Essay 11: The Hill That Wasn’t There

Introduction: People of the Book

Growing up Southern Baptist, I was always told we were People of the Book. That phrase carried a sense of pride. Catholics had their popes, Lutherans their catechisms, but we had the Bible alone — pure, inspired, without error. I can still hear the refrain: “The Bible said it. I believe it. That settles it.”

But the older I got, the more cracks appeared in that certainty. Friends in other churches, even those who also called themselves “Bible-believing,” seemed to carry around a version of the Bible that contained whole scenes and details I couldn’t find on the page. I would listen, puzzled, as they confidently declared things that sounded familiar — but when I went back to the text, the words weren’t there.

What they were relying on was not the Bible itself, but tradition built up around it. They were repeating interpretations that had been layered on long after the fact, interpretations so old and so familiar that they had become indistinguishable from scripture. For the Bible tells me so, I realized, often really meant for my pastor told me so.

That realization was unsettling. It made me feel like the ground was moving beneath me, that the very authority I was taught to trust was far less secure than advertised. At first it felt like betrayal. Later, I would come to see it differently — as a natural process of communities shaping meaning through time. But as a young man, the discovery that so much of my faith was built not on text but on tradition was one of the first cracks that would eventually open into de-conversion.

The Hill That Wasn’t There

When I close my eyes and picture the crucifixion, the image comes easily: three crosses rising against a dark sky, perched high on a hill above Jerusalem, the city walls fading in the distance. It is the image I absorbed in Sunday school posters, in Easter pageants, in hymns like “On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross.” It is the image that most Christians know by heart.

And yet, the Gospels never call Golgotha a hill. Matthew writes only that, “They came to a place called Golgotha (which means Place of the Skull)” (Matt. 27:33). Mark repeats the phrase (Mark 15:22), as does John (John 19:17). Luke is even briefer: “When they came to the place called the Skull, they crucified him there” (Luke 23:33). No hill, no mount, no height — just a place of execution outside the city walls.

So where did the hill come from? By the early fourth century, Christian pilgrims were already describing Golgotha as elevated ground. The anonymous pilgrim from Bordeaux, writing around 333 CE in the Itinerarium Burdigalense, speaks of visiting “the little hill of Golgotha where the Lord was crucified.” A decade later, Cyril of Jerusalem instructed his catechumens: “Golgotha, the holy hill standing above us here, bears witness to our sight” (Catechetical Lectures, 13.4). By then, the site of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre had been identified by Constantine’s mother Helena, and Christians were already venerating Golgotha as a sacred hill.

Once the hill entered the imagination, it never left. Medieval art cemented it: illuminated manuscripts, altarpieces, and frescoes all depicted the crucifixion high above the city, Jesus raised where all the world could see. Hymnody carried the image forward: Isaac Watts’s eighteenth-century line, “On a hill far away,” still echoes through Protestant churches today.

The reasons are not hard to grasp. A hill offers visibility: the execution becomes not a hidden shame but a cosmic drama. It ties the crucifixion to Israel’s sacred geography — to Sinai, Zion, and Moriah, mountains where God meets humanity. And it gives artists what they need most: composition. A rise of ground allows for figures at the base, thieves to the side, and Christ in the center, elevated above them all.

But the fact remains: the hill is not in the text. It is a product of retrospective interpretation — a creative elaboration that entered tradition centuries after the event and hardened into assumed fact. For me, that “hill that wasn’t there” stands as a symbol of how easily imagination and art blend into certainty. What began as a way of seeing became, over time, a way of believing. And most of us never thought to ask where the hill came from, because by the time we inherited the story, it had already become indistinguishable from scripture.

For the Bible Tells Me So

The hill of Golgotha is only one example. Once I started noticing details like that, I began to see them everywhere. What I had been taught as “biblical truth” often turned out to be later elaborations. And yet, in my church, these elaborations were spoken with as much certainty as if they had been written in red letters on the page.

That’s why I sometimes joke that “for the Bible tells me so” really means “for my pastor told me so.” In Southern Baptist circles, Bible study was less about the Bible and more about confirming what we already believed. Questions were allowed only if they had approved answers. We underlined verses, filled in blanks in workbooks, and left each week with the same conclusions we had walked in with.

This was a far cry from the wrestling I would later discover in the early church fathers. Origen, writing in the third century, claimed that scripture often contained “stumbling blocks” deliberately placed there so that readers would have to struggle, to move beyond the surface (On First Principles, 4.2.9). Augustine confessed that he was often bewildered by the text: “I confess to Your love, O Lord, that I am perplexed by the obscurities of Your Scripture” (Confessions, 12.18). For them, the Bible was not a manual of certainty but a field of questions, demanding patience, humility, and imagination.

But in the church of my youth, certainty was the point. So instead of study, we rehearsed tradition. We repeated the details that centuries of Christians had supplied, filling silences in the text with stories until they became indistinguishable from scripture itself. Mary Magdalene as a prostitute — a detail first asserted by Pope Gregory the Great in 591, not by Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. The apostles martyred one by one for their faith — a claim found in later church tradition but absent from the New Testament itself. Even the number of wise men at the nativity: Matthew never says three, only that magi brought gifts.

It makes me sad now, because the Bible itself has so much to offer when approached honestly. As an ancient text, it opens a window onto the world of first-century Palestine and the reach of the Roman Empire. Paul’s letters reveal fragile little communities trying to survive under Caesar’s shadow. The Gospels capture the tension of an occupied people, some expecting revolution, others longing for the end of the age. Seen alongside other ancient texts — Tacitus, Josephus, the Dead Sea Scrolls — the Bible is extraordinary, a human document of hope, struggle, and resistance.

But most of us never read it that way. Instead, we inherited a version already draped in centuries of retrospective interpretation. We were told it was the Bible speaking, when in truth it was our pastors — themselves repeating what had been told to them. And in that endless cycle of hand-me-down certainties, the text itself was often left unopened.

Betrayal and De-conversion

As a young man, discovering these layers of tradition felt less like illumination and more like betrayal. I had been told that we were People of the Book, but when I went looking for the Book itself, what I found was silence where I expected certainty. The hill wasn’t there. The three wise men weren’t three. Mary Magdalene wasn’t a prostitute. The apostles’ martyrdoms, so often cited as “proof” of Christianity’s truth, weren’t recorded anywhere in the New Testament.

I remember reading Acts with this in mind. Stephen is described as the first martyr, stoned outside Jerusalem (Acts 7). James, the brother of John, is executed by Herod Agrippa (Acts 12:2). And after that? Silence. Peter is imprisoned, then released. Paul is left alive at the end of Luke’s account, preaching in Rome “with all boldness and without hindrance” (Acts 28:31). Yet every sermon I heard assumed the apostles all went to their deaths for their testimony. Tradition supplied the details, but the text itself did not.

As I pressed into this gap, the answers I received were rarely satisfying. “Church history tells us so,” I was told, as if the traditions of the second or third century carried the same authority as the words of the Gospels themselves. Or worse, I was warned not to ask so many questions, because doubt was a sign of weak faith. The dissonance was unbearable. If we truly believed in scripture alone, then why did we fill its silences with legends? Why did we demand belief in things that were never actually written?

That gap — between the Bible I was told about and the Bible I read for myself — became one of the deepest cracks in my faith. What had been presented to me as the unshakable Word of God now looked like a patchwork of text and tradition, history and myth-making, literature and art. And once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.

The sense of betrayal was sharpened by the rhetoric of certainty that surrounded me. “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it” was more than a slogan — it was a shield against questioning. But as I discovered, what “the Bible says” was often what the preacher said the Bible must mean. In effect, I had been taught to place my faith not in the text itself, but in the unbroken confidence of those who interpreted it. When that confidence cracked, my faith did too.

Looking back, I can see that I was not alone. Many who leave evangelicalism tell similar stories. Scholars of de-conversion note that such narratives often mirror conversion testimonies in reverse: once I was blind, now I see — retold as once I was certain, now I doubt. For me, it was less sudden revelation than slow erosion. Each inconsistency, each silence in the text, each unconvincing answer wore down the foundation until finally there was nothing left to stand on.

At the time, it felt like loss. But in hindsight, it was also a release.

Religion as Art, Not Physics

For years, I carried the weight of that betrayal. If the Bible was supposed to be God’s perfect Word, how could it contain so many silences, so many inconsistencies, so many out-right falsehoods? If Christianity was built on certainty, how could so much of its foundation rest on legend? But over time, my perspective shifted. What once felt like deception, I now see as art.

Religion, I’ve come to believe, is not physics. It does not give us formulas that explain the universe, laws that never change, proofs that settle arguments once and for all. Religion is closer to poetry, or painting, or music. It is a human work of meaning, fragile and interpretive, woven out of memory and imagination.

The hill of Golgotha is a perfect example. As a historical detail, it is absent from the Gospels. But as a piece of religious art, it is brilliant. It transforms an ordinary place of Roman execution into a stage where the cosmic drama of suffering and redemption can be seen. It draws on Israel’s sacred geography — Sinai, Zion, Moriah — to frame the cross as the new mountain of God. And in art, from medieval frescoes to Protestant hymnody, the hill provides the composition, the symmetry, the drama that sears the image into memory. It is not factual, but it is meaningful.

The same could be said for the traditions of the apostles’ martyrdoms. Historically, the record is at best thin. But the stories endured because they answered a deep need: the conviction that those who had walked with Jesus were faithful unto death. Their courage became a mirror for later Christians facing persecution. Whether every detail happened or not, the legends served a purpose. They transformed silence into inspiration.

This, I think, is how retrospective interpretation works. It fills the gaps of history with imagination. Sometimes it distorts. Sometimes it consoles. At its best, it creates beauty out of suffering, meaning out of absence. The crucifixion itself is the clearest case: a brutal Roman execution, lifted by centuries of art and devotion into one of the most enduring symbols of human endurance and hope.

As a younger man, I saw these additions as failures of honesty. Now, I see them as fragile achievements of art. They are not “true” in the way that a scientific equation is true. They are true in the way that a painting can be true, or a poem can be true — not because they describe facts, but because they reveal what it feels like to be human.

For me, the shift was freeing. I no longer needed to force belief in things that the text did not say. I could honor the art of religion without demanding that it be history or science. The hill of Golgotha may never have been there, but the image has endured, not because it is factual, but because it is beautiful.

The Bible as Ancient Text

If I no longer read the Bible as inerrant, I have not stopped reading it altogether. In fact, once I set aside the demand that it function as flawless physics, the text became more compelling. What had once been a fortress of certainty opened up into a gallery of human voices.

Seen alongside other ancient writings — Josephus, Tacitus, Plutarch, the Dead Sea Scrolls — the Bible is one of our richest windows into the world of the first century. Paul’s letters reveal not abstract theology but urgent correspondence with fragile communities trying to survive under Roman rule. The Gospels, with their apocalyptic overtones, show a people caught between longing for God’s kingdom and enduring Caesar’s empire. Revelation, for all its strangeness, becomes a coded protest against imperial violence, a cry for justice in a world bent on oppression.

Even its contradictions become part of the fascination. Mark’s Gospel ends abruptly with women fleeing the tomb in fear, while John spins out resurrection stories of intimacy and recognition. Matthew situates Jesus on a mountain giving a new law, echoing Moses on Sinai, while Luke places him in a Nazareth synagogue announcing good news to the poor. Each is not a photographic record but an interpretive portrait. Taken together, they remind us that early Christianity was never a monolith; it was a conversation, already filled with retrospective interpretation from its first generation onward.

What saddens me is how often this richness is lost. In many churches, Bible study becomes an exercise in confirmation rather than discovery. Instead of marveling at its poetry, its fractures, its flashes of honesty, readers are given prepackaged answers that flatten its complexity. The Bible deserves better than that. As Augustine once said, “Scripture is shallow enough for a child to wade, but deep enough for an elephant to swim.” The tragedy is how often we never leave the shallows.

For me, to read the Bible now is not to extract rules or defend dogma, but to encounter the voices of a world both strange and familiar. It is to stand in the streets of first-century Jerusalem, to hear the arguments of Pharisees, to watch Roman governors wield power, to glimpse the hopes of people on the margins. It is to hear poetry, lament, and fragile faith echo across two millennia.

The Bible may not be the error-free code I was once told it was. But as an ancient text, it remains extraordinary. Its silences and embellishments, its remembered histories and invented legends, all reveal the human work of meaning. And in that sense, it still speaks. Not because it “tells me so,” but because it shows me us — our long struggle to understand suffering, to endure, and to make beauty out of loss.

In Closing

When I was young, I thought being a Person of the Book meant having answers. The Bible said it, I believed it, and that settled it. But the more I looked, the more unsettled I became. The hill wasn’t there. The three kings weren’t three. The martyrs weren’t there. So much of what I was told the Bible said turned out to be tradition speaking through the text, not the text itself. At the time, that discovery felt like betrayal.

Now, I see it differently. What once looked like deception I now recognize as art. Retrospective interpretation is not a flaw in religion but one of its most human achievements. It is the way communities fill silence with meaning, transform loss into legend, and lift ordinary suffering into beauty. The crucifixion may not have happened on a hill, but the hill made the story endurable, visible, unforgettable.

And the Bible itself, stripped of the weight of inerrancy, remains worth reading. Not as as textbook, not as law, but as literature and story — a chorus of voices from an occupied land, carrying forward their hopes, their doubts, their faith. To read it honestly is to enter a conversation across centuries, one that still reveals more about us than about any god.

So I no longer call myself a Person of the Book. I call myself religious, not spiritual. I treat the Bible as I treat mosaics, or cathedrals, or hymns: not as perfect, but as deeply human and beautiful. The truth it offers is not the certainty of settled answers but the witness of a people who kept telling stories, kept making meaning, kept filing in the gaps when the text itself was silent.

References

Augustine. (1998). Confessions (H. Chadwick, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published ca. 397 CE)

Cyril of Jerusalem. (2008). Catechetical lectures (E. H. Gifford, Trans.). In P. Schaff & H. Wace (Eds.), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (Series 2, Vol. 7). Hendrickson Publishers. (Original work delivered ca. 348 CE)

Dahan, G. (1998). The reception of the Bible in the Middle Ages (J. Taylor, Trans.). CUA Press.

Docherty, S. E. (2015). The Jewish pseudepigrapha: An introduction to the literature of the Second Temple period. Augsburg Fortress.

Itinerarium Burdigalense. (1887). The pilgrim of Bordeaux: Itinerary from Bordeaux to Jerusalem (A. Stewart, Trans.). Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society. (Original work written ca. 333 CE)

Luz, U. (2005). Matthew in history: Interpretation, influence, and effects. Fortress Press.

McDonald, L. M., & Sanders, J. A. (Eds.). (2002). The canon debate. Hendrickson Publishers.

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Ricoeur, P. (1984). Time and narrative, Volume 1 (K. McLaughlin & D. Pellauer, Trans.). University of Chicago Press.

The Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version. (1989). Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America.

Watts, I. (1915). Hymns and spiritual songs (Vol. 1). George E. Burrough. (Original work published 1707)

Young, F. M. (1989). Biblical exegesis and the formation of Christian culture. Cambridge University Press.

Zahn, T. (1909). Introduction to the New Testament (Vol. 3). T. & T. Clark.