As a boy, I used to come with my parents
to Glasgow Cathedral every Easter.
I knew all about the Crucifixion,
thanks to my illustrated children's Bible.
And in its pages, the story of Good Friday
was set in a place that looked very Hollywood,
with a blonde, blue-eyed leading man.
My understanding of the Easter story began with these images.
I was the son of a painter and now I'm one, too.
Growing up, I learned all about Christ's sacrifice
through the work of great artists.
I noticed that most of them had one thing in common.
They hadn't left home.
It was clear that, hundreds of years ago,
artists had to guess what the Holy Land looked like
and what they painted looked suspiciously European.
In this Holy Week, I'm making my own, very personal pilgrimage.
Don't run out of paper.
I have come to draw and paint the faces and places
where the Easter story actually happened.
This is epic stuff, isn't it?
Seeing is believing.
As an artist, it's my job to look at the world
and to see things a little differently.
All of it happened amidst this kind of noise
and interruptions and unexpected chaos.
I've brought along some of the masterpieces
that gave me my first ideas about Christ's last days.
Now I want to discover if seeing the Holy Land with my own eyes
changes my understanding of the Bible's story.
Standing here on holy ground, will I be moved by the same places
that inspired those amazing artists who came before me,
to illustrate the greatest story ever told?
My interest in visiting the Holy Land really began in France.
As a boy, I spent many summers here on the coast of Brittany,
where my mother was born.
But it wasn't all just buckets and spades and lazy days by the beach.
I was always off visiting churches with my dad.
He loved the atmosphere of these sacred buildings.
In this chapel, he saw something that helped inspire him
to become a painter of religious subjects.
It was, for him, a kind of vision.
And there it is.
It kick-started a whole series of Easter paintings.
And here are some sketches that my father made of this very sculpture,
standing on this spot 30 years ago.
And I suspect that, as a boy, I was probably nearby,
looking over his shoulder, as he traced these marks.
My dad repeatedly depicted this scene,
the crucifixion, in his work, again and again, and in doing so,
he joined the ranks of so many artists in history
who have been obsessed with this subject.
Dad painted all these without ever seeing...
..this.
I've come here to paint and draw in the actual places
where the Easter story happened.
At home, the colours can be grey and drab.
Here in the Middle East,
it's a whole new palette of golden sunshine.
As an artist, I don't only paint what I see, but what I feel.
And this place is intense.
This puts the whole stories of the Bible onto a whole other level.
This is the original wilderness, isn't it?
Beautiful!
Really, really beautiful.
Transports you.
And I guess, that's what faith...
..is all about.
We call this the Holy Land because it's given us three religions,
which all worship one God -
Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Muslims and Christians acknowledge
the existence of a prophet called Jesus.
The life of that man would eventually inspire
great faith and great art.
For Christians, Jesus wasn't just
a historical figure made out of literal facts.
He was the son of God and a worker of miracles.
The most famous miracle in the Easter story
is Jesus's return from the dead.
But there's another miracle that set the scene
for the events of Holy Week.
It's called the Transfiguration, and some say it happened
on this mountain in Galilee, northern Israel.
It's after this moment that the disciples realise
their leader is the son of God.
Jesus was now a celebrity,
a thorn in the side of the religious authorities.
The countdown had begun to his death on the cross a few weeks later,
on Good Friday.
Jesus and three of his disciples came up here
on what was shaping up to be just another day.
But as they reached the summit,
according to my children's illustrated Bible,
something strange happened.
Jesus's face began to shine like the sun
and his clothes were white as light.
Suddenly, beside him, there appeared the Old Testament prophets,
Moses and Elijah, and as the apostles fell to the ground,
they heard the voice of God declaring,
"This is my beloved son."
As a boy, I loved this magical picture,
but it was a real masterpiece that shaped my understanding
of what miracles looked like.
On this trip, I've brought along
some of my favourite religious paintings,
and this image is by Raphael.
It depicts the Transfiguration,
and he seems to have really breathed life
into this whole religious story.
This painting isn't really about pedantic details and accuracy,
it's about the CGI, the special effects,
and Raphael has really upped the ante,
because he's depicted Jesus levitating up into the sky.
Something that actually isn't described in the Gospels,
but Raphael knew it was an opportunity for him
to use a little bit of artistic interpretation,
to create the most awe-inspiring scene he could dream up.
But being here, beneath these skies,
I think Galilee does look like a setting for miracles.
Standing up here on a day like this,
you do get the sense that this is the kind of place
where God might just flex his muscles.
Raphael dreamt up this painting in Italy.
But I've come here to see the real faces and places of the Easter story
with my own eyes.
I will be using my children's Bible as a guide.
The New Testament contains four accounts - the Gospels.
They tell of Jesus's last days, what's called Holy Week.
I've never been entirely clear about this
but, by tradition, they were written by four early Christians,
30 to 70 years after the life of Jesus
and although they do differ in certain details,
when they're read together, they help give you
an almost blow-by-blow account of Jesus's last days.
It's a bit of a detective story, trying to piece it all together
and the picture that emerges from history
is that of a peasant preacher,
wandering from village to village in the first century,
forecasting the end of the world.
Jesus and his disciples were gathering followers
as they travelled south from Galilee,
heading for Jerusalem and what Jesus knew would be the final showdown.
Holy Week would begin with his glorious entry
into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.
But on the Friday or Saturday before, they came here to Jericho.
It's an oasis town with a tropical climate.
Back then, it was popular with Roman high rollers, a glamorous place.
He would have known all about the glitz
and the architectural splendour of this place,
but his interest was in the poor.
All along the way, Jesus had been telling his disciples
that he was going to die in Jerusalem,
but they seemed to have paid no attention.
Jesus, however, knew that the time he had left
to get his message across was running out.
I love sketching on the spot.
You have to look closely and draw fast.
The sketchbook, making notes, looking at the costumes,
capturing the faces.
Really absorbing this environment.
My dad would have absolutely loved this place,
because although it's chaotically, boisterously modern,
in the faces, in the costumes, in the clothing, in the atmosphere,
in the language that he would have overheard
and the smells and the perfumes coming off the stalls,
he would have been able to transport himself back into ancient times.
Because there is...there is a kind of line through all these places,
in the eyes of the people that you meet,
I know it sounds romantic, but they do transport you.
News of Jesus and his preaching had made him something of
a controversial celebrity, and as our Easter story begins,
he and his entourage were making their way
through the dusty outskirts of Jericho
when, suddenly, a blind beggar called out to him.
"Have mercy on me," he said. "Let me recover my sight."
And Jesus picks him out -
the scruffiest and most unfortunate member of the crowd -
and he heals him.
Now, of course, it's a miracle, but it also has another meaning.
Jesus had given him faith.
He'd allowed him to see the word and the message of God.
This painting is of Christ Healing The Blind Man and it's by El Greco,
who was one of my dad's favourite artists.
But even my father would have to agree
that it takes a stretch of the imagination to...
..to see the events El Greco has described
as belonging to this place, Jericho.
I mean, for a start, he's missed out the falafel stalls
and the noisy yellow cabs.
I mean, he's made this place look as grand as Ancient Rome.
On my old bedroom wall, this made Jericho look European.
I knew it probably wasn't accurate.
The place is a bit faded now,
but it's seen the bad times and the good.
Jericho's about 11,000 years old.
DRUMMING
The oldest city in the world.
Absolute cacophony of chaos.
Modern, noisy, the sirens...
DRUMMING CONTINUES
Hello.
Drawing people always attracts a crowd,
but the subject is all I see.
I grew up with religious pictures
featuring people who looked European.
But you find the truth in the faces of men like this.
My dad would have loved drawing here.
He'd probably have tried out his pidgin Arabic.
MAN SPEAKS IN ARABIC
What do you think?
Good. Thank you very much.
He doesn't look too happy.
It's all right.
Try harder, Lachlan!
Jesus mixed with the poor and the needy.
Some powerful people found this threatening, and he made enemies.
In six days' time, on Good Friday,
they'd have their revenge here in Jerusalem.
This city was the setting for the key events
of the last week of Jesus's life -
what's called the Passion of Christ.
The Easter story that ends with the crucifixion and the resurrection.
There's been a settlement here forever.
But, for me, it all starts with the Bible stories.
I mean, you're really staring into the eyes of history here.
Since the days of King Solomon,
since the days of Herod the Great and Jesus of Nazareth,
there has been a Jerusalem.
Here on the Mount of Olives, you begin to realise
that for billions of people, over thousands of years,
this has represented the centre of their world,
the centre of their faith.
So to actually be here
and to realise that this is a place of beauty, of gilded light...
..of a variety of noises, from the church bells
to the Muslim calls to prayer,
to the birdsong of the Holy Land.
Well...it's quite overwhelming.
And every Easter, at church perhaps in Glasgow,
when I tried to imagine the backdrop to the Easter story,
well, I always reverted to painted images I had seen before.
According to the Gospels,
Jesus stood here on the morning of Palm Sunday.
Crowds of his supporters were waiting
to welcome him into the city - their Messiah.
Jesus entered Jerusalem through an ancient gate,
buried long ago beneath this one.
He was surrounded by cheering crowds
but he now had five days left to live...
..and he knew it.
Now, this painting is by
the 14th-century Italian artist called Giotto.
You've got Jerusalem looking like a kind of fantastical place,
with towers and turrets, beautiful, elegant arcades.
And, in fact, it actually resembles 14th-century Florence,
where Giotto lived, much more than first-century Jerusalem.
As an artist, Giotto was renowned for being able to paint figures
that seemed to be believable, that seemed to be human.
And I certainly can believe in this Jesus.
As he arrives in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday,
he's celebrated and welcomed as the Messiah.
People are even trying to climb the trees in order to get a better view.
And look, the donkey's got a smile on, too.
The church was really keen to encourage this kind of imagery,
because what it did was it allowed people
who were thousands of miles away from Jerusalem,
even those who couldn't read,
to come to a much better understanding of a narrative
that the church wanted everyone to become familiar with.
Once he'd ridden into the city, Jesus's fate was sealed.
Every step took him nearer Golgotha,
the site of the cross, five days away.
Jerusalem was then a Jewish city ruled by Romans.
In time, it would be briefly Christian,
but it's been Islamic and Jewish ever since.
Today, at the Damascus Gate Market, in the Arab quarter of Jerusalem,
you see Muslims, Jews and Christians all shopping for tasty vegetables.
The old master painters were Christians.
The Jerusalem they imagined rang with the sound of church bells,
but being here, the reality sounds very different.
The old city echoes with the adhan, the Muslim call to prayer,
coming from mosques all around.
How you see Jerusalem, how you understand the Easter story,
depends on your point of view.
I've been brought up with
an entirely Christian understanding of history.
And one of the things that brushes under the carpet, I think,
is that Jesus was Jewish.
He a temple-worshipping, kosher-keeping, circumcised Jew.
We're on the southern side of what was once the Jewish Temple Mount,
a huge religious complex dominating the city.
So this place would have been extremely familiar
and extremely holy to him.
And what we see around us
is a surviving piece of first-century Jerusalem.
Because Jesus would have climbed these steps
on his way up to the entrance of the temple.
On the Monday of Holy Week, Jesus and the disciples came here.
Today, thousands more come to be close to the stones
that were the stage for the Easter drama.
As an artist, you sometimes have to make sense of complicated subjects.
I often had to imagine things that have disappeared.
The same skill that archaeologist Joe Uriel needs for his job.
Well, we are located to the south of the Temple Mount.
This is where the Jewish temple stood,
exactly during the time of Jesus.
Over the past 2,000 years, this is the heart of Jerusalem.
The religious focal point of the city.
The temple was one of the largest temples in the Roman Empire.
We're talking about one of the most magnificent structures
in the Roman Empire. It would've been a place to come,
just as you would go visit today the Taj Mahal, so too the Temple Mount.
When it's hard to separate myth and miracle from fact,
the real can take you by surprise.
So we're actually in a place
where we can walk in the footsteps of Jesus.
That's wonderful, because Jesus still remains, in my head,
this kind of imaginary figure.
But to have something physical that we can connect to him - wonderful.
So 2,000-year-old blocks of stone
from the Jewish Temple of Herod the Great.
Looking at these blocks, we have some physical certainty.
This is a passport into King Herod's magnificent temple. That's right.
We must assume, then, that if Jesus walked through these places,
who knows? His hands might have brushed against the stone.
Possibly. Possibly. I'll have to touch it now, won't I? Fantastic.
I mean, I still find it, in my imagination, quite hard to believe
that this subtle little groove which has been carved
into the block is 2,000 years old.
There was a mason, there was a guy with a little chisel
making this impression, and by touching it, hello,
I've got another artist touching back here.
I can feel his hand print.
To be in the shadow of a building that has stood for 20 centuries
puts your own human existence into perspective.
We've got a short span here, 70 years.
And every so often, you need a touchstone to make you realise,
not only how small you are,
but how magnificent this world we live in is.
And I really do get that feeling here.
Only the base of what was the Jewish temple complex remains.
These walls now support an Islamic site
and the surviving Western Wall is as close as Jews can get
to their spiritual home.
To approach it, I must cover my head.
When I go to places of sacred worship
within the Christian culture, I'm used to finding a cathedral.
I'm used to finding a place that is ornate,
decorated full of silver and frescoes.
This, this is raw.
It's as real as any holy building.
But it no longer exists.
The Romans destroyed the Jewish temple in the year 70.
I've never been in a sacred place like this.
It's...
It's chaotic...
..noisy, the songs of people celebrating
and the songs of people praying
with a kind of intensity that seems...
..when you listen to them up against the wall, actually quite sad.
And that's because...
..for centuries...
..the great story of Jewish culture
has been a narrative of loss and longing.
To Jews visiting in the first century,
the temple that stood here was the awe-inspiring house of God,
visible for miles around.
It's the Monday of Holy Week.
Jesus has just four more days to live.
The drama intensifies when he and the disciples
enter the temple and find it full of birds, beasts and money men.
According to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke,
Jesus goes into the temple and he kicks off.
It's really not what the Prince of Peace is supposed to do,
but he is furious.
As a boy, I spent hours enjoying the detail in this 16th-century picture
by an unnamed Dutch artist.
This is a painting of Christ driving the moneylenders out of the temple.
Artists have always loved depicting this subject
because it reveals Jesus in a human light,
as someone who can lose his rag.
Although this scene isn't really very accurate -
it's a figment of the artist's imagination.
The architecture, the costumes that people are wearing,
they belong to the Dutch 16th century,
not the first century in Judaea.
But what does ring true is that the cast of gurning characters
really do reveal the kinds of things that were cheesing Jesus off
about what was going on in the temple. I mean, just look at them.
They're grotesque.
They're spreading their filth and dishevelment
across this sacred place. You've got a quack doctor here.
You've got people who appear to be gambling.
There's a pig that's running through the courtyard.
I mean, they really are charlatans, hucksters,
and they have turned this sacred place into a den of thieves.
And right there in the middle of the painting, you've got Jesus,
and he's got a whip and he's getting medieval
on the asses of the moneylenders.
This is an extraordinary bust-up in a biblical soap opera.
In the first century, the huge temple made Jerusalem famous
throughout the Roman Empire as a religious centre.
But, of course, it was also a city of business.
# A city frieze
# Get on your knees
# Pray for warmth and green paper
# A city drought... #
I guess I never really thought of Jerusalem as a real place.
You know, somewhere that people take the bins out at night,
and go out and buy toilet roll.
I've only ever experienced this city through paintings,
and in my imagination it's just been a kind of sacred vision.
And sitting here in the souk, I do feel I'm inside a painting.
The light above me is gold and there's a blue sky
with doves flying across it.
I can hear Hebrew, I can hear Arabic,
I can see the colourful wares
and the sparkles of things in shops for sale.
But real life happens in these streets.
You know, this is a place of traders and merchants and the hard sell.
And Jesus never shied away from the seedier side of life,
but he just wouldn't tolerate it in the front room of his dad's house.
Old Jerusalem is full of visual contrasts.
Under these high, stone walls, shadows are a deep blue.
But just around the corner, it's a rainbow of colours and sunshine.
In the old city, every street's a shopping centre.
People aren't used to someone stopping with a sketchbook.
It usually takes about five minutes, but Mustapha was on me in moments.
Is your shop in the picture? Let me see.
Oh, I've just missed it out! I'll show you my grandfather's picture.
Your grandfather painted? Wonderful.
What kind of things...? A professional, he's an artist.
And did he paint landscapes, or...? Everything. Everything?
I hope you like the drawing.
Gorgeous picture.
And I am feeling on it because each colour,
you make me feel you have a story.
Ah! What kind of story?
Muslims, Christians and Jews.
Well, I'm delighted to hear that you see that in my painting.
I... How... How I'm looking on, because what I see,
you have beautiful great stuff.
Very good.
Thank you. They're waiting for you. All right, thank you.
The countdown to Jesus's execution had begun.
And, behind the scenes,
the authorities were watching and worrying,
trying to figure out how they could get their hands
on this troublesome preacher man from Nazareth.
Jesus was aware that his earthly days were now numbered
and he was dropping heavy hints at a dinner party
at the home of someone called Simon the Leper.
According to some accounts, it was on the Wednesday of Holy Week.
Jesus had just 48 hours left,
but still the disciples hadn't fully cottoned on.
This meal is a turning point.
Over the food, a row breaks out that leads directly
to Jesus's capture and crucifixion.
It all begins with a bottle of perfume.
If you follow your nose through the souk,
you can still find the scent...
Hello.
..that Jesus smelled that night.
Can you tell me a little more about this? What is this?
This is a nard oil, the original one.
It's made from original flower - spikenard, it's called.
A flower called spikenard?
Yes, this is a very expensive flower.
Where do you find it? Find it in the Alp,
in the Alp and the Himalaya.
Yes. So it's very rare? It's a very rare one.
Where did they...? So it was brought from all those exotic places
here to the Holy Land? To the Holy Land, yes.
And what was it used for at the time?
This is to anoint the body of the dead people.
When they're dead, in the Jewish time, they put an anointment...
OK. They fill... It's a perfume with...
What, the whole body or just a part of the body?
No, the whole body. The whole body.
So they wash the whole body in this?
Yes. That must be an expensive process. Yes.
For one bottle, it costs about 300 dinars.
OK. More than people might earn...
Yes. ..in a year? Yes, very expensive.
How much does this cost today?
This is around...
When you come to our shop, we will give you good price...
Absolutely, yes, I should hope so.
Turns out the nard oil is now just a few pounds.
Back then, one denarius was a day's wages.
Jesus's oil cost 300.
The use of this fragrance gives the name to this Easter landmark moment,
the Anointing.
It's another occasion when Jesus surprises his friends
by mixing with a kind of social outcast.
Present at the dinner is a woman called Mary.
There so many Marys, but according to the Gospel of Luke, a sinner.
She might even have been a prostitute.
And during the dinner she begins to anoint Jesus's head and his feet
and then she wipes it off using her hair.
Now, the disciples who are also present at the dinner
get themselves all worked up, particularly Judas,
who looks after the money box.
They turn round and they say, "What is she doing?!
"This is an expensive perfume.
"We could've sold it and then given the money to poor."
At which point Jesus says, "Stop. She has done me a good deed.
"You will always have the poor, but you won't always have me.
"She has done this for my burial."
It's the fatal moment.
Judas storms off to the Jewish authorities.
For a bribe, he tells them where they'll find Jesus the next night,
in Jerusalem, for a Passover dinner.
The saviour is doomed.
We've entered the last 24 hours of Jesus's life
and these moments will inspire more works of art
than any other day in human history.
ALL: Amen.
At Passover, Jews celebrate their ancestors' escape
from enslavement in Egypt with a special meal.
The Ein-Moor family of Jerusalem
have kindly invited me into their home
to witness another ritual meal - the Friday night Shabbat dinner.
In Jewish culture, meals like this
link all generations to their history.
Ingredients are symbolic.
Preparation and procedure are everything.
The disciples didn't know the Passover meal
would be their last supper with Jesus.
They met to eat and give thanks,
but they were left divided and in dismay.
It wasn't just Jesus's last supper.
These were his final hours as a free man,
the closing moments of fellowship with his disciples,
a quiet pause in the drama of Easter.
It took place in what the Gospels call the upper room
and here...it isn't.
This room is called the Cenacle, and by tradition
it's where the most famous meal in history took place, the Last Supper.
But nothing that you can see here
actually dates from the first century
and there are never many tourists here
because I think some people are slightly cynical about the Cenacle.
They don't believe necessarily that those events
could have taken place in this room,
because what we see is really a stage set
that was built in the 13th to 14th century.
And although it's not entirely authentic,
what's extraordinary is it resembles exactly the space imagined
by those artists in far-away Europe
when they pictured the events of the Last Supper.
In my children's Bible, it's all very Hollywood.
Or maybe Holy Wood.
We've got Jesus here with his blue eyes and blond hair,
our fantastic leading man, all dressed in Persil white.
Someone who looks a bit like Kirk Douglas.
And a sneaky-looking Judas.
This is a cinematic Last Supper,
but there's one other source for this image, I think.
And that's a painting by one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance.
Leonardo da Vinci's version of The Last Supper
was painted on the wall of a dining room in an Italian monastery.
And it was designed in such a way
that the monks munching on their pasta
could dine in good company.
And the first thing that you notice about da Vinci's painting
is that he has a very unconventional seating plan.
Everybody is placed on one side of the table,
so it's almost as if this meal is being performed for our benefit,
in a space whose exaggerated perspective
seems to draw us into the very heart of the action
and the figure of Jesus himself.
There seems to be lots of consternation
and hand-waving going on and, very pointedly,
the face of Judas Iscariot is cast into shadow.
That night, Jesus kept turning what should have been a celebratory feast
into a gloomy premonition of betrayal and suffering
and when the food finally arrived, he told the famished apostles
that the bread and the wine were to be seen
as symbols of his own body and blood,
a sign of the bond between himself, his followers and God.
THEY SING
The Last Supper was a Jewish ritual that became a Christian one -
Holy Communion -
a little bit of the Easter story that happens all year round.
Every week, in Christian churches across the world,
this ceremony is repeated.
Bread and wine are shared,
symbolising the body and the blood of Christ.
The Gospels tell how, at the Last Supper, Jesus drops heavy hints.
He knew that amongst his brothers there was a traitor.
"Truly, truly, one of you shall betray me."
And suddenly the room went silent.
Jesus handed a piece of bread to Judas.
The message was clear.
"What you must do, do quickly," he said.
And Judas left the room.
After dinner, the remaining disciples trooped out into the dusk,
probably a bit dazed.
Jesus led them to an olive grove.
According to tradition, this is the Garden of Gethsemane.
Well, the olive trees seem ancient enough,
but this is the place where the saviour of humankind
is supposed to have been betrayed.
This might be the site of the Garden of Gethsemane,
but, to me, it just doesn't feel like it.
Being an artist is about pencils and paint and paper,
but it's also about feeling the inspiration.
At dusk, this olive grove just outside Jerusalem feels to me
like a more convincing Gethsemane.
Jesus wanted a quiet place to pray
and although he was accompanied by a few of his disciples,
he must have been at this moment the loneliest man in the world.
He knew exactly what was coming
and he prayed to God to be released from the ordeal,
but there was no way out.
And so an angel was sent to give him strength.
For me, this is one of the most poignant moments
in the New Testament.
It's the anxious calm before the storm
and it's immortalised in two great paintings
by a pair of 15th-century Italian artists
who just happened to be brothers-in-law -
Andrea Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini.
Now, their two versions of The Agony In The Garden
appear to be quite similar
and I love the idea that both of these characters
might have been looking over one another's shoulders,
trying to outdo each other.
Now, whereas Andrea depicts a Jerusalem
in the background of his painting
that looks like a fantasy castle out of the Wizard Of Oz,
Giovanni gives us a small hilltop town.
He doesn't want to exaggerate things too much.
But where they both agree is that their Garden of Gethsemane
is a boulder-strewn place,
perhaps symbolising the bleak story that is about to unfold.
And there, in the middle distance,
you can see a little cavalcade of figures,
a colourful bunch of soldiers,
their armour clinking as they approach to arrest Jesus.
I mean, the paintings are so serene,
they're so beautiful that I find myself wanting to shout out to Jesus
in this moment of calm, "Please, please just run.
"You don't have to do this for us."
Now, the son of God gets tangled up
in a legal system that's complicated...
..because his country is run by both Roman and Jewish officials.
21 centuries later, the same land is again home to two different peoples.
Every day, on the occupied West Bank,
workers queue before dawn to leave the territory.
Once through Israel's wall, these men travel to jobs in Jerusalem,
under Israeli administration.
From the arrest in the garden onwards,
the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke are very detailed.
The Easter story becomes almost a minute-by-minute drama.
Thousands are flocking into Jerusalem for the Passover holiday,
but the Roman and the Jewish authorities are interested
in just one visitor, the preacher from Nazareth.
The Jesus problem must be solved as quickly and as quietly as possible.
The first chapter of the Easter story will end soon...
..and for Jesus, badly.
The Jewish authorities, the Sanhedrin,
hate this upstart preacher from Nazareth, but they're worried.
Jerusalem is like a tinderbox
and the guy they've got banged up in jail is the fuse.
Some people believe he's the Messiah,
but whichever way this pans out,
they don't want to be seen executing one of their own.
They want the Romans to do the dirty work.
Jesus is in jail.
The disciples are in hiding, in shock, probably.
They've finally got the message that his prophecies are coming true.
"But surely," they think to themselves,
"we've seen Jesus perform miracles - he's going to escape."
Is he?
In the dead of night,
Jesus is brought before a hastily set up court.
They're desperate to charge him with blasphemy,
but Jesus simply won't take the bait.
"Tell us whether you are the Christ, the son of God,"
they demand to know.
But all Jesus says is, "Well, if you say so."
It infuriates them, so they slap him,
but everybody knows that Jesus is guilty.
And in the morning he's brought to the offices
of the Roman administrator, Pontius Pilate.
It's Good Friday.
I always got the impression
that Pontius Pilate wasn't such a bad guy.
I mean, at school, I learned about someone
who didn't really want to execute Jesus in the first place,
and in my children's illustrated Bible he declares,
"I find in him no fault at all."
Pontius Pilate wasn't interested in the blasphemy charges,
but his Jewish colleagues kept telling him
that Jesus was trying to lead a tax revolt,
and that was a much more serious matter.
But still Pilate starts to wriggle.
This painting by Hieronymus Bosch shows the moment Pilate tried
to avoid taking responsibility for killing Jesus.
At Passover, it was traditional
for the Roman governor to release a prisoner
and Hieronymus Bosch paints the scene
as if it's a kind of pantomime.
We've got this figure here, who I think is Pilate
wearing a very fancy hat,
presenting Jesus to the crowds.
"Behold the man," he declares,
and he offers to release the King of the Jews.
The crowd, however, had been prepped by their priests
to demand the release of someone else -
a robber called Barabbas.
They chant his name and eventually they shriek,
"Let the blood be on our hands and on our children!"
Now we're on the final pages of the Easter story.
Jesus has less than 24 hours left on earth
as he begins to walk to the place of execution.
Oh, don't run out of paper.
MEN CHANT
They move fast, don't they?
Church towers and the minarets.
Every Friday, Christians gather
to follow the route Jesus travelled carrying his cross.
It's called the Via Dolorosa, which means "way of grief".
Pilgrims have been doing this for centuries,
on the same stones where they believe
Jesus walked towards his death.
This is extra sensory.
Non-stop.
The procession stops at places where Jesus paused,
where he was helped, where he stumbled.
These are the famous Stations of the Cross.
Fourth station.
Here, Jesus meets his mother.
THE FAITHFUL SING
Such an immersive experience
because you're moving from tight little alleys,
out to open spaces, through passageways, under minarets,
beside the souk and the bazaar.
And people are singing and chanting.
The crowd passes straight through the middle of Arab Jerusalem,
but the market stall holders don't seem to take any notice.
It does give you some sense of the physical sensory chaos
and bustle that must have accompanied Jesus on that last day.
The Via Dolorosa ends in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,
said to stand where the crucifixion and the resurrection happened.
For Christians, the holiest of holy ground.
In here, it's Easter every day.
I definitely felt the energy of history and belief.
Well, that was guerrilla sketching.
Through the streets, through the pathways, through the souk.
To combine speedy sketching
with an environment of passion and devotion like I've just experienced,
it's not anything I've ever done before.
But I'll treasure this sketchbook.
Being here in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at this moment
kind of redefines awesome.
Good Friday never felt like this.
In our cold, Protestant church in Scotland, we sang hymns,
we had a few Scriptures read out loud, but to really, really feel
the core of what this moment in the Scriptures is about, well,
I tell you to come here,
because then you'll really get a taste of why people of great faith
feel so strongly, so poignantly,
and eventually so joyfully about the Easter story.
And all along that way, all along through the procession,
there was talk of suffering,
there was talk of this figure, Jesus,
being burdened with the cross,
with his spirit being crushed, with the pain he was enduring,
with the insults that were being flung at him, and I tell you,
in those passageways,
bumped from side to side with all the people in the darkness,
emerging into the light, in the shadows, in the heat,
wow, you felt a little...
a little of what that atmosphere of Good Friday must have been like.
Outside, blinking in the glare,
travellers from all over Christendom take a breather.
For them, this is a pilgrimage, a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
The scene is drenched in sunlight.
It's perfect for watercolour.
You've got to move fast, though.
The shadows are lengthening, the colours will be fleeting.
One moment bright, then gone forever.
The blue sky of Jerusalem.
You've got to get this right straight away.
Onto the white paper, no mistakes.
I love this job.
Painting pictures takes me to the most fantastic places,
and it's not really like hard work.
You see amazing sights, you sit next to extraordinary folk...
..and every day is a little lesson in life, I tell you,
when you've got a paintbrush in your hand.
Inside the church, I was caught up
in the exhilaration and the strong emotions this place inspires.
Whether something actually happened here or over there
isn't really the point.
It's not about facts, it's about faith.
The place of the skull, Golgotha.
Sounds about right, doesn't it?
Somewhere that a master of the universe would be executed.
But, in actual fact, it was probably just a small pile of rubble
outside the city walls, a wasteland.
Today, the extraordinary Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands
where, legend has it, the crucifixion took place.
There have been many incarnations of this building
but there's always been something standing here,
where the Easter story comes to its climax.
This is a kind of pilgrimage for me, standing where my father never did.
Most of the great artists who depicted scenes from the Bible story
journeyed here only in their imaginations.
They believed, even though they hadn't seen...
..all this.
Rembrandt was one of the most
prolific illustrators of the Bible stories
and one of his favourite subjects was the crucifixion,
and here, in this etching, he gives us the full works.
There are crowds, there are men in armour,
there are costumes and horses.
And depicted as it is, in brutal black and white,
it really gives you the sense
that this shaft of light descending from the sky
represents God's love for his son,
but also, in the shadows, his fury at the rest of humanity.
I mean, it's a cinematic image and it really does remind me
of all those Hollywood epic movies
I used to watch at Easter time when I was little.
And to see this image, that I actually copied when I was a child,
here against the backdrop where this event happened,
supposedly in that building, well...
..that makes this experience all the more powerful for me.
The church is built around a rocky outcrop,
a stony fist in a glove of gold and marble,
low lit by candles night and day.
This rock is Golgotha.
This is the place where the cross was erected,
with one on either side for the two thieves
who were executed alongside Jesus.
Now, the death was an appalling one and Jesus was moved to cry out,
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
And, in spite of all this horror,
this moment in the Christian story is actually about a victory.
It's about Jesus's victory
over his persecutors, his oppressors,
but most importantly his victory over death,
because this is the moment that will lead
to his resurrection and to his greatest glory.
Even as a child, I couldn't quite believe in
the earliest pictures of the crucifixion.
They always made Jesus look triumphant and strong.
This later painting by Dutchman Dieric Bouts
felt like it was speaking directly to me.
And we are no longer in a place
where the image is emphasising
Jesus's divine, superhuman power.
What we see here is a picture of suffering.
This painting declares he was fragile, he was vulnerable,
he wept tears, just as you would
if you had to go through this ordeal yourself.
The greatest pictures are worth a thousand biblical words.
They go straight to the heart.
The week that shook the world ended down there at Golgotha.
It began with Jesus here on the Mount of Olives,
staring down at Jerusalem.
Looking out across the city helps me
put what I have experienced in those streets into perspective.
Now I've actually explored this city,
I think I know its colours and I know its shapes
so I can identify places on this horizon I've actually been to.
This is not a stranger any more.
I've been through all those little streets,
been through the souk, been in the churches, been in the grottoes
and at the Western Wall and now I think I need the bigger picture.
I think I'm ready to try and paint its portrait, really.
One of the things about painting is
you've got to be very sensitive to the light that surrounds you.
That might just sound obvious, but light in different places,
in different countries, has different colours
and I'm used to northern, Scottish, British light,
which is a bit cool and cold,
whereas here, there is a golden warmth to the sun,
and I'm not making this up,
there's also a crimson pink quality to it.
I've never seen anything like it.
I think it's amazing how the art of the Holy Land really does have
the ability to provoke great empathy and emotion,
even in people who don't have enormous faith.
I thought I knew all about the Easter story from paintings
and from my illustrated Bible,
but the Holy Land has changed the way I think about Jesus's death.
Now it's more than a story in a picture book.
It's about a real person in a real landscape.
Well, I wouldn't use this as a route map to get around Jerusalem.
The details are a bit all over the place, but I think I've managed
to capture just a little bit of the...higgledy-piggledy wonder...
..of this ancient place.
I feel so much closer to this subject
than I did on the first day of my journey.
Back in Glasgow, the pages of my sketchbook remind me of what I saw,
heard and felt as I followed Jesus's journey to the cross.
My father's not here to look through my sketchbooks with me,
but he's the person who inspired me to undertake this voyage.
Digging out some of his crucifixion studies,
I can now see them, and him, in a new light.
These are just a few of the works of art that he created,
inspired by that subject.
But my father had to imagine Golgotha
and all those places associated with the Easter story.
And for me, one of the most poignant parts of this whole pilgrimage
has been being able to go and make work
in places I know he would have found so thrilling.
And now, I have to say, I am even more impressed
because my dad wasn't a very religious man,
but in these images, I find that he manages to convey
the passion and the emotional intensity
that I have now actually experienced,
following my journey into the Holy Land.
Next time, the journey that ends with Jesus's death on the cross
continues with his miraculous resurrection.
I'll follow this next chapter in the Easter story
as painted by great artists and ask my question about his mother.
Why do we see more of Mary in art than in the Bible?
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