The Garden Tomb

The rock-hewn tomb in a garden near the place of crucifixion where Joseph of Arimathea laid Jesus' body on the evening of Good Friday (John 19:41-42) — a tomb "in which no one had ever yet been laid." On the first day of the week, the women find the great stone rolled away and the tomb empty, and angels announce the resurrection.

Two sites in Jerusalem compete for the historical location: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, venerated as the tomb since the fourth century and almost certainly the older claim, and the Garden Tomb just outside the Damascus Gate, identified in the 1880s. Both lie outside the first-century city walls, as Jewish burial custom required. The tomb's central meaning in scripture is not its address but its emptiness.