Before the Passion

Before the Passion was inspired by my visit to the Holy Land, where one of our stops was the house of Caiaphas. My desire was to capture the agony of Christ during the lonely night before He was taken to Pontius Pilate.

While the Gospels do not explicitly state that Jesus was lowered into a cistern or dungeon between His Jewish trial and His appearance before Pilate, a long-standing Christian tradition, supported by archaeological discoveries, has led a number of scholars and historians to regard the possibility as reasonable.

Many Christian writers associate Christ’s suffering during that night with the words of Psalm 88:

"You have put me in the depths of the pit, in the darkest places…" (Psalm 88:6).

In The Holy Land: An Oxford Archaeological Guide, Jerome Murphy-O’Connor described the remains beneath St. Peter in Gallicantu and acknowledged the ancient tradition that Jesus spent the night in the pit, while noting that such a claim cannot be historically proven.

Through Before the Passion, I sought to portray the isolation, anguish, and anticipation of the suffering that awaited Christ in the hours leading to His crucifixion.