Can you visualize peering into the tomb where Jesus’ body was set? Well archaeologists did that.
For a sixty-hour period commencing on October 26th, researchers had unprecedented use of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the site long -venerated as the place where Joseph of Arimathea placed Jesus’ body on Good Friday.
{Then on October 28th, the grave was resealed and may well not be re opened until, as the Nicene Creed says, He comes again in glory to judge the living and the deceased.
Some history: As stated by the historian Eusebius of Caesarea, about 100 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, the Roman emperor Hadrian, had a temple dedicated to the goddess Aphrodite constructed over the site of Jesus’ tomb. This wasn’t by accident.
Two centuries after, the emperor Constantine had the pagan temple demolished and in the process, found what was considered to function as the tomb of Jesus. Constantine ordered a church to be built around the grave.
The church we see in the site today is just not the first. It had been mended http://www.jesusis.com/news/ but later demolished with a Fatimid caliph in the first eleventh century and then rebuilt and damaged again, so forth etc.
Yet the pilgrims kept coming, so much so that in the 16th century the burial bed in the tomb was covered in marble to keep folks from taking home souvenirs{, as part of an effort to prevent the defilement of the tomb of Jesus Chirst…
Noelles Thoughts And Feelings 