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15. THE CITY LIMITS

        "And they bring him unto the place Golgotha, which is, being interpreted, The place of a skull" (Mk 15.22).  John adds the only other detail about this site:  "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.  There laid they Jesus therefore because of the Jews' preparation day; for the sepulchre was close at hand" (Jn 19.41-42).  This passage is the basis for the assumption that the sites of Jesus' death and resurrection were very close to one another, and in a garden area.

        The gospels use the Aramaic term Golgotha and the Greek  kranion -- skull -- interchangeably and often in tandem (the latin term for skull, calva, yields the English term Calvary.)  But no-one knows exactly to what "place of the skull" refers.  Some have suspected a topographical feature; so it was for the English general Charles George "Chinese" Gordon, who stopped in Jerusalem in 1864, on his way to a fatal encounter with a militant Islamic messiah in Khartoum.  Gordon was at once struck by a cave-pocked rock outcrop, in far northern Jerusalem, that resembled a skull, and declared it the site of Golgotha; the so-called Garden Tomb and "Gordon's Calvary" are considered authentic sites by many Protestants.  However, almost every sherd and spadeful of archaeological evidence from the site suggests an Iron Age tomb complex about seven centuries too old for the site of Jesus' death and burial.

        One reason for the Protestant devotion to the Garden Tomb, however, is the monopoly shared by the Armenian, Greek Orthodox, and Roman Catholic churches at the far more widely accepted site of Golgotha and Jesus' tomb, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.  The site where this venerable church stands was originally (from the seventh century B.C.) a limestone quarry, located about 200 yards north of what in the first century was the Gennath Gate, or Garden Gate, the northern entry into Jerusalem's affluent Upper City.  The present church, much of it twelfth century construction, still has traces of the original 4th century A.D. church built by Constantine the Great, Rome's first Christian emperor.

        Constantine's choice of the site was determined by Christian tradition, but how far back that tradition goes is suspect.  Many Christian scholars have cited two late fourth century A.D. reports of early second century A.D. pagan shrines of Venus and Jupiter, allegedly built by the Emperor Hadrian on the sites of the Christ's death and resurrection.  Of the two authors, who mention this desecration only in passing, the first, Jerome, wrote in 395 A.D., decades after the construction, at enormous expense, of Constantine's church; the second, Paulinus of Nola, never visited the holy land and is almost certainly repeating Jerome's rumor.  But the argument that proceeds from this scant evidence is this:  If Hadrian was so concerned to dishonor these Christian sites, their sacred status must date back well before his arrival in Palestine in 130 A.D.  As corroboration for this conjecture, we are usually given Cassius Dio's (Dio 69.12) remark that Hadrian raised a Temple to Jupiter on the site the Jerusalem Temple, which had been razed in 70 A.D.  However, Hadrian's attempt to paganize the sacred Temple site -- a desecration which helped spark the Bar Kokhba revolt of 135 A.D. -- does not directly translate into a parallel campaign to discredit Christian holy sites.  The simple fact is that the Romans, who loved images of their gods perhaps more than they loved their gods, put pagan statues and shrines all over Judea in the period from 70 A.D. on into the fourth century A.D.  That some of these ended up on some Christian sites is hardly remarkable -- holy places tend to transcend parochial concerns, as the current presence of one of Islam's most sacred mosques on the Temple site currently attests.  In that respect fourth century rumors of Roman statues formerly at Christian sites does little to prove Hadrian's alleged desecration campaign in the early in the second century A.D. -- much less take the tradition of the Holy Sepulchre site back to the early 30's A.D.

        What the Holy Sepulchre site might yield to modern archaeologists has been limited by the three-church consortium, which has permitted investigation only by archaeologists in its employ or authorized by it.  Almost all the information about the tombs has come from a single in-house source; what we can ascertain from these publications (which the Biblical Archaeological Review called "in no sense an archaeological report") is that beneath the Holy Sepulchre church there are several tombs of the type called loculi or kohkim -- rock hewn horizontal shaft tombs, each for a single body.-- which could have been carved there any time from the early second century B.C. to the late second century A.D.  The tomb traditionally regarded as Jesus' is a type of arched niche called an arcosolium, which was common somewhat later, from the late first century A.D. on through the fourth century A.D.  It should be added that this tomb was originally "excavated" by Constantine the Great's workers in the early fourth century A.D., just prior to the construction of the first church on the site.

        However, the real problem with the Holy Sepulchre site concerns the city limits at the time of Jesus.  We know from Josephus that Jerusalem's "second wall," a Herodian construction designed to enclose the rapidly expanding northern quarter of the city, began at the Gennath Gate and ran at least as far north as the Antonia fortress.  The road heading north out of the Gennath gate may have been inside or just outside this wall, though common sense would dictate inside.  Whatever the case, the location of the road can be determined from recent archaeological findings of the Gennath gate itself, as well as the evidence of a colonnaded avenue of late Roman and Byzantine Jerusalem that ran along exactly the same route.  This road passed about 100 yards east of the site of Golgotha, and about 150 yards east of the holy tomb itself.  It is quite unlikely that the area to the east of the road, whether inside or outside the "second wall," would not have been built up at the time of Jesus, if only to take commercial advantage of the approach to the city; even the rural road coming down from Bethany and the Mount of Olives was a site of shops and stalls, particularly during the festivals.

        But the area north of the Gennath Gate was much more thickly settled than the area east of the city.  We can infer this from the construction, beginning in 41 A.D. -- just ten years after Jesus' crucifixion -- of a third wall annexing an enormous area north of the city.  Josephus (War 5.149) describes the project.  "It was Agrippa who encompassed the parts added to the old city with this wall, which had been all naked before; for as the city grew more populous, it gradually crept beyond its old limits...."  This wall not only took in the site later occupied by the Holy Sepulchre, but also encompassed an area extending several hundred yards to the west of that site and about a half mile to the north.

        As originally planned -- Agrippa did not live to complete it to his specifications -- the third wall was a massive, many-towered fortification, hardly what first-century city planners were given to building around gardens and graveyards; there had to have been considerable existing population density simply to support the expenditure, much less justify it.  As Josephus makes clear, the new suburb had only "gradually crept" north; it certainly did not spring up in the ten years between Jesus' execution and the beginning of construction in 41 A.D.

        Given the Jewish legal prohibitions on the location of graves, it is impossible that the "new sepulchre" described in the gospels would have been constructed in such a populated area.  In fact, there is no archaeological evidence of any other early first century tomb sites within several hundred yards to the west of the Holy Sepulchre site, and within a thousand yards to the north -- it would seem that Agrippa built the third wall to the borders of the existing Jerusalem necropolis.  In short, Jews didn't bury people in their suburbs, and Jesus wasn't buried at the site of the Holy Sepulchre.  The church there is impressive enough as a monument to faith in the resurrection and the courage of the  pilgrims who have sought it over so many centuries.

        But if not the Holy Sepulchre site, why Hinnom?  One reason is that Jesus' followers were there.  It was customary for country Jews to camp out during the festivals -- the inns were always full with wealthier pilgrims.  But much of the campground had been taken up by the city's northward expansion, as well as a booming new necropolis on Mount Scopus (Lookout Mountain).  The campgrounds that remained would have been allotted to groups of pilgrims from various regions and villages, traditionally returning to claim the same spots.  We can imagine, then, thousands of the unemployed and homeless arriving for the festival and finding no place to camp except Hinnom.

        Another reason for favoring Hinnom is that it was more likely that any other site in Jerusalem to have a "place of the skull."  Originally the site of dreadful infant sacrifices, Hinnom had become the place where animal carcasses and the bodies of executed criminals were dumped, along with sewage and street garbage.  It was a place where unclean, abominated scavengers -- dogs, jackals, crows, and vultures -- freely roamed.  It was, simply, the only place near Jerusalem where one might see a skull.  Yet it also offered knolls for displaying the condemned and proximity to several key roads, so that passers-by would be forced to view the corpses.  And -- although this would not have been a consideration for Pilate -- Hinnom also had a large new necropolis on its southwest escarpment.

        Which brings us to the next question.  What really happened to Jesus' body?  

Next: HIS DISCIPLES CAME BY NIGHT

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Copyright (C) 2004 Michael Ennis
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Claudia Procula, or Claudia Procle, the name given Pilate's wife in such popular fictions as Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, is based solely on preposterous legends and forgeries long discredited by biblical scholars.