The earliest surviving description of the holy places was written by an anonymous traveller from Bordeaux in 333, while Constantine’s churches were going up, and it is far barer than what has been built on it. Golgotha is a *monticulus* — a hillock — found by walking directions and nothing else: out of the wall of Sion towards the gate of Neapolis, the praetorium down on the right, the little hill on the left. The word Calvary never appears in his text. The tomb is one clause, a *crypta*, a vault, a stone’s throw away; there is no rolled stone, no chamber, no description at all. He is not shown Gethsemane: he is shown *a stone* in the Valley of Josaphat where Judas betrayed the Lord, and a palm-tree the children took branches from. The name Gethsemane enters this text only in its Victorian editor’s introduction, in brackets. The Mount of Olives is where the Lord taught before the Passion — he does not connect it with the Ascension, though a basilica already stands there. The five-portico pool is *Bethsaida* in his own spelling; "Bethesda" is a marginal gloss printed in 1896. ⚠ And he reports, flatly and with no source, that the spring of Siloe runs six days and nights and does not run at all on the Sabbath. That cannot be what he was told it was, and it is the clearest proof of what this text is: EVIDENCE OF WHAT WAS BELIEVED IN 333, not of what happened three centuries earlier. A site he names is documented for the identification; the event keeps its own grade.
Itinerary from Bordeaux to Jerusalem (Itinerarium Burdigalense) · PPTS I, Itinerary from Bordeaux to Jerusalem, tr. Stewart — Golgotha and the vault pp. 23–24, the basilica p. 24, the betrayal stone p. 24, Olivet pp. 24–25, Bethsaida p. 20, Siloe pp. 22–23; the Latin in Appendix V pp. 63–66