Concept

Golgotha and the Tomb of Jesus

Intro

The Gospels say Jesus was crucified at a place called Golgotha, "the place of a skull," just outside Jerusalem. They also say his tomb was close by, in a garden, so close that it could be used in a hurry before the Sabbath began.

Two sites in Jerusalem claim to be that place today. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, inside the walls of the Old City, has the older tradition and the stronger archaeological case. The Garden Tomb, north of the Damascus Gate, is a peaceful and popular place to visit, but most archaeologists date its tomb to centuries before Jesus.

The short version: the Gospel details about the site fit what has been dug up under the Holy Sepulchre. The place was outside the city wall in Jesus's day, it was an old quarry with Jewish rock-cut tombs in it, and Christians were pointing to it before Constantine built a church there.

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In full

The New Testament locates the crucifixion near the city (John 19:20) and outside the gate (Hebrews 13:12), and places a garden with an unused rock-cut tomb at or beside the place of execution (John 19:41-42; Matthew 27:59-60). The traditional site, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, was identified in the 320s when Constantine ordered a Roman temple, built over the spot under Hadrian around AD 135, demolished and the ground cleared. Excavations in and around the church (including Kathleen Kenyon's 1960s work in the Muristan and later digs inside the church and the nearby Church of the Redeemer) show the area was a disused limestone quarry outside the inhabited city in the early first century, and the church still contains first-century Jewish kokhim tombs. The city wall that later enclosed the site is generally identified with the Third Wall, which Josephus says was begun by Herod Agrippa I in the early 40s, a decade after the crucifixion. The rival Garden Tomb, proposed by Charles Gordon in 1883, sits in a burial ground that Gabriel Barkay and Amos Kloner dated to the late Iron Age (8th to 7th centuries BC), which rules out a "new tomb wherein was never man yet laid." Certainty about any ancient site is not available, but the Holy Sepulchre has the best case by a wide margin.

What the Gospels and Hebrews say

The texts give four location clues. None of them names a street, but together they set a test any proposed site has to pass.

• The name. All four Gospels name the place. John explains it:

They took Jesus therefore: and he went out, bearing the cross for himself, unto the place called The place of a skull, which is called in Hebrew Golgotha: (John 19:17, ASV)

• "Golgotha" is the Aramaic word for skull. "Calvary" comes from the Latin calvaria, skull, used in the Latin Bible and carried into the King James rendering of Luke 23:33. The two names mean the same thing.
• Near the city. The title on the cross was read by many passers-by "for the place where Jesus was crucified was nigh to the city" (John 19:20, ASV).
• Outside the gate. Hebrews makes the location part of its theology:

Wherefore Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people through his own blood, suffered without the gate. (Hebrews 13:12, ASV)

• A garden and a new tomb, close by.

Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden; and in the garden a new tomb wherein was never man yet laid. There then because of the Jews' Preparation (for the tomb was nigh at hand) they laid Jesus. (John 19:41-42, ASV)

• A rich man's rock-cut tomb. Matthew adds that the tomb belonged to Joseph of Arimathea, who "laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn out in the rock: and he rolled a great stone to the door of the tomb" (Matthew 27:60, ASV).

So the cross and the tomb were neighbors, outside the wall, near a road where people passed, in a place where rock could be cut for tombs. That last point matters: Jews did not bury inside a city, so a tomb at the site is itself evidence the site was outside the wall.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre

How the site was identified

• Hadrian's temple. After the Bar Kokhba revolt, Hadrian rebuilt Jerusalem as the Roman colony Aelia Capitolina (c. AD 135). Eusebius of Caesarea, writing in his Life of Constantine (book 3), says the tomb had been buried under fill and a pagan shrine to Aphrodite built over it. Historians generally take the temple to be part of Hadrian's rebuilding.
• Constantine clears the site. Around AD 325-326, Constantine ordered the temple demolished and the fill removed, and Bishop Macarius of Jerusalem oversaw the building of a church. Eusebius of Caesarea describes the rock tomb coming to light "beyond all expectation." The church was consecrated in September 335. The Bordeaux Pilgrim, visiting in 333, already reports the basilica going up.
• Why the memory is credible. Jerusalem had a continuous Christian community, and a site a pagan emperor deliberately built over is a site someone was already venerating. Some scholars criticize Eusebius for reading tradition uncritically, so the case does not rest on him alone. It rests on the fit between his account and what the ground shows.

What the excavations show

• A quarry. Wherever digging inside the church has reached bedrock, it has found a quarry for high-grade meleke limestone, in places over 40 feet deep. Traces of the same quarry turned up in Kathleen Kenyon's excavation (her "Site C") in the Muristan just south of the church, and in Ute Lux's excavation under the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer. The excavators date the quarry's working life well before the first century.
• Outside the inhabited city. The same Muristan excavations show the area lay outside the city limits in the late Second Temple period, with the older defensive line running to the south. A disused quarry with gardens and tombs on its edges, beside a road out of the city, is exactly the setting the Gospels describe.
• First-century Jewish tombs. Rock-cut burial shafts of the kokh type (long niches cut into the rock face, the standard Jewish family tomb of the period) survive inside the church, west of the shrine over the tomb, in a chamber traditionally assigned to Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. That assignment is tradition only. The archaeological point is the type and date of the tombs: first-century Jewish burials prove the spot was outside the wall when they were cut.
• The 2016 restoration. When the marble cladding over the traditional burial bench was lifted in October 2016 by a team from the National Technical University of Athens, the original limestone bench was found intact beneath it. Mortar from just above the bench was later dated to the mid-fourth century, matching the Constantinian work Eusebius describes.

The walls question

The strongest objection to the Holy Sepulchre is that it lies inside the Old City today. The answer depends on which wall stood when.

• Josephus (Jewish War 5.4.2) describes three walls on Jerusalem's north side. The Second Wall began at the Gennath Gate in the First Wall and enclosed the northern quarter as far as the Antonia fortress. Its exact line is debated, but the Muristan and church excavations place the quarry outside it.
• The Third Wall was begun by Herod Agrippa I, who ruled Judea AD 41-44. Josephus says Agrippa stopped after laying the foundations, for fear the emperor Claudius would suspect a revolt, and it was hastily finished before the siege of 70. The area of the church was brought inside the city by this later work, roughly a decade after the crucifixion.
• Calibrated conclusion. The line of the Second Wall is not settled, and specialists still argue the details. But no excavation has shown the church area inside the city in AD 30, and the tombs and quarry positively show it was outside.

The Garden Tomb

• Origin. In 1883 the British general Charles Gordon identified a rocky hill north of the Damascus Gate, which some thought looked like a skull, as Golgotha, and a nearby rock-cut tomb as the tomb of Jesus. Earlier 19th-century writers had already proposed "Skull Hill." The garden is now kept by the Garden Tomb Association and is much loved by Protestant visitors.
• The dating problem. Gabriel Barkay, writing in Biblical Archaeology Review (1986), and his colleague Amos Kloner surveyed the burial caves in the area and found features typical of Judean tombs at the end of the Iron Age, the 8th to 7th centuries BC. Barkay found no feature characteristic of a first-century tomb, and evidence that the tomb was reused for burials in the Byzantine period. On that dating, the tomb was centuries old in Jesus's day, so it could not have been "a new tomb wherein was never man yet laid."
• Dissent. A minority dates the tomb later (one proposal places it in the Hellenistic period), and supporters argue that an old tomb could have been recut. Neither view makes it a new first-century tomb.
• The skull-shaped hill. The resemblance depends on erosion and quarrying that occurred long after the first century, so it cannot be how first-century people named the place. The Gospels never say the hill looked like a skull.
• Fair use of the site. The Garden Tomb gives visitors a vivid picture of what a garden tomb with a rolling stone might have looked like. As a teaching aid it is useful. As an identification it is weak.

Why the location matters for apologetics

• The empty tomb was preached in the city that could check it. The earliest resurrection preaching happened in Jerusalem, a short walk from the tomb. A known, local burial site makes the empty-tomb claim checkable, which is why the earliest Jewish counter-story conceded the tomb was empty and argued the body was stolen. See Stolen Body Hypothesis Defeater.
• It answers "Jesus was never buried in a tomb." The Gospel picture (an executed man given to a sympathetic council member, laid in a nearby rock tomb before the Sabbath) matches the archaeology of first-century Jerusalem burial. See Jesus Was Not Buried in a Tomb Objection Defeater.
• Incidental accuracy. John's details (near the city, a garden, a new tomb close at hand, rock-cut) are the kind of local knowledge a fiction writer far from Jerusalem would not supply, and they fit the excavated setting. This belongs with the broader pattern in NT Geographical Reliability.
• Limits. Archaeology can show the site fits. It cannot show that a body left the tomb. The location supports the burial and the empty-tomb argument; the resurrection itself is argued from the full case in Minimal Facts Argument.

See also

• Joseph of Arimathea, owner of the tomb
• Crucifixion Forensics, the medical and historical case for how Jesus died at Golgotha
• Resurrection of Jesus, what the empty tomb points to
• Jesus Was Not Buried in a Tomb Objection Defeater, the burial objection answered
• Stolen Body Hypothesis Defeater, the earliest rival explanation
• NT Geographical Reliability, the wider pattern of Gospel place-accuracy
• Biblical Archaeology, the parent hub
• Constantine and Eusebius of Caesarea, who built and described the first church
• Josephus, source for Jerusalem's three walls