The Sanhedrin Tombs lie in the Sanhedria neighborhood of northern Jerusalem, on a low ridge that in the first century AD stood well outside the inhabited area of the city. The complex comprises more than sixty rock-cut burial chambers cut into the local meleke limestone, the most prominent of which contains seventy individual burial niches — kokhim — arranged in three superimposed chambers. The seventy-niche count gave rise to the medieval misidentification of the tomb with the Sanhedrin, the seventy-member Jewish high council that interrogated Jesus in Matthew 26 and Mark 15 and presided over the early apostolic trials in Acts 4–5. The neighborhood and the public park preserve the misnomer. The actual occupants were a wealthy Jerusalem priestly-aristocratic family of the late Second Temple period — first century BC through the destruction of the city in AD 70 — not the council itself. The complex was excavated by L. Y. Rahmani for the Israel Antiquities Authority between 1958 and 1962, and Rahmani's resulting Catalogue of Jewish Ossuaries in the Collections of the State of Israel (1994) became the standard work on first-century Jerusalem ossuary practice, cataloguing the secondary-burial bone-boxes used in Jewish Jerusalem during exactly the period of the Gospels and the early Acts. Several ossuaries from the Sanhedria complex bear inscribed names in Hebrew and Aramaic — though none securely matches a New Testament figure, contrary to occasional popular claims. The architectural ornament of the largest tomb — its triangular pediment carved with acanthus and citron, its decorated lintel — is among the finest first-century funerary stonework surviving in the Jerusalem region. Avraham Negev's surveys established the tombs' place within the broader Second Temple necropolis. The site is currently Sanhedria Park, freely accessible as a Jerusalem municipal heritage site, with the largest tomb open to visitors. Sources: L. Y. Rahmani, A Catalogue of Jewish Ossuaries in the Collections of the State of Israel (Israel Antiquities Authority, 1994); L. Y. Rahmani, "Ancient Jerusalem's Funerary Customs and Tombs" (Biblical Archaeologist 44, 1981); Avraham Negev, Archaeological Encyclopedia of the Holy Land (Continuum, 2001); Boaz Zissu, "Necropolis of Jerusalem in the Second Temple Period" (PhD dissertation, Hebrew University, 2001).
The complex anchors Rahmani's foundational 1994 ossuary catalogue, the primary reference for secondary-burial practice in first-century-AD Jerusalem — the precise milieu of the Gospels and Acts. Its decorated priestly-family chambers also illustrate the elite funerary culture surrounding figures named in the New Testament passion and apostolic narratives.