In 1983, General Gordon, a British general stationed in Palestine, was sitting on the verandah of his home in Jerusalem. Studying the terrain, he was impressed by the limestone hill adjacent to a Moslem cemetery just across the Kidron Valley on the Mount of Olives. The more he looked at this promontory, the more he thought it resembled a skull. Gordon remembered that Jesus was crucified at Golgotha, or the place of the skull. "Could this be the very place?" he asked himself.
Gordon began to investigate. He also discovered nearby a first-century tomb–which he thought could have been the one belonging to Joseph of Arimathea where the body of Jesus was placed. Gordon was killed in military action shortly thereafter, but his interest in the place began a movement that eventually led a British group to purchase the site known today as the lovely Garden Tomb.
General Gordon believed the site known today as the Church of the Holy Sepulcher to be within the walls of the ancient city. Yet Scripture made it clear that Golgotha was outside the walls of Jerusalem, conforming to both tradition and Mosaic law. Gordon hoped he had found the true burial site.
What he didn’t live long enough to discover was that later archaeological discoveries found that the traditional site was in Jesus’ day outside the walls of the ancient city.
Over the centuries, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher accumulated an unbelievable number of incense pots, icons, and miscellaneous paraphernalia. When he visited the site in 1869, Mark Twain wrote, "When one stands where the Savior was crucified, he finds that all he can do is to keep it strictly before his mind that Christ was not crucified in a Catholic Church. He must remind himself that the great event transpired in the open air, and not in a gloomy candelighted cell, upstairs, all bejeweled and bespangled with flashy ornamentation."
The real issue is not "Where was Christ crucified?" but "What really happened on that day long ago?" and "How does this event relate to our lives today?"
Writing to believers in the city of Corinth, Paul wrote, "For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance; that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures" (1 Corinthians 15:3,4).
Why did Jesus have to die? Paul puts it like this: "God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Corinthians 5:21). Simply put, an exchange was made on that day long ago as God accepted Christ’s death in place of ours. That is Good News! Resource Reading: Matthew 27:32