The Garden Tomb in Jerusalem is a site of significant interest to many Latter-day Saints and religious educators. In the last thirty years, tens of thousands of Latter-day Saint visitors to Israel have spent time at the pleasantly landscaped site. Many of these, if not most, have come away impressed, both by the sincere explanations of the volunteer guides and by the peaceful spirit of the place. Visitors have often left with the feeling that this was where Jesus Christ rose from the dead on a Sunday morning nearly two thousand years ago. Photos, slides, and videos featuring the tomb in that garden are often used in Church classrooms when educators discuss the events of Jesus’ death and Resurrection.

In a recently produced video presentation entitled “Special Witnesses of Christ,” President Gordon B. Hinckley, standing at the Garden Tomb, made the following statement: “Just outside the walls of Jerusalem, in this place or somewhere nearby was the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, where the body of the Lord was interred.”[1] There is, however, something very notable about this statement. Always a cautious observer, President Hinckley, with the words “or somewhere nearby” left wide open the possibility that the Garden Tomb might not have been the sepulchre of Jesus at all.

In 1992, I began a decade-long archaeological investigation of both the Garden Tomb and the so-called Skull Hill not far away (hereafter referred to as the “skull feature”) with the goal of determining whether either or both may be identified with the New Testament “Golgotha” and the tomb of Jesus’ Resurrection.[2] That investigation has yielded mixed results. The good news is that evidence is quite positive for the skull feature having been Golgotha, or the “place of the skull” where Jesus was crucified. However, the bad news, for some at least, is that the Garden Tomb does not seem to meet the archaeological criteria to be the site of Jesus’ Resurrection described in the New Testament.[3] The tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, if it still exists, will have to be sought “somewhere nearby.”

 The Church of the Holy Sepulchre as the Site for Golgotha and the Tomb

Before I discuss the investigation of the skull feature and Garden Tomb and consider whether either or both may be connected to the account of Jesus’ Crucifixion and Resurrection, I must revisit the traditional and more widely accepted candidate for Golgotha and the tomb. It must first be demonstrated that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, located inside the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, does not represent the correct site of Jesus’ death and burial.

The original Holy Sepulchre shrine was built by order of the Roman-Christian emperor Constantine between a.d. 326 and 335, some three hundred years after Jesus’ death. Prior to a.d. 326, the site was occupied by a pagan temple built by the Roman emperor Hadrian in a.d. 135. Archaeological soundings show that the site of the Hadrianic temple and Holy Sepulchre was a stone quarry in the seventh century b.c., at which time its topsoil was entirely removed. The site remained without vegetation thereafter, and the bare bedrock became the location of tombs carved there during a later period.

In his book The Holy Land, noted scholar Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, professor of New Testament at the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise (otherwise known as the French School) in Jerusalem, offers an enthusiastic case in favor of the Holy Sepulchre. Murphy-O’Connor describes the location in these terms: “At the beginning of the C1 a.d. the site was a disused quarry outside the city walls. Tombs similar to those found elsewhere and dated to the C1 b.c. and the C1 a.d. had been cut into the vertical west wall left by the quarrymen. . . . Windblown earth and seeds watered by winter rains would have created the covering of green in the quarry that John dignifies by the term ‘garden.’”[4]

Murphy-O’Connor’s description of the quarry and the presence of tombs is basically correct (except for his “C1 a.d.” assumption), but his description of the “garden” as a naturally occurring weed patch shows little regard for the reliability of the Gospel of John. One might ask Murphy-O’Connor why Mary Magdalene would suppose she was talking to a “gardener” (John 20:15) if she were standing in nothing more gardenlike than a windblown weed patch on denuded quarry bedrock. The scenario he presents makes no sense when compared to the setting described in the New Testament. Because of the lack of arable soil, the Holy Sepulchre site could not have been a garden in the time of Jesus.

But the New Testament account calls not just for a real working garden. It stipulates that the tomb in that garden was newly cut at the time of Jesus’ death: “Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid” (John 19:41). Though horizontal burial niches (called kokhim in Hebrew) were found carved into the quarry bedrock under Hadrian’s temple (see figure 1), none of those could have been a “new sepulchre” in a.d. 30, when Jesus was buried.

Figure 1. Two kokhim (burial vaults) at the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

Murphy-O’Connor is mistaken in claiming that the tomb remains at the Holy Sepulchre date to both “the C1 b.c. and the C1 a.d.” The Byzantine Christians who selected the site assumed an incorrect date for the tombs they found when they demolished Hadrian’s pagan temple. Those burial niches probably date to the third or second centuries b.c., the period of Hellenistic control that culminated in Judea’s Hasmonean monarchy, but they cannot under any circumstances be dated to the first century a.d. when Jesus lived. Here is why.

From the tenth century b.c. through the first century a.d.—the archaeological Iron Age through the Herodian period—tombs were not constructed west of the inhabited areas of Jerusalem. The only exceptions were tombs located over one thousand meters west of the city walls. By and large, the west was simply avoided as a burial area.

The primary reason for this seems to have been connected with the prevailing winds. In Jerusalem, like most other areas in the land of Israel, the wind blows almost exclusively from the west. Exceptions are during short transition periods in spring and fall when hot desert winds called sharav blow from the east or southeast. But more than 350 days a year, the wind is from the west—from the sea. Jews did not embalm dead bodies prior to burial; and corpses were left exposed in the tomb to desiccate, which could take over a year. Tombs to the west of the city presented two problems: (1) the scent of decomposing corpses would be carried over the city by breezes from the west, and (2) Jews believed ritual impurity rising from interred corpses could be carried over the city by those breezes, causing the living inhabitants of the city to become “defiled” or unclean.

The prohibition on burial to the west of Jewish cities, including Jerusalem, is noted in both the Talmud and the archaeological record. I will consider first the Talmud. A quote from the Mishnah, the portion of Talmud that was put into writing about a.d. 200 and that preserves Jewish traditions from the second century b.c. to the second century a.d., recalls how Jews dealt with dead bodies in regard to their city limits: “They distance the animal carcases and the tombs and the tannery from the city fifty cubits. None place a tannery other than to the east of the city. Rabbi Akiva says: to every wind one places, except the west, and distances fifty cubits."[5]

In this Mishnah, the sages of the late second century a.d. indicate that Jews of their day did not deposit dead bodies, whether human or animal, within twenty-five meters (“fifty cubits”) of their town limits. The same was true for tanneries, where dead animals were processed for leather—in fact, tanneries were located only east of the city. The sages then refer to an earlier authority, Rabbi Akiva, to explain older practices upon which theirs were based. Akiva had grown up in the late first century a.d. and became nasi (the presiding rabbinic authority) in a.d. 110. He was killed by the Romans in a.d. 135. His words, recalled to harmonize the two prior statements in the Mishnah, reflect the first century a.d. custom that corpse deposition was permissible anywhere but to the west of the city—the words “to every wind” are both an idiomatic expression of direction as well as an indication that wind was the primary factor in determining permissible direction.

The sages who compiled the Mishnah often crafted preliminary statements in a way that allowed them to be harmonized or summarized by a preexisting statement from an earlier authority. That Akiva’s summary statement permitting deposition in every direction “except the west” has reference both to the dead animals and tombs of the first statement as well as the tannery of the second statement is deduced from the presence of terminology from both statements: the verb “distance” and the “fifty cubit” measurement of the first statement as well as the verb “place” from the second statement. The Mishnah is indicating, in its own peculiar way, that Jews did not place tombs on the west side of their cities during the first century a.d.

That Jerusalemites constructed their tombs only to the east, north, or south of the city is also evident from archaeological research. A map in the authoritative New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land that charts the location of Jerusalem’s ancient necropoli (burial grounds) shows that hundreds of tombs were located on the Mount of Olives, east of the city, as well as in large tracts on the north and south sides of the city. But no tombs of the first century a.d. appear on those maps in any area within a kilometer of ancient Jerusalem’s western limit.[6] Physical remains of tombs in that area are nonexistent. Both the Talmud’s recollection of first century a.d. practices and the thorough surveys of archaeologists seem to indicate that the west side of Jerusalem was an area where burial was entirely out of bounds.

A related aspect of the Holy Sepulchre’s location and the question of wind direction was the erection of the Temple of Herod and the expansion of the Temple Mount platform after 20 b.c. University of Haifa archaeologist Rami Arav and researcher John Rousseau have demonstrated that Pharisee tradition, the basis for most Jewish practice in the Herodian period, would not have permitted tomb construction anywhere directly west of the expanded Temple Mount because wind passing over western tombs would also have passed over the sacred temple enclosure, thus defiling it and anyone in it.[7] They maintain that “tombs found in this area [west of the city] are either older than the first century c.e. [a.d.] or are located more than a distance of 2,000 cubits (3,000 feet) from the Temple Mount."[8] Arav and Rousseau conclude that since “burial customs in the first half of the first century c.e. [a.d.] preclude burials and their attendant impurities west (windward) of the Temple, then the crucifixion and burial of Jesus could not have taken place at the site of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which is almost exactly due west of the Holy of Holies."[9]

How then may we account for the tomb remains at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre? The likely answer is that when the burial niches there were initially constructed, the area actually lay to the north of the city. Until the first century b.c., the northern limit of Jerusalem’s inhabited neighborhoods was the east-west line of the so-called “first wall” (see figure 2), originally built by King Hezekiah in the late eighth century b.c. and rebuilt by the Hasmoneans in the second century b.c. No prohibition would have existed, in those centuries, to locating graves a reasonable distance north of that “first wall.”

The Holy Sepulchre’s burial niches are located some one hundred meters north of that line (two hundred cubits by the sages’ measure). Those niches were most likely carved out during the third or second centuries b.c., either by Jews or possibly by non-Jewish Syrians garrisoned in the city. However, later, during the first century b.c., the growing population of Jerusalem expanded north of that “first wall,” establishing residential areas along the upper Tyropoean Valley as far as today’s Damascus Gate. Scholarly opinion on just when is divided, but sometime between 63 b.c. and 4 b.c. (when Herod the Great died), either during the reign of the last of the Hasmonean monarchs or of Herod himself, a rampart known as the “second wall” was built, surrounding the newer neighborhoods and annexing them to Jerusalem (see figure 3).

With the appearance of those neighborhoods and the erection of that “second wall,” the site of the Holy Sepulchre, only fifty meters west of that wall, became an area where new tombs would not have been permitted. In other words, at the time Jesus died in a.d. 30, no “new sepulchre” could have been cut out by Joseph of Arimathea at the Holy Sepulchre site—the cultural prohibition on tomb construction and burial at a point only fifty meters to the west of the “second wall” would have already come into play sixty to a hundred years earlier.

 

Figure 2. Jerusalem during the Hasmonean period, 164–63 b.c.
The dotted line represents the present Old City wall line.

Figure 3. Jerusalem during the mid-Herodian period, 20 b.c.–a.d. 43.
The dotted line represents the present Old City wall line.

The exact reasoning behind the original placement of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is not known. But it is clear that the Byzantine Christians of the fourth century who built the shrine were essentially uninformed concerning Jewish tradition and practice at the time of Jesus as well as the historical geography of Herodian Jerusalem, or else they would not have chosen the site they did. In modern times, generally, the only conversation about the authenticity of the tomb site at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre has surrounded the question of its location inside or outside the “second wall” of Herodian Jerusalem. This is a fair question itself because it is by no means certain that the “second wall” was located east of the Holy Sepulchre’s location. It may indeed have run on the west side of that location, meaning that the Holy Sepulchre site was inside the city in Jesus’ day. But inside or outside, the tombs there would have been emptied of all human remains when the city expanded northward in the first century b.c. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the tombs at the Holy Sepulchre were outside the “second wall” in Jesus’ day, the site still cannot have been where Joseph of Arimathea was cutting his new tomb in a.d. 30. It was in extremely close proximity to the western side of Jerusalem and west of the Temple of Herod and the expanded Temple Mount platform, thus disqualified as a new tomb site by the prevailing west winds. And, as discussed above, the site was a barren stone quarry, not a working garden, and would have needed no gardener.

The New Testament accounts require, for the site of Jesus’ burial, a newly cut tomb, a working garden, and the theoretical presence of a gardener. The Holy Sepulchre site fails on all counts. It is highly unlikely to have been the site of Jesus’ burial.

But what about the Holy Sepulchre’s “Hill of Calvary” as a crucifixion site? It should be noted that the New Testament does not say Jesus was executed on top of a hill, and no hill is mentioned in connection with the Crucifixion.

The tradition of a hill seems to have first appeared with the building of the Holy Sepulchre church itself and the identification of a small bedrock knoll as the crucifixion site. This was the knoll later idyllized in the Protestant hymn as “a green hill far away,” but no such hill is mentioned in the New Testament. Three of the four Gospel accounts give the Aramaic name for the place of Jesus’ crucifixion as golgotha, which literally means “the skull.” This is what the local Jews, who all spoke Aramaic, called the site—“the skull.” Luke alone omits the Aramaic term golgotha, simply calling the place kranion (Greek for “skull”).

The latinesque Catholic term “Calvary,” which appears in the English King James Version of Luke, is somewhat misleading—it is not found in the original Greek of Luke at all. Other than a few Roman soldiers who spoke Latin (and not all of them did), probably nobody called the place “Calvary” in Jesus’ day. But whether we read Matthew, Mark, and John’s golgotha or Luke’s kranion, it seems clear that there was something about the crucifixion site that led the Jews of Jerusalem to think of a skull. There is, however, no surviving feature of the Holy Sepulchre’s “Hill of Calvary” that can be identified in any way with a skull, nor is any such feature mentioned in the account of Eusebius, who chronicled the building of the church at the site in his “Life of Constantine.” Though the Holy Sepulchre site was a tomb locale a century prior to Jesus’ day, it is unlikely in a Jewish culture so careful about the disposition of human remains that skulls left lying about the site gave it the Golgotha name, as some have maintained.[10]

Since the Holy Sepulchre site was immediately west of an inhabited part of the city, the same ritual purity and wind-related factors that would have prohibited burials there in Jesus’ day would likely have put the location out of bounds for crucifixion or other forms of execution. (Arav and Rousseau reach the same conclusion in relation to the temple.) To the question of whether Roman soldiers would have given regard to Jewish concerns for ritual purity, it must be pointed out that Pontius Pilate and other governors found it necessary to do so, in order to work with the local Jewish leadership at keeping civil order (the Romans seem to have been closely allied with the Sadducees, from which were chosen the high priest and chief priests who administered the temple complex). Pilate, for example, gave regard to purity concerns when coming out of his residence to confer with the chief priests, who would not enter his hall “lest they should be defiled” (John 18:28–29). The ritual purity of the city and the temple would have been no less a concern; thus, the Romans would have avoided capital punishment west of the city. It becomes necessary, then, to look elsewhere for the Golgotha of Jesus’ crucifixion.

See Part 2 in tomorrow’s Meridian.

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 NOTES

1. Gordon B. Hinckley, in Special Witnesses of Christ, videotape, Intellectual Reserve, Inc., 2000.
2. The author holds a Ph.D. in near eastern archaeology and is an active field archaeologist at sites in Israel. The long-term investigation was carried out periodically, during the author’s free time, beginning with his two-year appointment to the full-time faculty of Brigham Young University’s Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies (1992–94) and continuing as he returned to Jerusalem each summer on Jerusalem Center teaching assignments or for archaeological excavation at Tel Miqne (biblical Ekron) and Tel Safi (biblical Gath) from 1995 to 2002.
3. This conclusion represents a change of position for the author, who in previous publications, prior to completing a degree in archaeology, had supported the Garden Tomb as a candidate for Jesus’ sepulchre. See Jeffrey R. Chadwick, “In Defense of the Garden Tomb,” Biblical Archaeology Review 12, no. 4 (July/ August 1986): 16–17; and D. Kelly Ogden and Jeffrey R. Chadwick, The Holy Land: A Geographical, Historical and Archaeological Guide to the Land of the Bible (Jerusalem: HaMakor and BYU Jerusalem Center, 1990), 340–45.
4. Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, The Holy Land: An Oxford Archaeological Guide from Earliest Times to 1700, 4th ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 45–47.
5. Babylonian Talmud, Baba Batra 25:a, literal translation by the author. The Hebrew version reads as follows:

Although the Hebrew version uses the term ruah (wind), the Soncino English translation idiomatically renders the term as “direction,” which is not incorrect but which does not preserve the important aspect of wind direction. The Gemara that follows specifies that the sages were discussing wind-related issues—hence the need for a more literal translation of the Mishnah.

6. Hillel Geva, “Jerusalem/Tombs” in The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, ed. Ephraim Stern (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society & Carta, 1993), 748.
7. John J. Rousseau and Rami Arav, Jesus and His World: An Archaeological and Cultural Dictionary (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 169.
8. Rousseau and Arav, Jesus and His World, 167–68. The singular presence of the so-called “Herod family tomb” to the west of Jerusalem’s Old City, on the grounds of the present-day King David Hotel, is explained by its distance from the Temple Mount—over 2,000 cubits, or 3,000 feet.
9. Rousseau and Arav, Jesus and His World, 169.
10. James E. Talmage incorrectly supposed that “the exposure of skulls and other human bones . . . would not be surprising; though the leaving of bodies or any of their parts unburied was contrary to Jewish law and sentiment.” But he also concluded that “the origin of the name is of . . . little importance” (Jesus the Christ [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1915, 1973], 667).