Christ's Burial Place Restoration

[Ubercat]

There's an episode of Expedition Unknown where they go to the church and are looking for remnants of the cross.  It's rather fascinating, and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is right in the middle of a major city area.

And from the episodes of Expedition Unknown that I've watched, I would guess they never find what they are looking for and only create more questions.  :P

Actually, they find what they're looking for, but are limited on what the guys at the church will let them do with it.

The episode on the Viking Sunstone is actually pretty excellent in what they find.

Wait, they found a piece of the "true cross" and I've never heard about it? Why isn't this being trumpeted all over the world?

[bbmike]

There's an episode of Expedition Unknown where they go to the church and are looking for remnants of the cross.  It's rather fascinating, and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is right in the middle of a major city area.

And from the episodes of Expedition Unknown that I've watched, I would guess they never find what they are looking for and only create more questions.  :P

Actually, they find what they're looking for, but are limited on what the guys at the church will let them do with it.

The episode on the Viking Sunstone is actually pretty excellent in what they find.

Even when don't find anything it's still interesting to get the background information on whatever they're after.

[bayonetbrant]

Wait, they found a piece of the "true cross" and I've never heard about it? Why isn't this being trumpeted all over the world?

they've found what the priests at the church claim is a piece of it, but they won't allow anyone to test it

[JasonPratt]

Also, even if it's real (or any of the other putative true cross fragments scattered around the world), it wasn't like it was lost. ;)

I'm rather more sceptical about the wood being from the cross, than the Church being built over the tomb. It's possible enough, but more likely to be wrong; the provenance question (tracing a historical continuity) seems a lot dicier to me.

That said, I do think it highly likely that there were relics of the crucifixion (and Resurrection) treasured and passed around for a while, whether or not any of them survive today: bloodied items would have been wrapped in the shroud with the body if possible, according to Jewish traditions of that time.

(Turin Shroud analysis, relatedly, strongly points to some other things having been wrapped in it at the foot. If it's a fake, those details are among a long line of crazy levels of verisimilitude that one wouldn't expect hoaxers to bother with, or even be likely to know to include, whether from the medieval period or late antiquity/dark age period: artistic provenance of a shroud of Christ matching the Turin Shroud characteristics can be traced back at least as far as the 700s, if I recall correctly, maybe farther into or back beyond the early Imperial Christian period.)

[JasonPratt]

The data collection has finished (a limit of 60 hours) and the site has been resealed; NatGeo provides an update: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/10/jesus-christ-tomb-burial-church-holy-sepulchre/ Interestingly, the article doesn't mention Helena, but rather Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, a Palestinian super-scholar familiar with the area and with the history of the area, who directed the Imperial representatives to Hadrian's temple which had been built over the prior veneration site.

(Eusebius, who would go on to write the most important of the earliest surviving histories of Christianity, was a disciple of Pamphilus of Caesarea, who had been the disciple of Origen Adamantius when Origen had been expelled by the Alexandrian bishop from Alexandria and welcomed into Palestine by the Jerusalem bishop. Together Pamphilus helped Origen create a new library at Caesarea Palestine to rival the famous Library of Alexandria to which Origen had contributed many books himself, as well as set up a new catechetical university. Origen, the first systematic Christian theologian and a progenitor of the principles of what would many centuries later become modern textual criticism, had been prized by the Roman Empire as the most learned man in history, before having every bone in his body broken during the Decian persecution, and may have contributed to the conversion of Philip the Arab, the first Christian Roman Emperor. Origen was the disciple of Titus Flavius Clemens of Alexandria, born and named after the cousin of Emperor Domition who served as Domition's consul and co-ruler of the Empire in the late 1st century before the original Clemens -- probably not to be confused with Clement of Rome, the second or third bishop succeeding Simon Peter -- was executed by his paranoid cousin, and his wife imprisoned in exile, for converting to "a Jewish superstition", typically a description for early Christianity among pagan elites. Clement of Alexandria was the disciple of Pantaneus who with his teacher founded the first Christian catechetical university, in Alexandria; Pantaneus' teacher was a disciple of John Mark, attributed as author of the Gospel According to Mark, who in his final years became the first bishop of Alexandria. John Mark in his youth served reportedly with both Paul of Tarsus and Simon Peter in their evangelical missions, and his mother owned an inn in Jerusalem frequented by Jesus' apostles; possibly also where Jesus held his final Passover celebration the night of his arrest. The line of tradition runs from Jesus --> Simon Peter (and Saul /Paul of Tarsus) --> John Mark --> Pantaneus' teacher (A'someone, I forget who at the moment) --> Pantaneus --> Clement of Alexandria --> Origen Adamantius --> Pamphilus --> Eusebius.)

Of course the restoration project itself still continues, and will for a while.

Next up will be a long and miniscule examination of the data; so far nothing jumps out as decisively identifying the tomb for being Jesus', but it certainly fits the profile: it's a Jewish tomb of the wealthy among other similar tombs, outside the early/mid 1st-century walls of Jerusalem, upon which has been demonstably built a Hadrian-era pagan temple, which was razed at the time of Eusebius after Constantine declared Christianity a legal religion, in order to expose the underlying tomb, and upon which several other layers of accretions (some protective) and destruction have accumulated. The team will be especially looking for primitive Christian graffiti below the level of Hadrian's desecration -- but the fact Hadrian (or his local governor) thought to convert a Jewish tomb to a pagan temple is highly curious in itself.