Where is Jesus' Tomb?

Church of the Holy Sepulcher

Photo by israeltourism

(Another question I answered on Quora.)

Q: What evidence is there that the tomb at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem is the burial place of Jesus Christ?


A: The main piece of evidence is that we know from historical texts that if you went to the Holy Land in the AD 300s (and probably for sometime before that) and asked the local people to show you Christ’s tomb, that this is the location you would be taken to. Emperor Constantine’s mother Helena did this and built a church over the site, which became today’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher. This could indicate that the Christians around the city preserved a memory of where the tomb was that could possibly go back to the earliest days of the church.

There are also these supporting facts: 1.) The site was outside the city in AD 33, which fits the New Testament’s description, 2.) It’s the right style tomb for the time (the so-called ‘Gordon’s Calvary,’ an alternative site that’s sometimes shown, is not), and 3.) Approximately 1000 tombs, most of them Christian and very old, are clustered around this spot, indicating that it may have been held in special reverence from an early date.

The evidence gathered by the archaeology team this time around may give us more information in the future.

Fragrant

Consider this quote from the Apostle Paul:

So imitate God. Follow Him like adored children, and live in love as the Anointed One loved you—so much that He gave Himself as a fragrant sacrifice, pleasing God. 

Ephesians 5:1-2 VOICE

Reality check: It can be easy 2000 years after the Christian Movement started to be lulled into a comfortable dreamy mood about this scripture. "Yes, Jesus was such a sweet, fragrant sacrifice, wasn't he."

Don't get me wrong. I enjoy comfortable dream states as much as the next guy. But in this letter we are back in the first century, a few decades after Jesus. The sacrifice Paul has in mind is the broken, bloody, tortured, humiliated body of an agonized man on a roman cross.

How interesting that perhaps a mere 30 years afterwards people in the Movement could think of THAT as "fragrant." As the New Testament scholar NT Wright has pointed our, perhaps the greatest proof of Jesus' resurrection is that it's the one thing that adequately explains the existence of the early church.

Particularly a church that could say this about THAT.

Good Friday: "...Our suffering he took on himself"

The Lord says, “Look, my servant will succeed in what he has to do, and he will be raised to a position of high honor. It is true that many were shocked when they saw him. He was beaten so badly that he no longer looked like a man. But it is also true that many nations will be amazed at him. Kings will look at him and be unable to speak. They will see what they had never been told. They will understand what they had never heard.”

Who really believed what we heard? Who saw in it the Lord’s great power?

He was always close to the Lord. He grew up like a young plant, like a root growing in dry ground. There was nothing special or impressive about the way he looked, nothing we could see that would cause us to like him. People made fun of him, and even his friends left him. He was a man who suffered a lot of pain and sickness. We treated him like someone of no importance, like someone people will not even look at but turn away from in disgust.

The fact is, it was our suffering he took on himself; he bore our pain. But we thought that God was punishing him, that God was beating him for something he did. But he was being punished for what we did. He was crushed because of our guilt. He took the punishment we deserved, and this brought us peace. We were healed because of his pain. We had all wandered away like sheep. We had gone our own way. And yet the Lord put all our guilt on him.

He was treated badly, but he never protested. He said nothing, like a lamb being led away to be killed. He was like a sheep that makes no sound as its wool is being cut off. He never opened his mouth to defend himself. He was taken away by force and judged unfairly. The people of his time did not even notice that he was killed. But he was put to death for the sins of his people. He had done no wrong to anyone. He had never even told a lie. But he was buried among the wicked. His tomb was with the rich.

But the Lord was pleased with this humble servant who suffered such pain. Even after giving himself as an offering for sin, he will see his descendants and enjoy a long life. He will succeed in doing what the Lord wanted. After his suffering he will see the light, and he will be satisfied with what he experienced.

The Lord says, “My servant, who always does what is right, will make his people right with me; he will take away their sins. For this reason, I will treat him as one of my great people. I will give him the rewards of one who wins in battle, and he will share them with his powerful ones. I will do this because he gave his life for the people. He was considered a criminal, but the truth is, he carried away the sins of many. Now he will stand before me and speak for those who have sinned.”


Book  of Isaiah chapter 52 verse 13 through chapter 53 verse 12, ERV

"...The claims of Jesus Christ..."

"Resurrection of Christ"
by Guerau Gener

Meditation for a Sunday Morning

"If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is futile and your faith is empty... if Christ has not been raised, your faith is useless; you are still in your sins."

1st Letter to the Corinthians chapter 15 verses 14, 17

______________________

It is well to bear in mind that faith is deeper and wider than a spiritual experience: it is an acknowledgement of the claims of Jesus Christ and an obedience to his commands. It consists primarily in personal devotion to a living Savior, but it also entails a confidence in the apostolic testimony concerning who he is and what he has done. Our faith is directed not simply to the mystical presence of Christ or to the unconditional, but to Jesus Christ crucified and risen according to the Scriptures. The act of believing (fides qua creditur), though supremely important, must never prevail over the content of faith (fides quae creditur).

Donald Bloesch, Essentials of Evangelical Theology, Volume 1: God, Authority, and Salvation

Jesus and the Universe

Not that long ago it was a doubtful idea that we would ever find planets outside our solar system. Yet today news comes that extra-solar planet number 700 has been located. Once in a while you will see this (or the possibility we may find life on one of those planets) offered by journalists as something that might, well... shake the faith of Jesus' followers right down to our boots. Because faith is such a precious, fragile little thing, you know.

There are a number of reasons people offer as to why life on other planets might disturb us, one of which is the notion that Jesus would have to visit each one and die horribly all over again. As one theologian recently put it, "It's been argued for a couple of centuries now whether one incarnation of God as Jesus Christ for the entirety of creation is sufficient."

Fortunately, the Scriptures have this covered.

According to the Apostles, the sacrifice of Jesus is of cosmic significance. It isn't limited to the planet it took place on; it isn't limited at all. In any way. It affects all of existence.

"Christ himself suffered on account of sins, once for all," St. Peter tells us, "the righteous one on behalf of the unrighteous. He did this in order to bring you into the presence of God," (First Letter of Peter chapter 3, verse 18, CEB). The Letter to the Hebrews says much the same thing: "We have been made holy by God’s will through the offering of Jesus Christ’s body once for all, (chapter 10, verse 10, CEB).

"Once for all" -- One death and resurrection, infinitely valuable, covers the sins of the universe, and what other universes there may be.

St. Paul put it so succinctly: "One died for the sake of all; therefore, all died," (Second Letter to the Corinthians chapter 5, verse 14, CEB).

Jesus' Family Tomb?

Last Sunday the Discover Channel ran a documentary that claimed a tomb found near Jerusalem in 1980 is actually where Jesus and his family -- including Mary Magdalene, whom he supposedly married -- are buried.

First century middle eastern people had the rather macabre custom of letting the dead rot for a year, then gathering up their bones and putting them in a limestone box called an ossuary. Sometimes they scratched the dead person's name on the box, but in most cases they left it blank. If a particularly honorific person's bones were inside they might put some effort into the inscription (as was the case with the famous "James Ossuary"). Usually, it was just chicken scratchings.

The main reason the show gave for this being Jesus' tomb seemed to be that the names on the bone boxes found inside were, with a little stretching in some cases, similar to the names of some people in the Gospels -- names like Joseph, Mary, Jesus, among others. There was also some DNA evidence introduced from 2 of the boxes (the bones were long gone, buried when they were first discovered), which was only able to show that they weren't genetically related.

And quite a lot was made of the odd version of the name "Mary" on one ossuary because it appears in a book written at least 300+ years later possibly referring to Mary Magdalene. This was followed in the inscription by the word "Mara," taken by the producers to be the aramaic word for "Master" and to refer to Mary Magdalene as well. Linguistic scholars say this much more likely the name "Martha" and was either a second name or the name of another person whose bones were put in the same box -- a baby daughter, for instance.

As Dr. Ben Witherington points out in his blog, virtually all historians and biblical scholars -- including those interviewed during the program -- do not accept it's conclusions. The scholarship on the show was mediocre in my opinion -- on the level of the search for Atlantis or the Da Vinci Code. But most people do not have the time to deeply study ancient greek and aramaic scratchings on 2000 year old bone boxes. An exciting TV show backed with selective use of facts and cool reinactments can seem quite convincing.

Something that weighs more heavily with me is this simple fact: This was not a secret tomb. In the 1st century, as all admit, this was an easily seen tomb sitting in a field near the major city of Jerusalem. As you can see in the photograph, it was even nicely decorated.

But the Christians asserted that Jesus of Nazareth had come back to life and that this verified he was really the long-awaited Messiah. Rather than go through a lot of trouble, all the Powers That Were had to do to stop the Christian movement was produce his body. If it could be demonstrated that Jesus hadn't come back from the dead but was actually still lying among them, the whole thing would go to pieces.

This was not lost on the early Christians. As St. Paul said, writing 20-something years after the crucifixion, "If Christ hasn't come back to life, our message has no meaning and your faith also has no meaning, " (First Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 15, verse 14).

I'm not going to make the more obvious point that nobody -- Jew or Roman -- ever claimed back then to have found the body of Jesus. Those who opposed Christianity always had to do so on other grounds. But I will point out that if the truth actually was that his followers spirited their crucified master's body away and reburied it so they could rather pathetically continue spreading his teaching and pretending he was alive, they certainly wouldn't have done so in this tomb.

If you're trying to say a dead man is alive, you do not put him in a visible tomb near the place his enemies killed him. You also do not have his relatives and supposed wife interred there in their own burial ceremonies over the years, acting as pointers to the location. And you don't write his name on his ossuary.

If the body of Jesus is in a grave somewhere (which, incidentally, I do not for a moment believe), it is in an inconspicuous hole far away from Jerusalem, and his bone box, if he got one, is anonymous.

To quote Paul again: "But, in reality, Christ has risen from among the dead, being the first to do so of those who are asleep. "