Garden Tomb (Jerusalem, Israel)

Overview

The Garden Tomb, along with Skull Hill, is one of the two main locations identified as the site of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial. The Garden tomb is located just 20 yards north of the Damascus Gate.

The Garden Tomb is an ancient rock-cut tomb in Jerusalem that functions as a site of Christian pilgrimage attracting hundreds of thousands of annual visitors, especially Evangelicals and other Protestants, as some Protestant Christians consider it to be the empty tomb where Jesus of Nazareth resurrected. This is in contrast to an older tradition that locates the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus at a site roughly 0.37 miles (600 meters) to the south that is now occupied by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The Garden Tomb and its surrounding gardens are adjacent to a rocky outcrop known as Skull Hill. In the mid-nineteenth century, some Christian scholars proposed that Skull Hill is Golgotha, where the Romans crucified Jesus.

When the British General Charles George Gordon visited Jerusalem in 1883, he became impressed with the topography of an area near the northern wall of the city just north of the Damascus gate, and particularly with the skull-like appearance of a limestone bluff. So General Gordon began to promote this site as the place of the skull – Golgotha (Aramaic equivalent of the Hebrew word “gulgoleth”) or Calvary (derived from the Greek word “kranion”). Nearby, to the west of this site, he identified a location he thought could have been Jesus’ tomb. Archaeological research in the area, however, does not support this conclusion.

Certain features indicate that it was constructed in the Byzantine Period (after 330 AD) rather than in the Roman Period of the first century. But while the site is likely not the authentic place of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial, the setting is one of beauty and tranquility with meticulously maintained gardens and trees, and accommodation for some five hundred worshipers. The empty tomb, with its significantly open doorway carved into the lower rock face, provides a focus for visitors as they reflect on Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection.

“Walk around the gravel paths between the simple flower beds and the shrubs, and under the dark pines,” writes biblical historian E. M. Blaiklock. “Go one by one or two by two into the tomb, and pray for what lies nearest to the heart. A service is not necessary. It is a place in which you should meet with God alone, quietly, without distracting words, in tranquillity.”