Archaeologists excavating beneath Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre say they’ve found something that lines up unusually well with the Bible: a first-century quarry that was later planted with olive trees and grapevines, and used for burials, right where Christian tradition has always placed Jesus’s tomb.
The
reported on Thursday that the dig, led by Francesca Romana Stasolla of Rome’s Sapienza University, has been running since 2022 as part of a restoration of the church’s floor and has continued through 2025. The findings appeared in a preliminary study in the Jerusalem archaeological journalLiber Annuus.
The Gospel of John places Jesus’s burial in a new tomb inside a garden near the crucifixion site, and Stasolla’s team says they’ve found cultivated ground and rock-cut tombs from around the right period sitting in the right place.
“We have found evidence of a funerary landscape,” she said. Speaking to the Times of Israel, she added: “The gospel mentions a green area between the Calvary and the tomb, and we identified these cultivated fields.”
None of this is a new location. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre has been venerated as the crucifixion and burial site since Constantine’s mother, Helena, identified it in the fourth century, and it remains the spot where six Christian denominations hold services today.
What’s new is archaeological support for the setting the Gospels describe: a quarry that had gone out of use and been overtaken by scrub and farmland by the time of Jesus’s death, roughly 33 CE, before it was pressed into service as a burial ground.
According to the Post’s report, one of the burial chambers was later boxed in by a Roman structure built under Hadrian in the second century. About two centuries after that, under Constantine, workers tore the Roman construction out, exposed the tomb, cut it off from the chambers around it, and built the first version of the church over it.
Stasolla’s team is still working through the marble tombs uncovered on the site, which they’ve linked to Joseph of Arimathea, the figure the Gospels credit with donating his own tomb for Jesus’s burial, and says geological testing on the marble and mortar is ongoing. As she put it: “We only have a part of the northern aisle left to excavate.”
None of this amounts to proof that a specific tomb belonged to Jesus, and Stasolla herself has been careful about that distinction. Her interest, as she’s described it elsewhere, is less about certifying a miracle than documenting why generations of people came to believe one happened there.
But for a site that’s drawn pilgrims on faith alone for seventeen centuries, having the dirt underneath it start to agree with the text is not nothing.
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