29/08/2026
A fascinating archaeological story is emerging from beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem — the site that Christian tradition has identified for almost 1,700 years as the place where Jesus was crucified, buried and resurrected.
Archaeologists working beneath the floor of the church have been uncovering traces of the ancient landscape that existed here roughly 2,000 years ago, around the time of Jesus.
What they are finding is particularly interesting.
The area appears to have once been a stone quarry that was later abandoned and gradually transformed into a burial and cultivated landscape. Archaeologists have identified rock-cut tombs, traces of agricultural activity and evidence of plants such as grapevines and olive trees.
And this is where the discovery becomes especially intriguing.
In the Gospel of John, the place where Jesus was crucified is described as being close to a garden, and within that garden there was said to be a new tomb cut into the rock.
The archaeological picture now emerging from underneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre fits remarkably well with that description: an area outside the ancient city walls, containing rock-cut tombs, cultivated ground and what appears to have been a garden-like landscape.
Of course, this does NOT mean that archaeologists have proven that Jesus was buried there.
There is no inscription saying “Jesus of Nazareth”, no object that can be directly connected to him and, realistically, archaeology may never be able to provide that kind of proof.
But the historical sequence of the site is fascinating in itself.
After the time of Jesus, the area changed dramatically. During the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrian in the 2nd century AD — the emperor who ruled not long after Trajan — the landscape was incorporated into the Roman city and covered by new constructions.
Then, in the 4th century, after Constantine the Great became the first Roman emperor to openly support Christianity, the site was transformed again.
According to the early Christian tradition, Constantine ordered the Roman structures in the area to be removed. One particular rock-cut tomb was isolated and turned into a Christian shrine. The enormous complex that eventually became the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was then constructed around it.
And that raises another fascinating historical question.
How did Christians in the 4th century know which tomb to identify, nearly 300 years after the crucifixion?
One possibility is that the location had remained part of the collective memory of Jerusalem's early Christian community, passed down across generations even after the Romans radically altered the area.
We cannot prove that today, but archaeology is now helping us reconstruct what the place actually looked like in the 1st century.
And so far, the evidence is striking.
From an archaeological point of view, the traditional location of Jesus' burial appears to fit surprisingly well with what we know about Jerusalem at the time and with several details preserved in the Gospel accounts.
That does not prove the biblical story.
But it does show that the setting described in those texts was entirely plausible — and that the place Christians began venerating in Late Antiquity was indeed part of a 1st-century burial landscape containing rock-cut tombs and cultivated land.
For a site that has been destroyed, rebuilt, transformed and visited by millions of people over almost two millennia, being able to reconstruct parts of its original landscape is remarkable in itself.
I’ll be following the archaeological research as it continues and will post more when new results are published.
