Where is Jesus’s tomb?

What the Gospels describe

The Gospels give a clear picture of the grave. Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the council, took the body down before the Sabbath began.

and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had cut out in the rock. Then he rolled a large stone against the door of the tomb, and departed.

It was new, “where no one had ever been laid” (Luke 23:53), in a garden near the place of crucifixion (John 19:41–42). The details fit Jewish family tombs of the time: a low doorway you had to stoop to look through (John 20:5), and a bench inside where the body lay, with room to sit “on the right side” (Mark 16:5). Where the cross stood is a separate question, answered in Where was Jesus crucified?

Under a Roman temple

The bishop and historian Eusebius tells how the tomb was found. Roman builders, probably under Hadrian, had buried the area under fill and raised a shrine of Aphrodite on top. In the 320s Constantine ordered it torn down and the soil carted away. Beneath it, Eusebius says, the cave of the resurrection came to light. Constantine’s builders cut the hillside away around it, leaving the tomb chamber standing free, and in 335 a great church was dedicated beside it (Life of Constantine 3.25–40).

The tomb has had a hard life since. In 1009 the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim had the church destroyed and the rock hacked away almost to the floor. What survives is the burial bench and parts of the walls, sealed inside the Edicule, a small marble shrine rebuilt after a fire in 1808. In 2016 a team from the National Technical University of Athens, restoring the Edicule, lifted the marble slab over the bench for about sixty hours. Under it, beneath a second, older slab, lay the original limestone bed. Mortar from between the layers was later dated to around AD 345, the age of Constantine’s builders.

Six churches share the building under an Ottoman-era arrangement called the Status Quo, chiefly the Greek Orthodox, the Catholic Franciscans and the Armenians. A Muslim family has kept the key to the front door for centuries, and a wooden ladder has stood on a ledge above the entrance since at least the 1700s, because no one can agree to move it.

The Garden Tomb

North of the Damascus Gate, beside the cliff some call Skull Hill, lies the Garden Tomb, uncovered in 1867 and owned since 1894 by a British charity, the Garden Tomb Association. It is quiet and green, easy to imagine Easter morning in, and many Protestant pilgrims prefer it. But the Israeli archaeologist Gabriel Barkay dated it, with the tombs around it, to the eighth and seventh centuries BC, the age of the kings of Judah. It was not a new tomb in Jesus’s day. The association itself does not insist that this is the place.

What archaeology can and can’t say

It can say that the Holy Sepulchre area was a disused quarry outside the city wall in the first century, used for Jewish burials. A family tomb with deep burial niches of exactly that period survives a few meters from the Edicule, in a side chapel the Syriac Orthodox call the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. It cannot name whose body lay on the bench. Claims for other graves, such as a family tomb found at Talpiot in 1980 and promoted in a 2007 documentary, are rejected by most archaeologists, who note that its names were among the most common of the time. Which tomb is a question for archaeology. What happened in it is a matter of faith.