Garden Tomb

Garden Tomb

The Garden Tomb (Arabic: بستان قبر المسيح, Hebrew: גן הקבר, literally "the Tomb Garden") is a Christian pilgrimage site in Jerusalem that contains an ancient tomb, also named the Garden Tomb, considered by some Protestants to be the empty tomb whence Jesus of Nazareth resurrected. This belief contrasts with an older tradition according to which the death and resurrection of Jesus occurred at a site known as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The Garden Tomb is adjacent to a rocky knoll known as Skull Hill. In the mid-nineteenth century, some Christian scholars proposed that Skull Hill is Golgotha, where the Romans crucified Jesus. Accordingly, the Garden Tomb draws hundreds of thousands of annual visitors, especially Evangelicals and other Protestants.The organization that owns and maintains the Garden Tomb is a non-denominational charitable trust based in the United Kingdom named The Garden Tomb (Jerusalem) Association, a member of the Evangelical Alliance of Israel and the World Evangelical Alliance. The association refrains from claiming that the Garden Tomb is the authentic tomb of Jesus, and instead emphasizes the site's utility as a visual aid because of certain similarities to the biblical descriptions of Golgotha and the empty tomb.The rock-cut tomb was unearthed in 1867. The Israeli archaeologist Gabriel Barkay points out that the tomb does not contain any features indicative of the 1st century CE, when Jesus was buried, and argues that the tomb was likely created in the 8th–7th centuries BCE. The Italian archeologist Ricardo Lufrani argues instead that it should be dated to the Hellenistic era, the 4th–2nd centuries BCE. The re-use of old tombs was not an uncommon practice in ancient times, but this would seem to contradict the biblical text that speaks of a new, not reused, tomb made for himself by Joseph of Arimathea (Matthew 27:57–60, John 19:41).

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