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An Empty tomb of Jesus?

– or vacuous nonsense!

A state religion needs the paraphernalia of public sanctuaries, "holy places" where the serried ranks of the faithful can prostrate before the gods and abase themselves before the earthly legates of the divine. No more is this true than in the delirium of religious revolution when the old gods are thrown down and a new god enthroned. Such was the religious revolution of Constantine.

Where better to place the "life and times" of the new god than upon the sacred places of the old? The literary basis of the Christian holy drama was obligingly vague. The gospels failed to identify precisely where the hero of the Christian story "conquered death" – but then those same gospels failed to substantiate every other salient detail of Jesus' life. It should surprise no one that the venues of his death and entombment are clouded by contention and doubt.

Thus it comes as something of a revelation to discover that not just the purported tomb of Jesus but also the alleged place of his execution are to be found within a single building. Is it really tenable that the godman's tomb could have been less than thirty metres from the site of his crucifixion?

Calvary and the Holy Sepulchre are pivotal points in the Christian dreamscape – but were they ever a reality in the known universe?

Golgotha – "Sacred Space"

"And he bearing his cross went forth into a place called the place of a skull, which is called in the Hebrew Golgotha ...The place where Jesus was crucified was nigh to the city." – John 19.17,20.

"Jesus ,,, suffered without the gate. Let us go forth therefore unto him without the camp." – Hebrews 13.12,13.

 

Golgotha – otherwise known as Calvary from the Latin for skull, calvaria – can be seen today in two places, one identified by a Christian fanatic in the 19th century, the other identified by a Christian fanatic in the 4th century. Neither is genuine, of course, but the weight of "tradition" favours the earlier identification.

To fully appreciate how the earlier fraud was concocted it is instructive to review how the recent Victorian chicanery was assembled from a heady mix of pious enthusiasm, amateurish "archaeology" and religio-political imperatives. Quite simply, the Protestants wanted their own sepulchre, free of Catholic idolatry, and in a larger than life scion of the British military establishment they found their man. General Charles Gordon, in an interlude between sacking Nanking and dying at the hand of the Mahdi in the Sudan, brought his Evangelical fervour and wide-eyed mysticism to the city of Jerusalem. Palestine at the time – 1883 – was a province of an Ottoman empire increasingly at the mercy of the European powers and Britain had just seized Cyprus from the perfidious Turks.

Gordon was contemptuous of the Catholic, Greek and Armenian monks that had turned the Church of the Holy Sepulchre into a thieves' market. That alone convinced him that the true tomb of Christ must lie elsewhere. Some forty years earlier an Otto Thenius had directed pious attention to a hill north of the Damascus Gate, whimsically named "Jeremiah's Grotto" in the 15th century, and Gordon, like Thenius, could see in the hill's contours the features of a human skull (or at least a couple of eye sockets). Christian mysticism – or perhaps we should say, lunacy – did the rest. "Skull hill" does contain a tomb (several in fact) – unfortunately dating from the Iron Age and tarted up by Byzantine Christians when building the monastic complex of St. Stephen's. Yet despite the transparently fake credentials, the so-called "Garden tomb" still draws the crowds. As Murphy O'Connor cheerfully admits (The Holy Land, p125.), "In Jerusalem the prudence of reason has little chance against the certitude of piety."

On the wilder shores of biblical mania there are still fools and charlatans who feed each other superlative nonsense about the "Ark of the Covenant" being found directly below "Gordon's Calvary" but – don't tell anyone – the discovery is kept secret by the Israeli government in the interests of public order!

Geddit? Me neither   The Garden tomb "And he shall kill it on the side of the altar northward before the LORD: and the priests, Aaron's sons, shall sprinkle his blood round about upon the altar." – Leviticus 1.11 Like an early-day David Icke, General Gordon could see cosmic design drawn on a vast canvas. The Bible – you may have guessed – was his guide. Jesus on his cross had embraced the whole city of Jerusalem and his true sepulchre obviously lay within the skull-shaped hill the gospels appropriately had named Golgotha. Arcane wisdom, obliquely referred to by the books of holy scripture, confirmed that this was the spot and of course it looked right – modest, peaceful, a real tomb, and a garden – every Protestant's idea of what the tomb of Jesus should look like. "You cannot help seeing that there is a body, that Schick's conduit is the oesophagus, that the quarries are the chest, and if you are venturesome you will carry out the analogy further."  – Gen. Gordon, Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement, 1885. Even today, but for the steady stream of tourists, the garden has a tranquility and the tomb chamber remains unadorned. Is this not the tomb that befits the simple piety of real Christians? Pity it's as fraudulent as the Catholic extravaganza down the road.    Garden tomb Empty tomb

Golgotha – Original Recipe

Constantine demands a superlative shrine

The so-called "Garden tomb" may be a palpable fake but the Catholic shrine is no less a fraud. It is simply older. Given the paucity of biblical directions ("without the gate ... nigh to the city") the place of execution could have been anywhere. Likewise, the holy tomb. Which rather nicely left a great deal of scope for fraudsters to concoct a tableau to delight and delude the foolish – particularly when commanded so to do by the ruler of the world. Emperor Constantine gave the heart-warming reassurance that "money was no object".

"I have no greater care than how I may best adorn with a splendid structure that sacred spot, which, under Divine direction, I have disencumbered as it were of the heavy weight of foul idol worship; a spot which has been accounted holy from the beginning in God's judgment, but which now appears holier still, since it has brought to light a clear assurance of our Saviour's passion.

"It will be well, therefore, for your sagacity to make such arrangements and provision of all things needful for the work, that not only the church itself as a whole may surpass all others whatsoever in beauty, but that the details of the building may be of such a kind that the fairest structures in any city of the empire may be excelled by this ... artificers and labourers, and whatever they shall understand from your sagacity to be needful for the advancement of the work, shall forthwith be furnished ... columns and marbles, whatever you shall judge ... to be especially precious and serviceable ... the ceiling be ornamented with gold ... whatever quantity or sort of materials we shall esteem from your letter to be needful, may be procured from every quarter, as required, for it is fitting that the most marvellous place in the world should be worthily decorated."

– Constantine's Letter to Macarius, Eusebius (Vita Constantini)

Although today's apologists love to suggest a "tradition" of early visitors to the tomb of Jesus (without a shred of evidence), nothing can disguise the fact that until the 4th century Christians got along just fine without a Jesus tomb and had no special reverence for the place of his supposed execution. After all, his kingdom was "not of this world".

Nicaea – a council with attitude

"The truth is evincing itself daily by fresh wonders, so our souls may all become more zealous"
– Constantine.

In May 325, about three hundred, of perhaps eighteen hundred, ordained bishops gathered for Constantine's "religious policy conference" at Nicaea on the Bosphorus. Constantine may have attributed his mastery of the Roman world to divine favour but he certainly understood the political value of a universal religion identifying his own person as God's regent on earth. After Constantine, for more than a thousand years, monarchy would be made secure and unfettered by a "divine right of kings", an article of faith in the empire of Christendom.

The creed eventually hammered out at Nicaea would have immediate and material consequence for the soon-to-be Holy Land. Three richly endowed churches would give concrete form and physical presence to a religious ideology codified eight hundred miles away by churchmen, most of whom had never stepped foot in Palestine. The new state religion required its hallowed ground: a church to mark where the new deity had taken form in the womb of a virgin, a church to glorify the spot where his lifeless body had been resurrected to life eternal, and a church to honour the place where he had ascended to heaven.

"The three spots memorialise some of the most fundamental passages of the Nicene Creed. For this asserts that Jesus was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary (the Nativity Church at Bethlehem), was crucified and died and rose again on the third day (the Church of the Holy Sepulchre), and ascended into Heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father (Church of the Ascension)." – Romer, Testament, p 223.

Urged on by Christian fervour, Constantine made the overthrow of the old gods a matter of state policy. Helena, the emperor's aged mother, was more than willing to ease her impending transfer to heaven by devoting herself to the task of sanctifying appropriate sites in Palestine. Yet the "discoveries" of the dowager empress were not the consequence of divine guidance or even joyful serendipity. They were the implementation of a state policy determined by an imperious and superstitious monarch and a coterie of senior churchmen at Nicaea. Each and every "Jesus venue" would displace a venerated pagan shrine. Before Helena "progressed" in regal splendour to the east, Constantine had already issued instructions to his Palestinian bishops.

Recycled Sacred Space

A careful reading of the Life of Constantine reveals the sequence of events. At first, the tomb of Jesus was unknown to all.

"This sacred cave certain impious and godless persons had thought to remove entirely from the eyes of men ... these devices of impious and wicked men against the truth had prevailed for a long time ... the monument of his most holy Passion, so long ago buried beneath the ground, should have remained unknown for so long a series of years."

Constantine, heady with the success of Nicaea and urged on by scheming bishops to build a New Jerusalem on the despised city of the Jews, ordered the destruction of the Hellenistic temples of Aelia Capitolina. Macarius, the Christian bishop, was delighted. It eliminated the pagan competition and he knew a state-funded church would follow.

"Constantine ... calling on the divine aid, gave orders that the place should be thoroughly purified, thinking that the parts which had been most polluted by the enemy ought to receive special tokens, through his means, of the greatness of the divine favour. As soon, then, as his commands were issued, these engines of deceit were cast down from their proud eminence to the very ground, and the dwelling-places of error, with the statues and the evil spirits which they represented, were overthrown and utterly destroyed."

The first target was the Hellenistic temple built by emperor Hadrian two hundred years earlier. The pagan edifice was destroyed and engineers readied the site for a new construction. More than a year had passed when, "contrary to all expectations", an ancient tomb came into view. The opportunistic priests immediately proclaimed the tomb to be that of Christ.

"As soon as the original surface of the ground, beneath the covering of earth, appeared, immediately, and contrary to all expectation, the venerable and hollowed monument of our Saviour's resurrection was discovered. Then indeed did this most holy cave present a faithful similitude of his return to life, in that, after lying buried in darkness, it again emerged to light, and afforded to all who came to witness the sight, a clear and visible proof of the wonders of which that spot had once been the scene, a testimony to the resurrection of the Saviour clearer than any voice could give."

The joyful news was relayed back to Constantine, whose "piety", ego and ambition were stroked by the momentous discovery. It was Christ's tomb, of course, because the divinely chosen monarch had foreseen the event in one of his all too frequent visionary dreams. The imperial purse strings were opened and the nouveau riche church engorged itself.

"Immediately after the transactions I have recorded, the emperor sent forth injunctions which breathed a truly pious spirit, at the same time granting ample supplies of money, and commanding that a house of prayer worthy of the worship of God should be erected near the Saviour's tomb on a scale of rich and royal greatness.

This object he had indeed for some time kept in view, and had foreseen, as if by the aid of a superior intelligence, that which should afterwards come to pass."

The "pilgrimage" of Helena which followed in the year 326 was an inspection of a fabulously expensive work-in-progress by a member of the divine household. She did not find the "true cross" but quite possibly was presented by a groveling cleric with a set of nails said to have pegged Jesus to his stake. These unusual "lucky charms" the empress sent back to her son. He had one mounted on his helmet and another in his horse's bridle. It began the thoroughly shamanistic degeneration of Christian belief in which anything deemed to have been touched by either the dead or living Jesus was transmuted into a potent instrument of divine magic.

Helena appears to have spent time at Bethlehem and Nazareth unsuccessfully seeking Jesus artifacts before a sojourn on the Mount of Olives. Here a Church of the Ascension was under construction. She is even said to have identified Jebel Musa as the Mount Sinai where Moses had received the ten commandments, a location unknown even to the Jews. Helena died the following year, no doubt content that she had quite literally put Christianity on the map.

A generation later, she was to be credited posthumously with the discovery of the tomb and the true cross itself (St. Ambrose, De Obitu Theodosii).

The Cover Story

One might legitimately wonder how the priests, who supervised Constantine's builders, managed to so quickly recognize the tomb of Jesus. One hole cut into rock is very much like another hole cut into rock. Obviously there were no bones with which to recognize the "resurrected" saviour and, of course, his burial garments were well on their way to Turin. Indeed, Constantine's rotundra ploughed straight through an ancient catacomb ("as old as the kingdom of Israel", Romer, p179), such was the regard for ancient Jewish burial sites. A remnant of this tomb now masquerades as the last resting place of Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. In that, there is a clue to the origins of the "tomb of Jesus".

A lie, dreamed up in antiquity and still circulated by Christians, was that the iniquitous pagans had first buried and then built upon the tomb of Jesus.

"Those who embraced the Christian faith, after the period of his passion, greatly venerated this tomb; but those who hated Christianity, having covered the spot with a mound of earth, erected on it a temple to Venus, and set up her image there, not caring for the memory of the place." – Socrates Scholasticus (Ecclesiastical History, XVII, c. 440 AD)

It was said that the Roman Emperor Hadrian, in his hatred for the true religion, had ordered the whole area be buried and a large platform made ready and a temple erected there to Aphrodite and his own vanity. Jerome, in contrast, reports that it was a statue of Jupiter which stood on the site for 180 years. The honoured god may even have been Tyche, which shows up on coins for the period. The temple may even have served a number of deities.

A temple of some kind is certain. But did it bury any tomb of Jesus?

The loving Christians destroy a temple to love

One hundred and eighty years after Hadrian, when the egomaniac Constantine made available near limitless funds for instituting the holy places of Christianity, Hellenistic temples were a primary target. The temple of Venus/ Aphrodite in Aelia was particular vulnerable, unloved by either the nouveaux riche Christians or Jews who had re-entered the city over the course of two centuries.

When Constantine converted the empire to Christianity, he had the pagan temple dismantled, the earth removed and a church built on the spot. The destruction of the Hellenistic sanctuary by the vindictive Christians was more or less total. However, temples still extant in other cities of the region provide a good indication of the probable size and style of the pagan sanctuary and excavation of the Cardo Maximus (the main north-south thoroughfare) and sections of the precinct platform (temenos), make it possible to approximate the location of the Hadrianic temple. The sacred precinct was larger than any of the Christian churches that followed.

The 5th century Christian historian Socrates records the fantastic yarn that it was Helena herself, divinely directed, who ordered the destruction of the pagan temple. He relates that when the tomb was cleared of soil, three crosses were found within the sepulchre itself, complete with the nails and the inscription written by Pilate (presumably in the three languages of Luke 23.38)! Apparently, the correct cross was identified by its ability to cure a dying woman – although John Chrysostom was happy with the explanation that it was the "one in the middle", such is the awesome naivety of the pious imagination!

Church of the Holy Sepulchre – displacing Alexander

The building of Constantine's Church of the Anastasis (Resurrection) was a religio-political act of Christian triumphalism. The old gods were to be destroyed physically as well as ideologically. It suited the political and religious policies of the first Christian emperor to "find" the tomb of his saviour at the very centre of the city which he would style the New Jerusalem, facing the forlorn ruins of the old.

In particular, it was an ideologically imperative to displace the other tomb that honoured a "man made god" and held the mummified remains of the conqueror (and saviour) of the world. The tomb of Alexander the Great had drawn pilgrims from across the Hellenic world for more than five centuries. Emperors and Roman grandees had joined the throngs of local pilgrims that made the journey to Alexandria to catch a glimpse of a sepulchre of the "greatest man who had ever lived", fabulously adorned with gold and precious gems.

Augustus, after his defeat of Mark Antony, had Alexander's mummy removed from its sarcophagus and crowned the head with a golden diadem (Suetonius), in the process accidentally breaking off part of Alexander's nose (Dio Cassius). Caligula stole Alexander's breastplate for his "campaign" in Gaul, no doubt for its talismanic qualities. Caracalla draped Alexander's grave with his own imperial cloak (Herodian).

The shrine of Alexander, venerable and loved, was an intolerable affront to the new dogma of Christ and did not long survive Constantine's triumph. A superior, "authentic" tomb for Jesus was certainly not too much to ask and imperial engineers soon hacked away enough rock to satisfying their paymaster.

 

An entire district of Alexandria was named The Soma ("dead body") in honour of Alexander's tomb. By the end of the 4th century church patriarch John Chrysostom could boast that Alexander's tomb no longer existed – a victim of Christian iconoclasts and official disapproval. The so-called Sarcophagus of Alexander in Istanbul (left) is actually the ornate coffin of one of the king's Persian provincial governors. Even that is very impressive.

 

Despite the claims of Eusebius that the very fabric of the pagan temple, "polluted by demons", was carted far off, the more useful stones found their way into the new edifice, as recent excavations show (see below). Curiously, Eusebius failed to mention that not only the tomb of Jesus but Golgotha itself had been found by Constantine's builders. The reason is simple: the noble bishop remained convinced that Golgotha was in a different place entirely!

"Golgotha. 'Place of the skull' where the Christ was crucified. It is pointed out in Jerusalem north of Mount Zion." – Eusebius, Onomasticon, 365.

Melito of Sardis, the 2nd century bishop of Asia Minor, had been even more vague about the site of the crucifixion, describing it as taking place “in the middle of the street, in the middle of the city” (On Pascha). No green hill far away for this guy.

Luckily, fifty years after Eusebius had celebrated the unexpected discovery of JC's tomb, it was noticed that the site of the Lord's crucifixion had indeed moved from Mt Zion to a far more convenient spot within Constantine's big church. An outcrop of limestone, which had probably intruded innocently enough in the vicinity of the Temple of Venus, entered the Christian dreamscape as a place of sanctity and awe.

The reigning bishop, Cyril of Jerusalem (c.315-386) declared Golgotha to be the "mid-point of the earth" (Catechesis, 13.28). Even the ancient sockets that had held the cross were identified and, by some mysterious osmosis, had themselves become holy. It was Cyril who instituted a two-day observance which began each Easter Thursday. Passages from the Passion narratives were read aloud while the faithful solemnly followed a processional route from the Mount of Olives to Constantine's church. It was the origin of the Way of the Cross (the Via Dolorosa from the 16th century). In 417 Emperor Theodosius II had the large wooden cross mounted on Calvary replaced with one made of gold and precious stones.

The holiness just kept on growing.

The present, patched-up crusader church occupies less than half of the area of the 4th century Constantinian structure. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is sited on the central area of what was once Hadrian's sacred precinct.

A Crusader Fantasy

Adam too!

Constantine's showpiece did not survive the Muslim era. 12th century Crusaders built a smaller, cruder church on the ruins, but one not lacking a panoply of religious novelties and relics to entice and fleece intrepid pilgrims. For the knights of Christendom, Calvary turned out to be a remarkable "hill" indeed. Unbelievably, the tomb of Adam now emerged from beneath the slab of limestone called Golgotha. It seems that Adam – yes, the first man from Eden – was buried on the very same spot that Jesus was crucified! Origen seems to have floated this idea as early as the 3rd century (In Matth. 126) but now the "theology" gained a visible presence in the world.

As far as the Jews were concerned Adam's grave was in Hebron with the rest of the patriarchs. In the new "tradition", when Jesus died on the cross his blood trickled down to touch Adam's skull, and thereby redeemed the first sinner and hence all mankind.

“Under this rock the skull of the first man lay … the rock was opened above the skull of Adam and the Blood and Water which flowed from the side of Christ ran through this crack and washed away the sins of men.” 
– Fr. Daniel, Russian Abbot (c. 1106).

Should you doubt the veracity of this remarkable event be assured that the Holy Sepulchre theme park provides all the evidence that the pious mind might require. The tomb (or chapel) of Adam is actually hacked out of the rock below Golgotha (directly below the Greek Orthodox chapel) for all to see.

Authenticity is vouchsafed by a nifty little window which gives a view of the sacred limestone, complete with crack from the very moment "Jesus gave up the ghost" (or perhaps where a Crusader pickaxe missed its mark).