Most scholars believe the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is built on top of Golgotha. Archaeologist Dr. Dan Bahat
is quoted as follows:
The early Christian community of Jerusalem
appears to have held liturgical celebrations at Christ's tomb from the time of the resurrection until the city was taken by the Romans in 66 AD. Less than a century later, in 135 AD,
Emperor Hadrian filled in the quarry to provide a level foundation for a temple to Aphrodite. The site remained buried beneath the pagan temple
until Emperor Constantine the Great
converted to Christianity in 312 AD. He soon showed an interest in the holy places associated with his new faith, and commissioned numerous churches to be built throughout the Holy Land.
The most important of these, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, was begun in 326 AD. Constantine's builders dug away the hillside to leave the rock-hewn tomb of Christ isolated and
with enough room to built a church around it. They also cleared away Hadrian's temple and the material with which an old quarry had been filled to provide the temple's foundations.
In the process, according to contemporary Christian historians, the Rock of Golgotha was found. The Church was formally dedicated in 335 with an oration by Constantine's biographer,
Eusebius of Caesarea.
After defeating Jewish forces in the
Bar Kokhba revolt of ~130 CE, Roman Emperor Hadrian took drastic measures to prevent
future rebellions (the Bar Kokhba revolt was the third Jewish revolt against Rome in the previous 60 years). He banned Jews from the city of Jerusalem, rebuilt the city, and renamed it
Aelia Capitolina. He also apparently sought to wipe out places of Jewish and Christian religious
practices in the city by building Rome sanctioned Temples dedicated to pagan Gods on top of the holiest site for Jews (Temple Mount) and the holiest site for Christians (Golgotha) thus marking the location of
these sites approximately 100 years after Jesus' death. Although Golgotha was "identified" by Constantine's builders and his mother
Helena approximately 300 years after Jesus' death, the site had apparently
been marked by Hadrian's efforts 200 years prior. Subsequent building work on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre uncovered corroborating evidence of rock cut tombs under the Roman Temple at the site.
More recent archaeological work has confirmed the presence of tombs cut in the first century BCE and the first century CE surrounding the site and that the site
was just outside the city walls at the time of Jesus' death. Numerous writers have interpreted
Gospel accounts (e.g.
John 19:17) and Jewish customs of cleanliness and uncleanliness to indicate that
Golgotha would have been outside the city walls.
