Archaeologists have announced the discovery of a garden referred to in the New Testament. Archaeologists were digging beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre when they discovered evidence of the presence of olive trees and grapevines from around 2,000 years ago. The archaeologists were led by Professor Francesca Romana Stasolla of Sapienza University of Rome, with the excavation having begun in 2022 as part of a renovation of the church. The garden is reminiscent of a garden described in John 19:19-20: “Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulcher, wherein was never man yet laid. There laid they Jesus.”

“We know that the area was already part of the city at the time of Emperor Hadrian when the Romans built Aelia Capitolina. However, at the time of Jesus, the area was not part of the city yet,” said Professor Stasolla. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is supposed to be at the site of the crucifixion and Jesus’s tomb. The garden is the location of the tomb, described as belonging to Joseph of Arimathea according to the other books of the Gospel. The site’s history makes it extremely significant to the Christian population in the area and can make such excavations difficult to attain in order to protect the Sepulchre. “Low stone walls were erected, and the space between them was filled with dirt. The archaeobotanical findings have been especially interesting for us, in light of what is mentioned in the Gospel of John, whose information is considered written or collected by someone familiar with Jerusalem at the time. The Gospel mentions a green area between the Calvary and the tomb, and we identified these cultivated fields.”

The renovation project allowed excavation project’s like Stasolla’s to take place. The area“With the renovation works, the religious communities decided to also allow archaeological excavations under the floor. However, at the moment, we do not have any digging area open, as the church is getting ready for Easter, when it needs to be fully accessible by pilgrims,” Stasolla said. “While we have not been able to see the entire church excavated in one glance, new technologies are allowing us to reconstruct the bigger picture in our labs,” Stasolla said. “If we were talking about a puzzle, we could say we are only excavating one piece at a time, but eventually, we will have a complete multimedia reconstruction of the full picture.”