Whether this church covers the Golgotha of the crucifixion and the place of our Lord’s sepulture remains an open question. No subject within the range of sacred archæology presents greater difficulties, and none has been contested with a more brilliant display of acute argumentation and varied learning. Pre-eminently it is a question of two sides, and the contest is sometimes so evenly balanced that an assumed victory by the advocates of either theory is one of doubtful certainty. To argue against the supposition, one is forced to reason against his inclination to stand on the site of the Redeemer’s death and sit within the shadow of his tomb; to reject it is to leave the world without a substitute, and consign the remembrance of those grand events which it commemorates to the memory of man, without a knowledge of the scene of their occurrence; to deny the identity of the spot is to call in question the traditions of fifteen centuries, to which the Christians of Europe and of the East have fondly clung, and for which the brave have died; to accept it is to argue against the unbroken silence of three hundred years――against equivocal history――against topography――against analogy――against eminent scholarship――against the Bible. The argument for it is tradition and history; the proof against it is the Bible and topography.
Traditionally considered, the argument in its favor runs thus: Such was the popularity of Jesus, and such the publicity of his death, burial, and resurrection, as to stamp the place of their occurrence with imperishable memory; that the descent of the Holy Ghost, the conversion of three thousand, the early founding of his Church in the city of his rejection, and the maintenance of its unity for thirty-seven years, combined to cherish in the public mind the recollection of the place; that though, just previous to the siege of the Holy City by Titus, his followers fled to Pella, beyond the Jordan, it was but a temporary departure, and that, after the storm of war had spent its fury, they returned to the city of their choice; that the desolation of seventy years which followed the conquest of the Romans was partial, and that, while the more wealthy of the population were sold into captivity, many of the common people retained their humbler homes; that, from the year 130 A.D. to the present time, Jerusalem has been an inhabited city, and that the Emperor Hadrian rebuilt the city, and, to dishonor alike the Jew and Christian, he reared a fane in honor of Jupiter on the site of Solomon’s Temple, and covered the tomb of Jesus with a temple to Venus; and that this temple to Venus remained standing for two hundred years after its erection, and was seen by Eusebius in the year 326 A.D.