Church of The Holy Sepulchre - Location

Location

The Bible describes Jesus' tomb as being outside the city wall, as was normal for burials across the ancient world, which were regarded as unclean, but the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is in the heart of Hadrian's city, well within the Old City walls, which were built by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in 1538 Some have claimed that the city had been much narrower in Jesus' time, with the site then having been outside the walls; since Herod Agrippa (41–44) is recorded by history as extending the city to the north (beyond the present northern walls), the required repositioning of the western wall is traditionally attributed to him as well.

However, a wall would imply the existence of a defensive ditch outside it, so an earlier wall could not be immediately adjacent to site of the tomb, which combined with the presence of the Temple Mount would make the city inside the wall quite thin; essentially for the traditional site to have been outside the wall, the city would have had to be limited to the lower parts of the Tyropoeon Valley, rather than including the defensively advantageous western hill. Since these geographic considerations imply that, not including the hill within, the walls would be willfully making the city prone to attack from it, some scholars, including the late 19th century surveyors of the Palestine Exploration Fund, consider it unlikely that a wall would ever have been built that would cut the hill off from the city in the valley; archaeological evidence for the existence of an earlier city wall in such a location has never been found. The area immediately to the south and east of the sepulchre was a quarry and outside the city during the early 1st century as excavations under the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer across the street demonstrated. This obviated the need for a defensive ditch or fosse since the line of the city wall would follow the south lip of the quarry. The quarry and tombs associated with it are north, not west of the main city and west only of the merchant area in the Tyropoeon Valley, which was enclosed by the Second Wall.

Although, in 2007, Dan Bahat stated that Six graves from the first century were found on the area of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. That means, this place outside of the city, without any doubt, ...., the dating of the tombs is based on the fact that they are in the kokh style, which was common in 1st century; however, the kokh style of tomb was also common in the first to 3rd centuries BC.

The likelihood of a 1st century tomb being built to the west of the city is questionable, as according to the late 1st century rabbinic leader, Akiva ben Joseph, quoted in the Mishnah, tombs should not built to the west of the city, as the wind in Jerusalem generally blows from the west, and would blow the smell of the corpses and their impurity over the city, and the Temple Mount. Additionally, the Aedicule would be quite close to the city even the west wall of the city had been to its east; yet Akiba remarks that Jewish law insists that tombs should not be built within 50 cubits of a city. The archaeological record indicates that the instructions reported by Akiba, for choosing a burial location, were rigidly adhered to; almost all of the tombs from classical Jerusalem are to the east of the city, on the Mount of Olives, except for a few located over a kilometre to the west, and those in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

One might note, however, that what is assumed to be a niche for the Torah scroll in the building probably originally built as a Judeo-Christian synagogue between AD 70 and AD 135 on the traditional site of the Cenacle or upper room of the Last Supper and now identified as the site of the King David's Tomb is oriented not towards the Temple Mount, but towards the site of the Holy Sepulchre, which would seem to indicate that the Christian community that had built it had already began to transfer many of the religious traditions originally associated with the Temple to the sites they associated with Christ's death and resurrection (such as the burial place of Adam and the centre of the world).