The Holy Sepulchre vs. the Garden Tomb: The Knockout

It has been three months since I visited these two sites, and since I've been wanting to do a post on their contending claims. However, since the contest is so one-sided, it just seemed mean, and as a result I've been putting it off. You see, it's less an academic question of two sites with contending if uneven merits debated between scholars than it is a social contest between two claims, one borne of sentimentality, politics, and propaganda, the other of history, archaeology, and tradition.

The two sites of which I speak are the two contending sites of Calvary-Golgotha and the Tomb of Christ.

The Holy Sepulchre is a massive Crusader-era renovation of the original church built by Constantine and his mother Helena in AD 326. It sits at heart of the Christian Quarter within the walls of the Old City, and is one of the world's greatest pilgrimage sites for Orthodox, Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, and a good number of other Christians. It is the chief religious shrine of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, standing alongside the Haram al-Sharif (the 'temple mount) for Muslims and the Western ('wailing') Wall for Jews. It's name is an antiquated English term meaning 'the holy tomb.' The original Greek name was Naos tis Anastaseos, meaning the Church of the Resurrection.

The Garden Tomb is a very, very different site. It conforms to our western images of simplicity and piety. Unlike the Holy Sepulchre, which is covered in icons darkened from age and accented in ecclesiastical silver, as well as monks from various factions holding together the precarious status quo, the Garden Tomb is a serene collection of tastefully-labeled flora and small chapels where tour groups are offered space for worship. It is outside the city walls, near the Arab bus station across from Damascus Gate. The tomb at the site is actually embedded in the rock face in the open air, rather than being chiseled out of its surroundings and enclosed in an edicule within a rotunda as at the Holy Sepulchre. And, unlike at the Holy Sepulchre, there aren't hordes of Russian pilgrims and tour groups causing a two hour line.

So why this Garden Tomb, this alternative site? This tomb was discovered when General Charles Gordon, at the end of his career, took up a year's residence in Jerusalem in 1882. His residence was in an apartment in the Old City above Damascus Gate, with a view looking out of the city to the cliff face beyond. Gordon was deeply dissatisfied with the site of the Holy Sepulchre. For one, he was an evangelical, and Protestants of any kind were not represented in the church (this, of course, because there were no Protestants to speak of when the chapels of the church were first claimed and allotted); therefore, he had a strong desire for a Protestant site of Calvary and the Tomb. Second, the Sepulchre, even if it had had Protestant representation, did not conform to his images of religious devotion, what with all the icons, the silver, the gold, the monk fights, and the dark caverns.

But third and most ridiculously, he refused to believe the Holy Sepulchre could be the site because the church is located within the city walls. What he didn't know (and apparently didn't learn there during a year's stay) is that the current city walls are Ottoman-era, built under the orders of Suleiman the Magnificent in the 16th century. The first century city walls, on the other hand, were closer in to the temple mount than the current site; the Holy Sepulchre and the vicinity were only taken within the walls between AD 41 and 44, when Herod Agrippa I built the so-called 'third-wall' that enclosed much of the present Old City.

Looking out from his apartment, Gordon eventually convinced himself that he could see the shape of a skull in the rock face. Today there are about six different angles from which visitors can convince themselves they can see about forty different skulls, none of them the ones that Gordon saw; for the topography has changed significantly in the past one hundred thirty years, both due to natural soil erosion and the construction of the Arab bus station. One wonders, if this can happen in 130 years, what has happened in 2000.

Nevertheless, people searched the site and found a tomb. If this seems too amazing to be coincidence, then you might try spending more time in Eurasia: tombs are everywhere. Finding a tomb within the vicinity is like finding a drunk in Central Park, it's bound to happen.

But isn't this tomb, as my AIT group and countless other visitors are told at the site, a first century tomb? Oh dear...

No, and I'm really not sure where they get that idea. When you enter the tomb from the exterior, you step inside to a mourner's vestibule. Here people would come to further anoint bodies and remember their loved ones. Where were these bodies? In Gordon's Tomb, one has to enter through the straight door from the exterior into the vestibule, and then make a ninety degree turn right to look into the burial chamber where the bodies lay.

This configuration is unheard of in the first century. In the first century, tombs were carved out such that one would enter from the exterior into the vestibule with the burial chamber straight ahead. Door, vestibule, and burial chamber are all lined up in first century tombs. But here, the vestibule is the fulcrum on a right angle turn between door and burial chamber.

This is the configuration of a tomb from the 9th to 7th centuries BC: the Iron Age. This was certainly not a newly cut tomb at the time of Christ.

What, then, of the 'baptismal' pool that visitors are shown? As Jerome Murphy-O'Connor says in his excellent The Holy Land: An Oxford Archaeological Guide: "...one would except each body bench [in a first century tomb] to be set within an arch (arcosolium). Here on the contrary the body benches simply extend from the wall, as in other Iron Age tombs.... Moreover, in the Byzantine period the benches were cut down to create rock sarcophagi. Such radical disfigurement of the structure clearly indicates that Christians of the C4-C6 did not believe that this tomb was the burial place of Christ. The Crusaders lowered the rock surface in front of the tomb in order to ensure that the vaults, which they built against the rock escarpment, should not project above it. They used the site as a stable." So what is that 'baptismal' channel? It's a water trough.

So Gordon's tomb is most certainly not the tomb of Jesus Christ. It's just a random tomb from a totally different era. What, then, of the Holy Sepulchre?

The Holy Sepulchre, as I've mentioned, was built on orders of the Emperor Constantine and under the supervision of his mother the Empress Helena in AD 326 (or thereabouts). Helena had a rather obsessive interest in relics and holy sites, and her personality quirks have undoubtedly shaped the excesses of Orthodox piety ever since.

Yet why this site? Following the defeat of the zealots in the Great Jewish Revolt of AD 66-73, the radical Jewish nationalists did not entirely abandon their hopes for redemption. In AD 132 Simon bar Kokhba, with approval of the great Rabbi Akiva (whose tomb I visited in Tiberias, if you recall), led another revolt against Rome. When this was put down in AD 135, the Emperor Hadrian began an empire-wide campaign to stamp out divergent religious movements. Among these movements was nascent Christianity.

On the site that is today the Holy Sepulchre he ordered the construction of a temple to Aphrodite, just as he erected a sanctuary to Jupiter on the temple mount (and another shrine to Aphrodite in Bethlehem). He slapped all these pagan and imperial temples down on cultic centers and religious sites in order to smash whatever movement was centered on the site. The temple to Aphrodite he ordered built in Jerusalem was placed specifically to eradicate a Christian shrine celebrating the resurrection of Christ. This is in AD 135.

When Helena had the Aphrodite temple torn down, she and her excavation team (unscientific as it was) discovered a quarry of white stone that had been exhausted in the late first century BC. Following that time, it was used as a graveyard (with first century-style straight door-vestibule-burial chamber arrangements; you can still see two of these in the Syriac chapel). One of the graves, they found, had been extensively marked by Christian graffiti that singled it out as a site of Christian veneration of the tomb and resurrection of Christ. This graffiti, like everything under the temple, dated to the time before AD 135.

This is a mere hundred years after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And lets not forget that that graffiti and the associated shrine did not appear the night before Hadrian's temple of Aphrodite was plopped down. Of all the various centers of Christian devotion in the city, this was the site a Roman Emperor decided was worth stamping out. In order to disregard the Holy Sepulchre, therefore, one needs to posit that the original Jerusalem community that knew the site of the tomb was wiped out in AD 70 or thereabouts, but that immediately afterward a new Christian community came into being that selected a totally fictitious site that built up enough pious momentum to warrant the wrath of a Roman emperor.

We cannot say with certainty that the Holy Sepulchre is the site of Christ's tomb. We can only say that it has a very high probability of being the site. On the other hand, we can be most certain that Gordon's tomb is not it, but is a mere combination of wishful thinking and pious propaganda.