness of my orphanhood, and the painful tidings concerning you have today robbed me of my joy. The angel announced your birth to me in Nazareth, and now this cruel news about you has been announced to me in Jerusalem. Your Annunciation came to me in the house of Joseph, and this evil news was brought to me in the house of John. O my beloved, I was rejoicing in my heart and saying to myself each day, 'Tomorrow we shall keep our Passover, fulfill the ordinance of the feast, and return home.' The Passover has come to me, O my beloved Son, with weeping and wailing. My feast has turned to lamentation and my Passover into grief."

The Virgin uttered this heartfelt lament in the house of John when they brought her the sorrowful news of her Son. Then she began to look for one of his holy disciples to walk with her, but she found none, for all had fled and forsaken him out of fear of the Jews. She asked for Peter to accompany her, and was told that out of fear of the High Priest he had denied her Son, saying, "I do not know him," and had gone and hidden himself. She asked for James, the brother of the Lord, and was told that he had fled and left him on the mount where he was seized. She asked for Andrew, and was told that he had not come with him into the city at all. She asked for Thomas, and was told that he had thrown down his garments and fled. She asked for the son of Tolmai, and was told that he was the first of his companions to flee. She asked for Philip, and was told that when he saw the torches burning he was terrified and fled. She asked for James, the brother of John, and was told that he had not so much as looked back at him. She asked for Matthew, and was told that he feared the Jews more than all the others, since they bore a particular grudge against him from the days when he had collected taxes from them, and that he had therefore fled in the darkness of the night. In short, she asked for all of them and found not one, except John, who had accompanied him to Golgotha.

Then the Virgin resumed her weeping and wailing, because she could find none of the apostles, the disciples of her Son, except John, and she said through her tears: "Woe is me, O my Son, O my beloved, for your brothers have fled and vanished. O my father Peter, I thought every day that you would never deny your Master. You were given no gold or silver that you should deny him so quickly. You were offered no boat or oars — why then did you deny your Master and your Lord today? You were given no son or daughter as the price of your denial, O Peter, and you were not offered a brother or a friend in exchange for him — why then this spiritless weakness in you? You did not see a second cross, O Peter, that you should have believed it might be meant for you and been so terrified that you denied him. He gave you a tongue of iron, O Peter, and you melted it and ruined it without fire or a smith. He bestowed grace upon you, O Peter, more than upon any other man, and yet you could not bear even a single blow for your Master's sake."

He bestowed on you, O Peter, two eyes whose light does not fade, and you were not ashamed to deny their light. He entrusted to you, O Peter, the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, and you could not endure a short time for His sake in the prison of the High Priest. He made you, O Peter, His deputy over all the world, and you could not bear a single temptation for your Master. He made you, O Peter, a father to all the world, and you did not show even one brief hour of brotherly love toward my Son. He laid His divine hand upon your head, O Peter, and yet you would not consent to wear a crown of thorns upon your head before you had denied Him. Even if you were to say, Peter, that my Son was not your Master but only your friend, that was no reason to deny Him in such a way. If you had been called to endure all the tribulations that my father Joseph endured alongside us, you would have been dragged to Herod together with my Son. If you had been required to bear, as he bore, the hardships of the journey to the land of Egypt, you would not have been able to endure a single one of them. May the dew of heaven nourish your bones, O my father Joseph, righteous man, and may the tree of life sustain your soul, for you endured my tribulations with me and never denied my Son. O Peter, they did not bring you before the Governor, nor did they place you before the high tribunal, and yet you denied your Master so quickly.

When the Virgin finished her lamentations over Peter's denial in the house of John, she sent for John, who came and found her weeping. Then both John and the Virgin wept together over the Lord Jesus. John said to the Virgin: "O my mother, do not weep over Peter for his denial of my Master, for the blame that attaches to him is not the same as that which attaches to Judas, who betrayed Him. I heard what my Master said at the evening meal, and what Peter said to Him: 'Far be it from you, Lord — this shall never happen to you; I will give my life for you.' And I heard my Lord and Master rebuke him, saying three times, 'Get behind me, Satan; you have become a stumbling block to me, for you are not thinking of the things of God, but of the things of men.' Now, O my Lady and my mother, do not weep over my father Peter, for his denial will become a symbol of repentance to sinners, since he gave the lie to his own words and so confirmed the words of his Master."

Then the Virgin gave herself over to bitter weeping, because she had not yet seen her Son, and she returned again to her painful lamentations in the house of John and said: "I adjure you, O John, show me the way to the Kranion. I adjure you, O John, accompany me to Golgotha. I have never yet seen a robber being crucified, nor have I ever stood near a robber when he was beheaded. I will forsake my town and all my freedom, and go barefoot to the place where my beloved Son has been crucified like a common robber, for He is alone, and not one of His brethren is standing near Him, and none of your friends is here with you who might speak a word on your behalf. O my child, the sorrow of a mother for her beloved son is one thing, and the sorrow of a friend for his friend is another; the pain in the heart of a mother weeping over her beloved son is one thing, and the weeping of a friend over his friend is another. My sorrow, O my child, is today greater than the sorrow of all the world and of all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and my weeping is more bitter than that of all who will gather near me."

When John saw that she could not stop her weeping and wailing, and that he for his part was unable to comfort her, because she kept saying, "If I do not see Him I cannot be comforted," he said to her: "Rise, and I will take you to the Kranion, so that you may see Him."