Ben C Smith

You have so far produced one (presumably) checked source. Does one checked source establish a consensus?

Ben.

ETA: Toto added another source, but one less certain as to the conclusion. No competing site is not the same as this is surely the one.

RareBird

No. Ulysses S. Grant was.

xunzian

What do you mean "one" source. We have the entirety of Christian tradition, for one, as well as archaeologists backing that one up. Can you show me some archaeologists that have suggested that the CotHS isn't Jesus's tomb? There is the Garden tomb, but the assumptions that led to it being selected aren't terribly sound.

Ben C Smith

Surely a simple slip for no corroborating evidence.

Ben.

Minimalist

The church was built on a spot located by Constantine's mother on her tour to find all these holy places centuries later....completely ignoring the fact that the Roman army had twice burned the whole goddamn country to the ground in the interim and that "Jerusalem" itself had been levelled and rebuilt as Aelia Capitolina by Hadrian.

Really. If the emperor's mother shows up wanting to know where the tomb was are you, as a junior officer, going to tell her that it doesn't exist or are you going to say "yes, ma'am....it's right over here!"

Ben C Smith

I doubt that you, as junior officer, are going to provide information that you invented right there on the spot.

I do think there is reason to believe that the site was at one time a real tomb. It seems unlikely that a site inside the current walls of Jerusalem (current, that is, in century IV) would be selected for no reason at all other than to provide a holy place, since burials occurred outside the city. I bet a real tomb from century I or before (since the city grew up around the site sometime in the middle of century I, I think) was in fact discovered and was (probably mis)identified as having once held the Lord himself.

Ben.

Zenaphobe

I just finished reading The burial of Jesus in Light of Jewish Law (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Richard Carrier and if I understand it correctly his argument is,

If Jesus had died on the first day of Passover (Friday) and it was forbidden to bury on the first day of a festival, Jesus could not be buried until Saturday night after the Sabbath. Wouldn't it fit the situation for Jesus to be temporarily interred until he could be properly buried in the proper criminal graveyard?

So, Joseph's tomb could have been the temporary holding place until Joseph had him properly buried Saturday night and the women come and find an empty tomb on Sunday morning.

It seems a reasonable theory that this is how a resurrection story could get started and grow from there.

Johnny Skeptic

The texts say that the only people who saw Jesus' body put in Joseph's tomb were Mary Magdalene, another woman, Joseph, and a helper. Other than the supposed guards, the only way that anyone else could have known about where the body was buried would have been if one of those four people told other people that the body had been put in Joseph's tomb. What evidence is there that any of those four people told other people that the doby had been put in Joseph's tomb?

If the body was moved, which Richard Carrier and other skeptics believe is plausible, obviously, it does not matter where it was originally put.

In Lee Strobel's 'The Case For Christ,' after elaborating at length regarding where the body was buried, William Lane Craig basically concludes by saying that since there is sufficient evidence that Jesus rose from the dead, it does not matter very much where his body was put.

Back then, if God had really wanted most people to believe that Jesus rose from the dead, he would not have had any trouble doing that. Such being the case, it is reasonable to assume that he is not trying to accomplish that now.

Amaleq13

Father Murphy is only a single scholar and I would be surprised if the claim made in this travel book published by Oxford has the endorsement of the Oxford history department.

Citing a travel book published by Oxford is certainly not the same as citing scholars from "one of the foremost academic institutions in the world".

To my knowledge there is no credible evidence that this tomb was venerated prior to the 4th century. It was "discovered" when such discoveries were popular and profitable. It really isn't any more credible than the multiple foreskins of the baby Jesus or multiple slivers of the "true cross" that were making the rounds.

Ben C Smith

Granted a choice between an old shriveled up foreskin and a sliver of the true cross... give me the sliver every time.

Ben.