As a literary device, this description of the burial place of Jesus Christ is effective; it offers a contrast between the site of Jesus’s death at the crucifixion site of Calvary (also called Golgotha, both derived from the Latin for “place of the skull”) and a fertile garden, brimming with life. It also provides a cyclical shape to the final chapter of the Christ narrative, which begins with his arrest in the garden of Gethsemane.
So, as storytelling, this single sentence from the Gospel of John (the most recently written of the four canonical gospels, most scholars agree) has a substantial power to its brevity. But, as a historical record of where, exactly, one of the most famous men who ever lived was laid to rest, you’d be forgiven for finding it sorely lacking in detail.
Yet, thanks to a new discovery reported in the Times of Israel, that sentence might be key to confirming where the real man at the center of the Christian faith was placed after his famous crucifixion.
As the Times notes, the site that now hosts the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is held in the Christian tradition to encompass both the crucifixion site and the tomb in which Christ was buried. As such, it is beset upon at all times by Christ-following pilgrims from across the planet, determined to worship at the site where they believe the Messiah lay dead for three days before his resurrection on Easter Sunday.
But this popularity is only part of the problem for archaeologists hoping to examine the purportedly holy site.
There was also, as the Times describes, “decades of in-fighting” between the three religious communities charged with managing the church: the Orthodox Patriarchate, the Custody of the Holy Land, and the Armenian Patriarchate. When these groups finally came to a consensus in 2019 that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre required renovations to replace the site’s 19th-century floor, a team of Italian architects with La Sapienza University saw their opportunity.
“With the renovation works, the religious communities decided to also allow archaeological excavations under the floor,” Francesca Romana Stasolla from the Sapienza University of Rome noted to the Times of Israel. The excavations have been under Stasolla’s direction since they commenced in 2022.
Hellbound and Down 