Garden Tomb

The Garden Tomb (Arabic: بستان قبر المسيح, romanized: Bustān Qabr al-Masīḥ, lit. 'the Garden of the Tomb of Christ'; Hebrew: גן הקבר, romanized: Gan ha-Kéver, lit. 'Garden of the Tomb') is an ancient rock-cut tomb surrounded by a garden, right outside the walls of ancient Jerusalem, that functions as a site of Christian pilgrimage attracting hundreds of thousands of annual visitors, especially Evangelicals and other Protestants, as some Protestant Christians consider it to be the empty tomb where Jesus of Nazareth resurrected. This is in contrast to an older tradition that locates the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus at a site roughly 600 metres (0.37 mi) to the south known as Golgotha and located within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The Garden Tomb and its surrounding gardens are adjacent to a rocky outcrop known as Skull Hill (Arabic: تلة الجمجمة, romanized: Tallat al-Jumjumah; Hebrew: גבעת הגולגולת, romanized: Giv'át ha-Gulgólet). In the mid-nineteenth century, some Christian scholars proposed that Skull Hill is Golgotha, where the Romans crucified Jesus. A few decades later, in 1867, the Garden Tomb was discovered and later proposed to be the tomb of Jesus.

More recently, 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 is likely to have been created in the 8th–7th centuries BCE. The Italian archeologist Riccardo 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 newly hewn tomb which Joseph of Arimathea made for himself (Matthew 27:57–60, John 19:41).

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. It was formed by a number of evangelical Anglicans from the Church of England in 1885. 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 for the gospel accounts and its function as a place of Christian worship. The site draws hundreds of thousands of annual pilgrims, especially evangelicals and other Protestants.