Religious Site
Garden Tomb
GAR-den TOOM · Modern Garden Tomb, East Jerusalem · 31.7839° N, 35.2300° E
The Garden Tomb is a rock-cut tomb near a skull-shaped rocky outcropping outside Jerusalem's Damascus Gate, promoted since the 19th century as an alternative site to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for Jesus's burial and resurrection — especially popular with Protestant and evangelical pilgrims.
Archaeology
G. Barkay published the study that settled the date in Biblical Archaeology Review in 1986, and his conclusion is worth having whole: "I have concluded that the cave of the Garden Tomb was originally hewn in the Iron Age II, sometime in the eighth or seventh century B.C. It was reused for burial purposes in the Byzantine period (fifth to seventh centuries A.D.), so it could not have been the tomb of Jesus. All lines of reasoning support this conclusion." Luke 23:53 and John 19:41 require a tomb in which no one had ever been laid, and a tomb cut seven centuries earlier and used since is not a new tomb. Two features shown to visitors belong to later periods: the groove beside the entrance, presented as the channel for a rolling stone, is a Crusader-period cutting from when the place was used as a stable, and the burial benches were recut into troughs during the Byzantine reuse. The identification itself is modern — O. Thenius noted the skull-shaped cliff in 1842, C. G. Gordon popularised the site in 1883, and the Garden Tomb Association was founded in 1894; its Victorian promoters were devout readers of the landscape rather than archaeologists. The Association does not claim the tomb is authentic and does not disclaim it either; what it says is that "whether this is the same tomb that Jesus was laid in, is not important. We believe what is important is not the place, but the Person of Jesus Christ." This app has no quarrel with that. The site is a real place of prayer for a great many people, and none of the dating touches that. See The Search for Jesus' Tomb for the full comparison.
On a modern map
Further reading
- G. Barkay, "The Garden Tomb - Was Jesus Buried Here?", Biblical Archaeology Review 12:2 (March/April 1986)
- The Garden Tomb Association's own statement of its position
- S. J. Frantzman and R. Kark, "General Gordon, the Palestine Exploration Fund and the Origins of 'Gordon's Calvary'", Palestine Exploration Quarterly 140:2 (2008), 119-136
- J. R. Chadwick, "Revisiting Golgotha and the Garden Tomb" (2003) - the author of the only modern published defence retracting it
- Wikipedia - Church of the Holy Sepulchre
Reflect
Whatever the exact spot, the tomb was empty — how would you live differently this week if you fully believed that?
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