The Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands in the Christian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, west of the Cardo, on the site identified by Helena — the mother of Constantine — during her pilgrimage of around AD 326. The Constantinian builders cleared a pagan temple of Hadrianic date that had stood on the spot since AD 135 and excavated down to a first-century quarry-and-tomb area outside the line of the city wall in the time of Jesus. The bedrock of Calvary was preserved within the basilica's south transept; the rock-cut tomb was isolated as a freestanding edicule under a great rotunda. Eusebius, who was present at the dedication, describes the discovery and the building program in his Life of Constantine. The Bordeaux Pilgrim, visiting in AD 333, describes the basilica already in use. The edicule has been rebuilt repeatedly across the centuries — destroyed by fire in 1808 and reconstructed in 1810 in the present Ottoman-period form. In 2016–17 an interdisciplinary conservation team led by Antonia Moropoulou of the National Technical University of Athens dismantled the marble cladding for the first time in centuries. Beneath the cladding, the team confirmed the limestone burial bench cut from the living bedrock — the rock-cut surface on which a body would have been laid in a first-century Jewish tomb of the kokhim type. The find resolved the decades of dispute over whether anything original remained beneath the medieval and Ottoman fabric. Six Christian communities share custody under the Status Quo agreement of 1852: the Greek Orthodox, Latin Catholic, Armenian Apostolic, Coptic Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox, and Ethiopian Orthodox patriarchates. The Joudeh and Nuseibeh Muslim families have held the keys to the church door since the medieval period as a neutral arrangement among the six. Continuous Christian veneration of the site is documented from Eusebius's Onomasticon and the Bordeaux Pilgrim of AD 333 through to the conservation team that closed up the edicule in March 2017. Sources: Martin Biddle, The Tomb of Christ (Sutton, 1999); Joan Taylor, "Golgotha: A Reconsideration of the Evidence for the Sites of Jesus' Crucifixion and Burial" (New Testament Studies 44, 1998); Eusebius, Onomasticon and Life of Constantine 3.25–40; Egeria, Itinerarium (c. AD 384), ed. Wilkinson; Antonia Moropoulou et al., "Five-Dimensional (5D) Modelling of the Holy Aedicule" (Journal of Cultural Heritage 32, 2018).
The 2016–17 conservation confirmed that original first-century bedrock survives beneath the edicule's later cladding, grounding the site in archaeologically verifiable stratigraphy. Combined with Hadrianic and Constantinian building sequences and continuous documentary attestation from AD 333, the church supplies the earliest datable physical context for New Testament crucifixion and burial traditions.