This post is a continuation of my post Thursday Morning in Jerusalem.

Thursday was a very busy day and we visited a lot of different spots. In the last post I left off with our lunch at Jacob’s Pizza.

Our next stop was one that I had been looking forward to since long before the beginning of our trip to Israel.

Our first visit after lunch was to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. In the picture above you see the Edicule of the Tomb which was recently restored. When I was in Jerusalem last year this structure was being repaired. You can see pictures of the Edicule under renovation by visiting my post Holy Sepulcher Tombs. There are also links there for more information about this structure which is built over the traditional site of the burial of Jesus.

After we visited the Church of the Holy Sepulcher we were given some free time to do some shopping. This made the women in the group very happy, but also gave me an opportunity to take one of the other members of the group to see a little visited site that was nearby.

The Holy Monastery of Saint John the Baptist of Jerusalem is easy to miss as the entrance is not easy to find. The interior of the church is very ornate and you can see that it is Greek Orthodox. The church has beautiful murals painted on the walls and ceilings.

This is the traditional location of where the head of John the Baptist is buried.

We then walked down the Via Dolorosa in reverse to the Church of St. Anne. This building was built in the 1100’s and has wonderful acoustics. We spent some time here singing several songs as a group. There is a video of us singing, but I don’t know how to link to it as it is a Facebook post.

The Church of St. Anne is just by the pools of Bethesda. The pools have had several church buildings built over them so you can only see glimpses of the original pools.

After visiting the pools the scheduled program for the day was complete. However, I went with my friends David and Melinda to visit several more spots in Jerusalem. We went out the Lion Gate and walked along the eastern wall of the Temple Mount.  Here is the Golden Gate or Eastern Gate. The gate has been shut up since 1541 and there is a cemetery in front of it.

We also looked for and found the seam in the Temple Mount wall where it was expanded to the south.

We then walked down into the Kidron Valley to visit the monumental tombs that are there. We took many pictures and I need to soon write a post about them. I also visited these tombs last year and at that time had promised a future post. Maybe I will get one written soon 🙂

Here is the corner of the Temple Mount which is probably the Pinnacle of the Temple. The picture does not give the full impact as to how high the Temple Mount stood above the Kidron Valley. The wall was probably more than 10 meters higher and the Kidron Valley is also not as deep as it was at the time of Christ.

The last place we visited is the possible place of Gabbatha or The Stone Pavement which is mentioned in John 19:13.

We then made the long walk back to our hotel.

Steven