The line forms early in the morning inside a vast dim church in the old city of Jerusalem.
Pilgrims from every corner of the world wait for an hour, sometimes much longer, holding candles, murmuring prayers in a dozen languages.
At the front of the line stands a small shrine of reddish stone under a great dome.
One by one, the pilgrims stoop through its low doorway into a room so small that only a handful of people fit inside at once.
There they kneel and kiss a slab of marble.
They’ve been told that beneath it is the place where the body of Jesus was laid.
For centuries, nobody could say what was actually under that marble.
The slab had been in place since at least 1555.
Some believed the original tomb had been completely destroyed a thousand years ago and that the shrine sat over nothing at all.
Then one October night, the church was closed, the doors were locked, and a team of scientists lifted the slab.
What they saw over the next 60 hours left one of the archaeologists present, saying his knees were shaking.
That was only the first discovery.
Last month, archaeologists finished digging beneath the floor of the church around that shrine.
Deep in the soil, they found traces of something the Gospel of John mentions in a single line.
I’d read about this church for years before I learned that anyone had looked under that slab.
Stay with me and you’ll see what was down there and the date a laboratory in Greece put on it.
The Gospel of Matthew describes the burial in a few careful lines.
After the crucifixion, a rich man named Joseph from the town of Arythea asked Pontius Pilate for the body.
He wrapped it in linen and laid it in his own new tomb which he had hewned out in the rock.
Then he rolled a great stone to the door of the sephiler and departed.
The gospel of John adds a detail the others leave out.
Now in the place where he was crucified, there was a garden, John writes, and in the garden a new sephiler wherein was never man yet laid.
And when the disciples ran to the tomb on the first day of the week, one of them, John says, stooped down and looked in and saw the linen clothes lying.
That’s the account.
For a long time, it seemed to clash with the place that tradition points to.
The shrine stands inside a great church in the middle of the walled old city, surrounded by streets and shops.
It’s hard to imagine anything less like a garden outside a city wall.
Skeptics asked a simple question.
Where was the garden?
The answer begins with the city walls themselves.
In the time of Jesus, this area lay outside them.
Archaeologists have found that it was a limestone quarry and that by the first century, Jewish families were cutting tombs into the old quarry faces.
You can still see one of those tombs today.
In a small dark chapel at the back of the church, a few steps from the shrine, there’s a first century Jewish burial cave.
Long narrow niches for the dead are cut into its rock.
Tradition calls it the tomb of Joseph of Arythea.
Nobody can prove that, but it shows clearly that this was a Jewish burial ground in Jesus’ day.
Even the stone at the door has a story.
The Israeli archaeologist Amos Cloner examined more than 900 burial caves from that period around Jerusalem.
[snorts] Most were closed with square blocks of stone.
Only four had the large roundstones that could be rolled across the entrance.
Roundstones were rare and costly, and the Gospel of Matthew calls Joseph a rich man.
Cloner himself thought this tomb was more likely closed with a square block and scholars still debate it.
A century after the crucifixion, Jerusalem was rebuilt as a Roman city by the emperor Hadrien.
Around the year 135, the old quarry was filled in and leveled and a pagan temple was built over the site.
The 4th century bishop and historian Ucius wrote that it was a shrine to the goddess the Romans called Venus.
Then about 200 years after Hadrien, the first Christian emperor, Constantine, ordered that temple torn down, describes what happened next.
The ground itself was dug up to a considerable depth.
And then he writes, “Contrary to all expectation, the venerable and hallowed monument of our Savior’s resurrection was discovered.
Constantine’s builders did something remarkable with it.
They cut away the hillside all around the tomb, leaving the burial chamber standing free like a little house of rock.
They wrapped it in a small column shrine and built a great church around it.
The church was consecrated in the year 335.
Why this particular tomb out of all the old tombs in that quarry?
The Oxford archaeologist Martin Bidd who spent years studying it put it frankly.
Uczeius doesn’t say,” he noted, and we don’t know.
Perhaps the local Christian community had kept the memory alive.
Perhaps the very temple Hadrien built over it marked the spot.”
Over the following centuries, the tomb suffered almost everything a building can suffer.
Persian troops burned the church in the year 614.
An earthquake shook it.
In 1009, the Fatimid Calipal Hakeim ordered the church destroyed and his men smashed the tomb.
The church was rebuilt in the 11th century and again by the crusaders in the 12th.
By the 16th century, the burial place had been covered with marble, partly to stop pilgrims from chipping off pieces as souvenirs.
In 1808, a fire brought down the great dome, and the shrine over the tomb was rebuilt in 1809 and 1810.
That’s the shrine pilgrims still stoop into today.
There’s another complication, and it’s a human one.
The church is shared under an arrangement fixed by Ottoman decrees in the 1700s and 1800s known simply as the status quo.
Three communities hold the main rights.
The Greek Orthodox, the Roman Catholics through the Franciscans, and the Armenians, [music] with smaller rights held by the Coptic, Ethiopian, and Syriak churches.
Nothing important can change without agreement.
[music] Above one of the church’s entrances, a wooden ladder has leaned against a window ledge since at least the 1700s.
It’s called the immovable ladder because no one community has the right to take it down.
By a tradition about 800 years old, one Muslim family keeps the key to the front door.
Every morning, a member of another Muslim family unlocks the church with it.
That arrangement explains what happened next.
In 1927, a strong earthquake damaged the shrine over the tomb.
The communities couldn’t agree on how to repair it.
So, in 1947, the British authorities who then govern Jerusalem wrapped it in a cage of iron girders to keep it from falling down.
The girders were meant to be temporary.
They stayed for 70 years.
They were still there, rusting [music] on the October night the marble came up.
By 2015, the shrine was in such bad shape that the Israeli authorities briefly closed it as unsafe.
In March 2016, something rare happened.
The leaders of the three main communities signed an agreement to restore it together.
The work went to a team of more than 50 specialists from the National Technical University of Athens, led by Professor Antonio Moropu.
The churches, the World Monuments Fund, and private donors, among them, King Abdullah II of Jordan, shared a cost of roughly three half to$4 million.
The team scanned the shrine with ground penetrating radar.
They reinforced its bowing walls and anchored its columns with titanium rods.
On the night of October 26th, 2016, with the church closed to the public, they lifted the marble slab that pilgrims had been kissing for centuries.
At first, all they found under the slab was loose fill, rubble, and debris.
They kept going, working around the clock.
Beneath the fill, they came to a second slab of marble.
It was broken and carved into its surface was a cross.
Some researchers think it was laid by the crusaders.
Others think it may be even older, already in place, and already broken before the destruction of 1009.
Then they lifted that, too.
By the night of October 28th, they were looking at bare limestone, a long shelf cut into the side of the cave.
The original burial bed still intact.
They confirmed something else as well.
The walls of the original rock cut cave were still standing, hidden inside the 19th century shrine.
In 1009, Alhakeim’s men had done terrible damage, but they hadn’t erased the tomb.
Frederick Heert, the archaeologist and residence at National Geographic, [music] which was documenting the work, was inside.
“I’m absolutely amazed,” [music] he said.
“My knees are shaking a little bit because I wasn’t expecting this.”
Then he chose his words carefully.
“We can’t say 100%,” he said, but it appears to be visible proof that the location of the tomb has not shifted through time.
Professor Moropu put it in a single sentence.
This is the holy rock that has been revered for centuries, but only now can actually be seen.
After about 60 hours, the burial bed was sealed again.
The team also cut a small window into one wall of the shrine so that pilgrims can now see a piece of the original rock for themselves.
There were stories that night, too.
Reports later circulated that workers noticed a sweet fragrance and that instruments behaved oddly near the tomb.
None of the scientists involved confirmed them.
What the team did carry out of the tomb that week was a handful of small samples.
Between the original burial bed and the cross-carved slab lay a layer of mortar, the material used to set the marble in place.
If that mortar could be dated, it would show when someone covered this rock and honored it as a tomb.
[music] The team sent samples to two separate laboratories in Greece.
They used a method called optically stimulated luminescence, which measures the last time tiny grains of quartz in the mortar were exposed to sunlight.
In November 2017, [music] the results were announced.
The mortar dated to around the year 345.
Before these tests, the oldest architectural evidence anyone could point to inside the tomb was from the crusader period, less than a thousand years old.
Now, the mortar went back to the time of Constantine, within a generation of the moment Ucius describes.
Another sample from the cave wall gave a date of 335 and the entrance dated to the 11th century, the rebuilding after al-Hakim.
Martin Bidd, who had long studied the tomb, [music] said the date was spoton for whatever Constantine did.
That’s very remarkable, he added.
[music] Here is what that date means.
The rock that pilgrims kneel over today is the same rock Constantine’s [music] builders enshrined in the 4th century.
In all the burnings and earthquakes since, the place never moved.
It doesn’t mean the lab dated the burial of Jesus.
Mortar can only show when someone built something around the tomb.
The archaeologist Jodie Magnus, who wasn’t part of the team, said it plainly.
This does not, of course, prove that the event was historical.
In February 2017, the British girders were finally cut away.
In March, the restoration was finished, and at a ceremony attended by leaders of the different churches, the shrine was rededicated.
But the team had found something that worried them.
Beneath the shrine and the great columns around it, the ground was full of old rubble, tunnels, and drainage channels.
Some of the 22-tonon pillars of the rotunda stood on more than 4 ft of loose fill.
When it fails, Moropu warned the failure will not be a slow process, but catastrophic.
The communities agreed to go further and to restore the floor of the whole church.
That meant digging under it.
In 2022, a team from St.
Pienza University of Rome, led by the archaeologist Francesca Romanosa, began to lift the floor.
They worked one section at a time so the church could stay open for pilgrims.
Some of it ran through the night.
Some of what they found was the kind of thing archaeologists hope for.
Two bricks stamped by the 10th Legion, the Roman legion that garrisoned Jerusalem.
In front of the shrine, in a dig that ran for seven days and seven nights, they uncovered two white marble steps.
Coins under the paving, the latest from the reign of the emperor Valins, who died in the year 378, show that pilgrims climbed those steps to the tomb at the end of the 4th century.
A fragment of old cladding scratched with graffiti from the 1700s in Greek, Latin, [music] and Armenian.
And beneath the shrine itself, a circular marble base that the team thinks may have belonged to Constantine’s original monument.
They’re careful to call that a possibility.
Stissola’s team also had something to say about one of the most beloved spots in the church.
Just inside the entrance, pilgrims kneel at a long flat stone called the stone of anointing, where tradition says the body was prepared for burial.
The stone there now is much later than the first century, [music] and the tradition behind it goes back to the Middle Ages.
For many believers, it remains a place of prayer all the same.
Stala thinks the body was more likely prepared in the small antichamber of the tomb itself, the room pilgrims pass through today, just before they stoop into the burial chamber.
But the finding that drew the world’s attention came from the soil itself.
[music] The team took samples from the layers beneath the church, layers older than Constantine, and sent them for archaobotanical study, the analysis of ancient seeds, wood, and [music] pollen.
In those deep layers, they found the remains of olive trees and grape vines.
[music] They also found traces of figs and cereals.
There were also low stone walls dividing the ground into small plots.
Before this was a church, before it was a Roman temple, this part of the old quarry had been cultivated.
Professor Stissola explained why that mattered to her team.
The Gospel of John, she said, mentions a green area between Calvary and the tomb.
And we identified these cultivated fields.
John’s words again.
In the place where he was crucified, there was a garden, and in the garden, a new seeler.
There’s an echo from the 4th century 2.
Around the year 350, Sirill, the bishop of Jerusalem, preached to new believers inside Constantine’s church.
It was a garden where he was crucified, Sirill told them.
Though it has now been most highly adorned with royal gifts, yet formerly it was a garden.
In late August of this year, the findings went around the world again.
This time with some headlines claiming the plants had been dated to the year 33.
They hadn’t.
The scientists had found a pre-Christian garden landscape with tombs [music] nearby.
They had not dated any plant to the time of the crucifixion, and they had found no inscription and no human remains.
Stala described what they had found in her own words, evidence of aerary landscape alongside small areas planted with vines and olive trees.
[music] In September, the archaeological digging was reported complete, and the first volume of the project’s official publication, more than 500 pages long, was presented in Jerusalem.
The Greek Orthodox Patriarch, the head of the Franciscans, and representatives of the Armenian Patriarch were all there.
The restoration itself continues.
About a third of the new floor has been laid, and the church’s great wooden doors, last repaired in 1810, [music] have been taken down to be restored.
This spring, for security reasons, the church was closed for several weeks, and at the holy fire ceremony, only about 50 people were allowed inside a building that is normally packed to the walls.
Not everyone accepts this church as the place of the burial, and it’s worth being fair to the alternatives.
Many Protestant visitors love the Garden Tomb, a peaceful rock cut tomb in a garden just north of the old city walls.
It’s a beautiful place to picture the scene, but the archaeologist Gabriel Barquay dated it to the age of the kings of Judah, many centuries before Jesus.
The association that cares for it doesn’t claim it is the authentic tomb, and many still find it a moving place to [music] pray.
In 2007, a television documentary claimed another tomb in Jerusalem had held the family of Jesus.
Amos Cloner, the archaeologist who had excavated that tomb, called the claim nonsense.
The former Jerusalem city archaeologist Dan Bahhat summed up the view of many.
We may not be absolutely certain that the site of the Holy Sephilic Church is the site of Jesus’ burial.
He said he also said that no other site has a comparably strong claim.
Professor Stissola, who led the excavations under the floor, went further in her caution.
[music] Using archaeology to prove faith, she said, does a disservice both to faith and to history.
[music] Scientific research provides data.
Interpretation comes afterward.
What in the end have the scientists found?
Before 2016, it was possible to believe that the tomb inside this church had been destroyed long ago [music] and that pilgrims were kneeling over empty fill and later marble.
That can no longer be said.
The original burial bed and the walls of the cave are still there.
Mortar beneath the marble was laid in the time of Constantine, so the place has not moved in more than 16 centuries.
[music] Beneath the floor lies the old quarry outside the city wall.
Jewish tombs were cut into its faces, and in the soil below the church are the remains of vines and olive trees from before Constantine’s time.
Nobody has dated a single vine to the spring of the crucifixion.
Still, a planted plot beside a burial ground is what John’s one line would lead you to look for.
Martin Bidd’s question still stands.
[music] Why this tomb out of all the others in the quarry?
The new evidence doesn’t answer it.
It does show that whatever memory Constantine’s builders followed, it led them to a quarry with tombs and small planted plots outside the old wall.
That is the kind of place the Gospel of John describes.
What none of it can do is tell us who was laid on that shelf of rock or what happened there early on the first day of the week.
The mortar has a date.
Now, the meaning of the empty tomb was never something a laboratory was asked to measure.
[music] John leaves that with his reader and the archaeologists by their own account leave it there too.
This year the great doors of the church have been away for restoration [music] and temporary panels show photographs of them.
Still every morning the Muslim families who keep the key open the church as they have for centuries.
The line forms again.
One by one the pilgrims bend down to pass through the low doorway the way John says a disciple once stooped down and looked in.
[music] And beneath the marble they kiss, scientists now know the rock is still there.
If that marble is ever lifted again, what one question would you want the scientists to answer?
[music] Write it in the comments.
I read them all.
