From Dan to Beersheba / A Description of the Wonderful Land, with Maps and Engravings and a Prologue by the Author Containing the Latest Explorations and Discoveries

by John Philip Newman

Whether this church covers the Golgotha of the crucifixion and the place of our Lord’s sepulture remains an open question. No subject within the range of sacred archæology presents greater difficulties, and none has been contested with a more brilliant display of acute argumentation and varied learning. Pre-eminently it is a question of two sides, and the contest is sometimes so evenly balanced that an assumed victory by the advocates of either theory is one of doubtful certainty. To argue against the supposition, one is forced to reason against his inclination to stand on the site of the Redeemer’s death and sit within the shadow of his tomb; to reject it is to leave the world without a substitute, and consign the remembrance of those grand events which it commemorates to the memory of man, without a knowledge of the scene of their occurrence; to deny the identity of the spot is to call in question the traditions of fifteen centuries, to which the Christians of Europe and of the East have fondly clung, and for which the brave have died; to accept it is to argue against the unbroken silence of three hundred years—against equivocal history—against topography—against analogy—against eminent scholarship—against the Bible. The argument for it is tradition and history; the proof against it is the Bible and topography.

Traditionally considered, the argument in its favor runs thus: Such was the popularity of Jesus, and such the publicity of his death, burial, and resurrection, as to stamp the place of their occurrence with imperishable memory; that the descent of the Holy Ghost, the conversion of three thousand, the early founding of his Church in the city of his rejection, and the maintenance of its unity for thirty-seven years, combined to cherish in the public mind the recollection of the place; that though, just previous to the siege of the Holy City by Titus, his followers fled to Pella, beyond the Jordan, it was but a temporary departure, and that, after the storm of war had spent its fury, they returned to the city of their choice; that the desolation of seventy years which followed the conquest of the Romans was partial, and that, while the more wealthy of the population were sold into captivity, many of the common people retained their humbler homes; that, from the year 130 A.D.to the present time, Jerusalem has been an inhabited city, and that the Emperor Hadrian rebuilt the city, and, to dishonor alike the Jew and Christian, he reared a fane in honor of Jupiter on the site of Solomon’s Temple, and covered the tomb of Jesus with a temple to Venus; and that this temple to Venus remained standing for two hundred years after its erection, and was seen by Eusebius in the year 326 A.D.

GROUND PLAN OF THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE.

Such is the evidence for the identity of the Holy Sepulchre as the tomb of Jesus, from his resurrection down to the commencement of authentic history. It is unwritten tradition, and, at best, presumptive proof. Extending through a period of three hundred years of wars, revolutions, and desolations, it is the most unreliable period of all the centuries subsequent to the Christian era. Whatever may have been the temporary interest attached to Golgotha and to the tomb of Joseph to the idle and curious, to the friend and foe of Jesus, it is evident, from their inspired narrative, that the sacred writers neither shared the excitement, nor considered it incumbent on them to describe with minuteness the scene of their Master’s death and burial. They were too much absorbed in recording the stupendous facts of our Lord’s expiatory sufferings, and the glory of his resurrection, to entertain their readers with an accurate account of the rock on which he expired, and of the sepulchre from which he arose triumphant. The place is forgotten in the significance of the event; the actor, and not the stage, is the burden of their history. Their simple story is,They led him away to crucify him;[229]When they came to the place which is called Calvary, there they crucified him;[230]The place where Jesus was crucified was nigh to the city;[231]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.[232] This is the sum of their record. They must have been familiar both with the place of execution and of interment, but, from Matthew to Revelation, the apostles are silent to indifference as to the one and the other. Had they deemed it important, they might have intimated out of which gate the mournful procession passed, and on which side of the city the Son of God was slain; but, regarding such information as unworthy their sublime narrative, or fearing our idolatry, they leave us to the uncertainty of conjecture. The invitation of the angels to the devotedMarys, Come, see the place where the Lord lay, was not to enshrine the tomb, but to unshrine it, by convincing them by their own sight that he is not here, for he is risen, as he said; and, dear as the spot might be, they were not to linger,but to go quickly, and tell his disciples that he is risen from the dead.[233] We never read of their return to that tomb. Convinced of his resurrection, they sought him among the living and not among the dead. From the summit of Olivet they watched his ascending form, till a cloud received him out of their sight, and then returned with great joy, not to the tomb,but to an “upper room,” waiting the “promise of the Father.”[234] In his wondrous sermon on the day of Pentecost, St. Peter declared the resurrection of Christ, but made no allusion to his tomb,while he reminded his hearers that David’s sepulchre is with us unto this day.[235] In all the subsequent apostolic letters, neither the zealous Peter, nor the beloved John, nor St. Paul, that devoted worshiper of our Lord, ever alluded to those memorable places.

History is comparatively silent as to the return of the Christians from Pella. Many of the first followers of Christ were strangers in Jerusalem, who had come to the Holy City from distant countries to celebrate the annual festivals of their nation. Such must have been most of the three thousand converted on the day of Pentecost, who,returning to their far-off homes, spread the glad tidings of a risen Savior as they went.[236]And although all who “believed were together and had all things common, and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men as every man had need, and continued daily with one accord in the Temple, and breaking bread from house to house,”[237] yet in a brief time thereafter St. Stephen was martyred,“and at that time there was a great persecution against the church which was in Jerusalem, and they were all scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles.”[238] The number who fled to Pella, which was but a small town on the eastern bank of the Jordan, must have been exceedingly small. Those who found refuge there remained for seventy years, during which time Jerusalem was a desolation; and, excepting the military towers on Mount Zion, “the rest of the wall was so entirely thrown down evenwith the ground by those who digged it up to the very foundation,that there was left nothing to make those who came thither believe it had ever been inhabited.”[239] By some this account is regarded as exaggerated, and at most it can only refer to the walls of the city. Granting the correctness of such a supposition, and that some of the poorer inhabitants clung to the ruins of the capital, yet historians agree that the Christians did not return to Jerusalem till about the year 130 A.D., which was after the town had been rebuilt by the Emperor Adrian, and by him called Ælia Capitolina. And, at best, only the descendants of those who had fled returned, as during the lapse of seventy years most of the fugitives had ascended to their reward. It is also difficult to conceive how those who had never visited Jerusalem before, and especially after it had been rebuilt by the Romans, could have identified an obscure tomb which had remained unmarked by any enduring monument.

The historic accounts which have come down to us that Adrian desecrated the tomb of Jesus by erecting over it an idol monument, are as contradictory as they are inconsistent. As the emperor was the enemy of the Jew rather than of the Christian, it is impossible to conceive what motive impelled him to dishonor an humble shrine held sacred by a handful of harmless religionists. The erection of a proud fane on the site of Solomon’s Temple is in keeping with the character of the man and his hatred for the Jews, but the desecration of Golgotha and of the Holy Sepulchre is inconsistent with his reign in the East, and with the admission of the Christians to his new colony and city. But the early Church historians are not agreed as to the name and character of this idol monument. Writing after the death of Constantine, Eusebius speaks of a temple to Venus covering the Holy Sepulchre, ascribing its erection to impious men; writing sixty years later than Eusebius, Jerome ascribes it to the Emperor Adrian. Eusebius declares it was a temple, Jerome affirms it was a statue; Eusebius asserts it was in honor of Venus, Jerome informs us it was dedicated to Jupiter.

There are similar discrepancies in the writings of these fathers as to the discovery of the Holy Sepulchre, and as to the founder of the first Christian church reared in honor of our Lord’s resurrection. According to Eusebius, “impious men, orrather the whole race of demons through the agency of impious men, had labored to deliver over that illustrious monument of immortality to darkness and oblivion. They had covered the cave (or tomb) with earth brought from other quarters, and then erected over it a sanctuary to Venus, in which to celebrate the impure rites and worship of that goddess. Moved by a divine intimation made by the Spirit of the Savior himself, the Emperor Constantine ordered the obstructions removed, the holy tomb purified, and a magnificent church to be erected in commemoration of the event.” In this miraculous interposition to discover the veritable tomb of Christ, Eusebius concedes that there was no existing tradition identifying its locality. Either the place of our Lord’s burial was known to Eusebius, or it was not. If it was certainly known to him by a pagan temple standing on the spot, no miracle was necessary for its recognition; if it was not known to him, then there was no unbroken tradition extending through a period of three centuries, and the question turns upon the credibility of the pretended miracle. The “Father of History” can only be saved from palpable contradiction by supposing that after the tomb had been supernaturally discovered he found over it a pagan temple. But what proof have we that such a miracle was wrought? What good to mankind has resulted from such an interposition? In all Bible miracles, the great moral purposes to be attained justified the departure from the established course of nature. The history of this church, from Constantine to our own times, has been a series of religious rivalries, of bitter contentions between opposing sects, of wars between Christians and Turks, of weary and inefficacious pilgrimages from the snows of Russia and the sands of Africa, of useless expenditures of treasure, of relic worship, and of the utter absence of moral influence on Moslem and Jew.

Such a miraculous intimation given to the apostles would have been more appropriate than to a warrior whose piety is as questionable as the results of his conversion have proved disastrous to mankind. To an enlightened Christian mind it would afford a melancholy pleasure to stand on Calvary and sit in the Savior’s tomb, but the temptation to idolatry would be too strong for the common mind to brook. Duped by a mercenary priesthood for fifteen centuries, millions of Greek and Latin pilgrims have bowed in idolatrous veneration beforethe reputed tomb of Jesus; and for a boon so humble, immense donations have been demanded for the support of ecclesiastical establishments. The genuineness of this divine intimation is affected by the character of the age of Constantine. It was the age of pious frauds. Monkery had existed for two centuries; heresies had taken deep root; saints were worshiped, martyrs canonized, relics adored; and, sanctioned by imperial example, the people were ripe for any deception. Either the theory of an unbroken tradition coming down from the apostolic age to the time of Eusebius, and the existence of a pagan temple upon the well-known tomb must be abandoned, or the pretended miracle for its recognition must be relinquished, as the one supersedes the necessity of the other. Both can not co-exist; one or the other is without foundation in truth.

Jerome and his contemporaries, together with his successors, give a different version of the identification of the Holy Sepulchre and of the founder of the first church over the consecrated spot; and, what must appear as a little remarkable to every intelligent mind, these later historians, who wrote in succeeding centuries, are far more full and minute in their details than Eusebius, who was an eyewitness of what he wrote. According to them, the Empress Helena, the mother of Constantine, moved by a pious desire to worship at those shrines sacred to the memory of our Lord, visited Palestine in the year 326 A.D., at the advanced age of eighty. Having identified the sites of the principal events connected with our Lord’s history, she determined to rescue them from oblivion by the erection of enduring monuments, no less expressive of her own gratitude than for the guidance of those devout pilgrims whose devotions might lead them in future years to the Holy Land. Discovering to her satisfaction the stable and manger of the nativity at Bethlehem, and the exact spot of the ascension on Olivet, she ordered the erection of monumental structures on the site of such extraordinary events, at once worthy the Redeemer’s glory and the magnificent reign of her imperial son. Naturally desiring to supply the intermediate link, and perpetuate the memory of the Savior’s death and resurrection, she earnestly sought for Calvary and the reputed tomb of Joseph. Whether the recollection of these most sacred places had been lost, or whether to confirm her faith in the traditional sites,she diligently inquired of the oldest Jewish and Christian inhabitants of the city as to their location, who pointed her to the area at present inclosed within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. But the accumulation of rubbish during the lapse of so many years rendered the search difficult and uncertain. Intent, however, on the consummation of an object so laudable, and guided by a divine intimation, she at length came to the sepulchre of Jesus, and near it discovered the three crosses, with Pilate’s tablet, still bearing his superscription. The joy experienced by the unexpected discovery of the crosses was lessened by the tablet being detached from its original cross, precluding the possibility of determining to which of the three it had belonged. Ever fruitful in expedients, Macarius, then Bishop of Jerusalem, suggested the happy thought that the three crosses should be presented in succession to the person of a noble lady at that moment afflicted with an incurable disease, and the one which should impart healing virtue should be regarded as the cross on which the Lord of life and glory suffered. Singly each cross was presented, the first and second, however, without effect, but on the touch of the third she immediately recovered. Content with the accomplishment of a work so grand, and sincerely grateful for the honor Heaven had conferred upon her, she ordered the erection of a magnificent basilica over the Redeemer’s tomb, and, full of holy joy, the venerable Helena returned to Constantinople, where she expired in her eighty-second year. Nine years subsequent to her visit, and seven years after her demise, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was completed, and with unrivaled pomp dedicated to Jesus in the year 335 A.D. With these additional facts and palpable discrepancies, it is impossible to determine to which belongs the honor of the work—to the Emperor of the West or to his imperial mother. In both accounts there is the incompatible mingling of tradition and miracle, mutually destroying the force of each other. An intelligent Christian, visiting Jerusalem for the first time, and remembering his Lord expired and was interred “nigh unto the city,” would not be a little surprised to find Golgotha and the tomb of Joseph in the heart of the modern town. At the time of those great events the city was encompassed on the north with two walls. The first, beginning at the Tower of Hippicus on Mount Zion, ran along its northern brow, and, crossingthe Tyropean Valley, terminated at the western wall of the Temple inclosure, a distance of 630 yards. As the third wall was not built till after the Crucifixion, a description of it is not material to the argument; but on the direction of the second wall hangs the decision of this long-contested question. According to Josephus, the second wall commenced at the Gennath Gate, which signifies “garden,” and was used as a means of ingress either to a royal garden on Mount Zion, or of egress to the gardens in the Valley of Hinnom. In either case the gate would have been located near the western wall of the city, at which point the second wall commenced, and, running northward over the level portion of Mount Akra to the Damascus Gate, and thence coming down over Mount Bezetha, terminated at the northwest corner of the Tower of Antonia, including in its course the traditional Golgotha. To the most unpracticed eye such a line of wall would be in harmony with good sense, with correct civil engineering, and with the approved principles of military defensive works. To locate the Gennath Gate at the north base of Mount Zion, and run the second wall along Bazar Street up to the Damascus Gate and thence back to the Tower of Antonia, would certainly exclude the present site of the Holy Sepulchre, but would also exclude the large Pool of Hezekiah, give but a narrow space to the “Lower City” of ancient Jerusalem, and leave the whole of Mount Akra uninclosed. Such a line of wall would have left a large part, and the weakest portion, of the northern wall of Zion unprotected, and skirting, as it must have done, the steep sides of Akra, been entirely unavailing as a defensive structure. No sane engineer would have constructed a wall so as to expose to the use of an attacking enemy the large fountain of Hezekiah; and, if the second wall did not run north and south, it is impossible to understand Josephus, who informs us that, in his assault upon this part of the city, Titus stationed troops in towers along the southern part, and dispatched others to throw down the northern portion.