Colorado Orthodox Academy

Were the Holy Family refugees?

First, we must understand clearly that the Christian duty and the Christian church is to help the people who really need help without allowing them to use the system, and this is independent of their origin and it's without question. The Church is here to help, help in just ways, and not to judge. However, in recent years many churches and organizations misuse the Holy Family, defining them as refugees or illegal immigrants in order to excuse unjust actions. The Holy Family was never a refugee or immigrant family. The Roman Empire, at the time of the Holy Family, was all one country, including Judea and Egypt, so to move from Judea to Egypt was not crossing any border, but rather was like moving from one province to another, i.e. like to move from Colorado to New Mexico. Joseph, a hard-working man, moved to Bethlehem because the government of Rome required this for registration. His family was there for a very short time. The cave where Mary gave birth to Christ is misrepresented by artists because stables or caves for animals were part of the house where a family lived, not a separate structure. When Joseph got warned about Herod, they moved to Egypt which was another province of the Roman Empire (not another country), and again they remained there for a short time and then returned to Nazareth, their city of origin, where we know Jesus was for at least 25 years until he was 30 years of age and started his mission. It is at the very least an offense to the Holy Family to put them on the same level with the thousands of illegals (many of whom are gang members, drug runners, or human trafficking dealers) that cross the border. Churches have to stop using the Holy Family as an example because they were never refugees or immigrants. Churches and Christian organizations have to just do their Christian duty to help people without using the Holy Family. Just do your Christian duty, but always remember duty and justice go together.

The Roman Empire at the time of Jesus

The Definition Of An Educated Man According To Socrates

•Those who control unpleasant situations, instead of being controlled by them
•Those who treat all events with bravery and good old common sense
•Those who are honest in all their dealings
•Those who face unpleasant situations and are calm even when mistreated by people who dislike them
•Those who can control their pleasures
•Those who were not defeated by their misfortunes and failures
•And Those who do not become arrogant and corrupt by their success and glory

Chronological development of a baby

*1st week (1st month)
The s*x of the baby is determined. 2) Genetic traits are determined. 3) Embryo travels from the fallopian tube to the uterus.
*2nd week (1st month)
The egg is implanted in the wall of the uterus. 2) Placenta develops.
*3rd week (1st month)
The heart begins to develop, 18-25 days. 2) Brain begins to develop. 3) Intestinal tract begins to develop.
*4th – 5th weeks (1st month)
Vertebra begins to develop. 2) Blood flow begins. 3) Eye development begins. 4) Arm and leg development begin. 5) The umbilical cord begins to form.
*6th week (1 – 2 months)
Fingers and the toes appear. 2) Nose, ears, develop. 3) Joints are developing.
*7th week (1 – 2 months)
All essential organs are developing. 2) Eyelids form.
*8th week (2 months)
Muscle contraction occurs. 2) Facial features become more prominent. 3) Heart has four chambers.
*9th – 12th week (2 – 3 months)
The baby is about 3 inches long. 2) The neck develops. 3) Arms and legs begin to lengthen. 4) Ge****ls are well defined.
*13th – 16th weeks (3 – 4 months)
The baby is about 6 inches. 2) Hair begins to develop. 3) The baby moves. 4) Lungs develop. 5) If female, the ovaries contain about 2 million eggs. 6) The face is more developed. 7) The baby can suck its thumb.
*17th – 20th weeks (4 – 5 months)
The baby is about 8 inches. 2) Eyebrows form. 3) Nails on fingers and toes form. 4) Movement can be felt by the mother. 5) The circulatory system is working. 6) Swallowing begins to occur.
*21st – 24th weeks (5 – 6 months)
The baby is about 11 inches long 2) The baby weighs about 1.5 pounds. 3) Fingerprints form. 4) The baby can hear and react to sounds from outside the womb.
*25th – 28th weeks (6 – 7 months)
The baby is about 15 inches long. 2) The baby weighs about 2.5 pounds. 3) Survivability outside the womb is possible. 4) The baby can react to light from outside the womb.
*29th – 32nd weeks (7 – 8 months)
The baby is about 16 inches long. 2) The baby weighs about 4.5 pounds. 3) All bones are fully developed.
*33rd – 40th weeks (8 – 9 months)
The baby is about 18 – 21 inches long. 2) The baby weighs about 6 – 8 pounds. 3) The baby is ready to be born. 4) Sleep patterns are apparent. 5) Strong movement is very apparent.

How December 25 Became Christmas?

How did December 25 come to be associated with Jesus’ birthday?
The Bible offers few clues: Celebrations of Jesus’ Nativity are not mentioned in the Gospels or Acts; the date is not given, not even the time of year. The biblical reference to shepherds tending their flocks at night when they hear the news of Jesus’ birth (Luke 2:8) might suggest the spring lambing season; in the cold month of December, on the other hand, sheep might well have been corralled. Yet most scholars would urge caution about extracting such a precise but incidental detail from a narrative whose focus is theological rather than calendrical.
The extrabiblical evidence from the first and second century is equally spare: There is no mention of birth celebrations in the writings of early Christian writers such as Irenaeus (c. 130–200) or Tertullian (c. 160–225). Origen of Alexandria (c. 165–264) goes so far as to mock Roman celebrations of birth anniversaries, dismissing them as “pagan” practices—a strong indication that Jesus’ birth was not marked with similar festivities at that place and time. As far as we can tell, Christmas was not celebrated at all at this point.
According to Clement of Alexandria, several different days had been proposed by various Christian groups. Surprising as it may seem, Clement doesn’t mention December 25 at all. Clement writes: “There are those who have determined not only the year of our Lord’s birth, but also the day; and they say that it took place in the 28th year of Augustus, and in the 25th day of [the Egyptian month] Pachon [May 20 in our calendar] … And treating of His Passion, with very great accuracy, some say that it took place in the 16th year of Tiberius, on the 25th of Phamenoth [March 21]; and others on the 25th of Pharmuthi [April 21] and others say that on the 19th of Pharmuthi [April 15] the Savior suffered. Further, others say that He was born on the 24th or 25th of Pharmuthi [April 20 or 21].”
The earliest mention of December 25 as Jesus’ birthday comes from a mid-fourth-century Roman almanac that lists the death dates of various Christian bishops and martyrs. The first date listed, December 25, is marked: natus Christus in Betleem Judeae: “Christ was born in Bethlehem of Judea.”
Around 200 C.E. Tertullian of Carthage reported the calculation that the 14th of Nisan (the day of the crucifixion according to the Gospel of John) in the year Jesus diedc was equivalent to March 25 in the Roman (solar) calendar. March 25 is, of course, nine months before December 25; it was later recognized as the Feast of the Annunciation—the commemoration of Jesus’ conception. Thus, Jesus was believed to have been conceived and crucified on the same day of the year. Exactly nine months later, Jesus was born, on December 25.
The December 25 feast seems to have existed before 312—before Constantine and his conversion, at least.
One of the most loudly touted theory about the origins of the Christmas date(s) is that it was borrowed from pagan celebrations. The Romans had their mid-winter Saturnalia festival in late December; barbarian peoples of northern and western Europe kept holidays at similar times. To top it off, in 274 C.E., the Roman emperor Aurelian established a feast of the birth of Sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun), on December 25. Christmas, the argument goes, is really a spin-off from these pagan solar festivals. According to this theory, early Christians deliberately chose these dates to encourage the spread of Christmas and Christianity throughout the Roman world: If Christmas looked like a pagan holiday, more pagans would be open to both the holiday and the God whose birth it celebrated.
How did December 25 become Christmas? We cannot be entirely sure.
Most important is to see Christmas as true theological view and no as chronological.
(Source BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY SOCIETY, December 11, 2021 )

Artifacts Pointing to the Historicity of Exodus Events

Merneptah Stele
Discovered in 1896 by pioneering Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, the Merneptah Stele (also pictured at the top of the article) has long been the most famous artifact related to biblical history in the era of the exodus. Conventionally dated to 1208 BC, it was erected in the 5th year of Pharaoh Merneptah who was the son of Ramesses II. The monument pronounces military victories over a series of enemies including the people of Israel living to the north of Egypt.

Brooklyn Papyrus
One of the most common charges against the Bible’s exodus account is that there is no evidence of a massive Semitic slave population in Egypt in the era of Pharaoh Ramesses. However, in the earlier Middle Kingdom (13th Dynasty) there is evidence of Semitic settlements all across the northeast Nile Delta. A document from further south at this time lists nearly a hundred slaves from a single estate – the majority of whom were Semitic.
The Bible says the Israelites became so numerous that they spread across Egypt. All the documents from the Nile Delta have rotted away because of the Nile floods that covered the area annually for thousands of years. So, we have no written records from the Delta Egypt. But this slave list from the south has dozens of slaves including the biblical forms of names like “Shiphrah” (the same name as the Hebrew midwife in the Exodus account), “Asher” and “Issachar.”

Shasu of Yhwh Name Ring
The Exodus account makes it clear (in Exodus 5:2) that Pharaoh had never heard of Israel’s God YHWH. Yet at the ancient temple of Soleb in modern Sudan, an inscription from Pharaoh Amenhotep III (more than a hundred years before Ramesses II) lists enemies of Egypt. One of those enemies is the Shasu (nomads) of YHWH. This is the oldest known inscription to use the name “YHWH,” showing that after the Exodus Israel’s God was no longer unknown to the pharaohs.

Ipuwer Papyrus
A papyrus housed in the Leiden Museum in the Netherlands records a time of great calamities in Egypt and the resulting chaos that occurred when society had broken down. Known as the Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage and also as the Ipuwer Papyrus, it uses several phrases early on that bear an uncanny similarity to the Exodus account. These include the river turning to blood, darkness, all is ruin, wailing throughout the land with no shortage of the dead.

Berlin Pedestal Stone Inscription
The Merneptah Stele no longer contains the oldest known mention of “Israel” in an ancient inscription. The Berlin Pedestal includes a set of name rings (each associated with a depiction of a bound prisoner) of enemies in the Canaan area with damage to the right-hand ring in the image. A reconstruction of the name ring by German Egyptologists Manfred Gorg, Peter van der Veen and Christoffer Theis has shown that it names Israel. The most put it somewhere around a century prior to Ramesses. If the Israelites were established in the Canaan area at that time, the Exodus would have happened at least 40 years before this point.
(Patterns of Evidence, 06/01/2019)

Photo: The Ipuwer Papyrus

Ecumenism
By Fr. George Metallinos ( Professor/Dean at the School of Theology of the University of Athens, 11 March 1940 – 19 December 2019).

The following error is everywhere widespread: By the Church we mean only the hierarchy, the bishops. The Church is all the clergy and the people.
Time has shown that the ecumenical movement has a clear and concrete goal: To consolidate the world under a guise of “Christianity” and the creation of one flock and one pastor.
And what is this one world religion? Nothing other than a manufacture of the modern political “New age” tendency and a new world order. Its final goal is to consolidate the world under one pastor, and this pastor will by no means be our Lord Jesus Christ.
Ecumenism in all its manifestations and variations represents a real Babylonian captivity of a large part of the leadership of Orthodox Churches. The only thing that has been achieved on the ecumenical path is the legalization of heresies and the schisms of Protestantism.
In speaking of Orthodoxy, I mean the Orthodoxy of our saints. It is precisely this Orthodoxy that we must be faithful to, and unite on the basis of it. But those who have fallen away from it and created their own version of Christianity (Protestant denominations) have nothing in common with patristic Christianity (other than a similar name).
Dialogue with the heterodox is possible only on a missionary, apostolic basis. The aim should be to help our Western brothers who have been torn away from the truth to once again acquire the Church that they have left.
Today we observe a completely different form of dialogue with the heterodox. How many high-ranking papists have returned to the Church? How many well-known Protestants have come back?
If we want to conduct a proper dialogue—fraternal, missionary, self-sacrificing—then we should make it our aim to try to help these people find the path from which they have strayed. We must unite them not with ourselves personally, but with the Church of our saints, with the Body of Christ.
Now, the very opposite is happening… We have left the Western Christians to their own fate; worse than that, we ourselves are forming a deceptive impression amongst them that they are also Christians [i.e. members of the Body of Christ] and there are no serious differences or contradictions between us.
Each of us is within our own fortification, and together we will stand up to the common enemy. And this enemy is not a person (patriarchs, bishops, etc.), but the spirit of ecumenism, which is poisoning Orthodoxy and destroying our unity. With love, humility, and understanding we will never cease to criticize the ecumenical path, which is a constant distancing from Orthodoxy and an identification with the forces that are ruling this world.
Do you know what our problem is? To what Christ do we call, to what faith? Are we leading people to the Orthodoxy of our fathers? Or do we think that missionary work is simply a chase after numbers—to baptize as many people as possible and lock them into some jurisdiction, in order to increase our worldly power?
Orthodox Christianity offers man the opportunity for deification.
In speaking of Orthodoxy, do not repeat Pilate’s mistake when he asked Christ, “What is truth?” It is correct to say, “Who is truth?”... Because the Truth is not an idea, theory, or system, but the All-Holy Person of the Incarnate God the Word, Jesus Christ.
The only correct path is to turn with prayer (including the Jesus prayer) to Christ. This is the way out of the situation.

False Ideas of Canonicity
By Fr. Alexander Schmemann (+1983)

We must begin with a clarification of the seemingly simple notion of canonicity. I say "seemingly simple" because it is indeed simple enough to give a formal definition: "canonical is that which complies with the canons of the Church". It is much more difficult, however, to understand what this "compliance" is and how to achieve it. There are those, for example, who solve the complex and tragical canonical problem of Orthodoxy by one simple rule, which to them seems a self-evident one: to be "canonical" one has to be under some Patriarch, or, in general, under some established autocephalous church in the old world. Canonicity is thus reduced to subordination which is declared to constitute the fundamental principle of church organization. Implied here is the idea that a "high ecclesiastical power" (Patriarch, Synod, etc.) is in itself and by itself the source of canonicity: whatever it decides is ipso facto canonical and the criterion of canonicity. But in the genuine Orthodox tradition the ecclesiastical power is itself under the canons and its decisions are valid and compulsory only inasmuch as they comply with the canons. In other terms, it is not the decision of a Patriarch or His Synod that creates and guarantees "canonicity", but, on the contrary, it is the canonicity of the decision that gives it its true authority and power. Truth, and not power, is the criterion, and the canons, not different in this from the dogmas, express the truth of the Church. And just as no power, no authority can transform heresy into orthodoxy and to make white what is black, no power can make canonical a situation which is not canonical. When told that all Patriarchs have agreed with the Patriarch of Constantinople that Monotheletism is an Orthodox doctrine, St. Maximus the Confessor refused to accept this argument as a decisive criterion of truth. The Church ultimately canonized St. Maximus and condemned the Patriarchs. Canonicity has been identified not with truth, but with "security.'' And nothing short of a real canonical revival can bring us back to the glorious certitude that in Orthodoxy there is no substitute for Truth.

The reality of the church is reduced to the formal principle of "jurisdiction," i.e. subordination to a central ecclesiastical power. But then the meaning of the Apostolic succession is deeply changed as is also that of the Bishop and his function within the Church. In the original tradition, a Bishop through his consecration by other bishops, becomes the "successor'' not to his consecrators but, first of all, to the unbroken continuity of his own Church.
The "Church is in the Bishop" because the "Bishop is in the Church", in the: "organic unity with a particular body of church people.'' In the system of canonical subordination, however, the Bishop becomes a simple representative of a higher jurisdiction, important not in himself, not as the charismatic bearer and guardian of his Church's continuity and catholicity, but as means of this Church's subordination to a "jurisdiction." It is difficult to imagine a more serious distortion and, indeed, destruction of the Orthodox conception of continuity and apostolic succession. For the Church cannot be reduced to "jurisdiction." She is a living organism and her continuity is precisely that of life.

Finally, all this leads to (and also in part proceeds from) the harmful and un-Orthodox reduction of canonicity to an almost abstract principle of validity. When a man has been consecrated bishop by at least two other bishops, he is considered as a "valid" bishop regardless of the ecclesiastical and ecclesiological content of his consecration. But Orthodox tradition has never isolated validity into a "principle in itself," i.e. disconnected from truth, authenticity and, in general, the whole faith and order of the Church. It would not be difficult to show that the canonical tradition, when dealing with holy orders and sacraments, always stresses that they are valid because they are acts of, and within, the Church which means that it is their authenticity as acts of the Church that make them valid and not vice-versa. To consider validity as a self-contained principle leads to a magical understanding of the Church and to a dangerous distortion of ecclesiology. A Bishop, a priest, a layman can be accused of all sorts of moral and canonical sins: the day when he "shifts" to the "canonical" jurisdictions all these accusations become irrelevant; he is "valid" and one can entrust to him the salvation of human souls! Have we completely forgotten that all the "notae" of the Church are not only equally important but also interdependent, and what is not holy—i.e. right, moral, just, canonical, cannot be "apostolic"? In our opinion nothing has harmed more the spiritual and moral foundations of Church life than the really immoral idea that a man, an act, a situation are "valid" only in function of a purely formal "validity in itself." It is this immoral doctrine that poisons the Church, makes parishes and individuals think of any jurisdictional shift as justified as long as they "go under a valid bishop" and makes the Church cynical about and indifferent to, considerations of truth and morals.

Orthodox Tradition

What do they mean by the word? A tradition, says the Oxford Dictionary, is an opinion, belief, or custom handed down from ancestors to posterity. Christian Tradition, in that case, is the faith which Jesus Christ imparted to the Apostles, and which since the Apostles’ time has been handed down from generation to generation in the Church (Compare Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:3). But to an Orthodox Christian, Tradition means something more concrete and specific than this. It means the books of the Bible; it means the Creed; it means the decrees of the Ecumenical Councils and the writings of the Fathers; it means the Canons, the Service Books, the Holy Icons — in fact, the whole system of doctrine, Church government, worship, and art which Orthodoxy has articulated over the ages. The Orthodox Christian of today sees himself as heir and guardian to a great inheritance received from the past, and he believes that it is his duty to transmit this inheritance unimpaired to the future.
Not everything received from the past is of equal value, nor is everything received from the past necessarily true. As one of the bishops remarked at the Council of Carthage in 257:‘The Lord said, "I am truth." He did not say, I am custom". There is a difference between ‘Tradition’ and ‘traditions:’ many traditions which the past has handed down are human and accidental — pious opinions (or worse), but not a true part of the one Tradition, the essential Christian message.
Tradition is not only kept by the Church — it lives in the Church, it is the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church. The Orthodox conception of Tradition is not static but dynamic, not a dead acceptance of the past but a living experience of the Holy Spirit in the present. Tradition, while inwardly changeless (for God does not change), is constantly assuming new forms, which supplement the old without superseding them.
This idea of Tradition as a living thing has been well expressed by Georges Florovsky: ''Tradition is the witness of the Spirit; the Spirit’s unceasing revelation and preaching of good tidings . . . . To accept and understand Tradition we must live within the Church, we must be conscious of the grace-giving presence of the Lord in it; we must feel the breath of the Holy Ghost in it . . . Tradition is not only a protective, conservative principle; it is, primarily, the principle of growth and regeneration . . . Tradition is the constant abiding of the Spirit and not only the memory of words".

(From the Book: Excerpts from the Orthodox Church
by Bishop Kallistos Ware)

Reverend Fr. George Metallinos writings.
(In his memory 1940-2019)

We have placed all our hope in earthly prosperity, and the Lord has allowed that we become disenchanted with it and through this, wake up.

Time has shown that the ecumenical movement has a clear and concrete goal: To consolidate the world under a guise of “Christianity” and the creation of one flock and one pastor.

And what is this one world religion? Nothing other than a manufacture of the modern political “New age” tendency and a new world order. Its final goal is to consolidate the world under one pastor, and this pastor will by no means be our Lord Jesus Christ.

Do you know what our problem is? To what Christ do we call, to what faith? Are we leading people to the Orthodoxy of our fathers? Or do we think that missionary work is simply a chase after numbers—to baptize as many people as possible and lock them into some jurisdiction, in order to increase our worldly power? This is the painful problem of modern missionary work. To what are we calling people—to the Church (Christ’s spiritual hospital) or to our earthly institutions?

A Christian who does not labor in ascesis is like a sick man who does not follow the course of treatment that the doctor has prescribed.

In speaking of Orthodoxy, do not repeat Pilate’s mistake when he asked Christ, “What is truth?” It is correct to say, “Who is truth?”... Because the Truth is not an idea, theory, or system, but the All-Holy Person of the Incarnate God the Word, Jesus Christ.

Tradition is not a synonym for conservatism, but to the contrary, it is the dynamic development of a way of life that embodies the ideals inherited from our ancestors, and finding new forms of expression for them that resonate with the spirit and means of a given historical period.

The Archaeology of Easter

Gethsemane
Gethsemane itself means “olive press” or “press of oils.”Likely none of the trees in the garden were alive when Jesus prayed there, as Josephus records that the Romans cut down all of the olive trees around Jerusalem to use in their siege of the city in 70 AD. Some of the trees standing in the garden today may be the descendants of trees that Jesus walked among. Nearby is an ancient site called the Cave of Gethsemane (or the Grotto of Betrayal), which may in fact be the actual site of the betrayal of Jesus, or at least the spot where the disciples slumbered. Given that it was a cold night (Jn 18:18) it makes sense that they would have sought shelter in the cave.

House of Annas
In the 1970s, renowned archaeological architect Leen Ritmeyer was part of a team that excavated a large palace near Temple Mount in Jerusalem, known as the “Palatial Mansion.” He has identified it as the palace of Annas, who ruled as high priest from 6-15 A.D. After he was deposed, Annas continued to wield incredible power in Jersualem behind the scenes while his sons and son-in-law, Caiaphas, served High Priests, so it is not surprising that Jesus was taken first to him (Annas is even named a “co-high priest” in Luke 3:2).
Ritmeyer has pointed out that the remains of the Palatial Mansion clearly housed priests, having four mikva’ot (ritual baths), the most found in any ancient dwelling in Jerusalem (or Israel). It is also near the Burnt House, which has been shown to belong to the priestly family of Katros, and is in the area Josephus records that the palace of Annas was.

Praetorium
After his trial before the Sanhedrin, Jesus was taken before Pontius Pilate, at the “palace of the Roman governor” (Jn 18:28), which one and the same as the Praetorium (Mk 15:16). A tradition stretching back to the medieval era has the Praetorium in the Antonia Fortress. Archaeologist Shimon Gibson has measured the base of the Antionia Fortress and argues that it is too small to have functioned as anything more than a Roman outpost and observation tower. It certainly wasn’t big enough to house the palace and administrative center of the Roman governor.Today many believe that Pontius Pilate resided in Herod’s old palace complex when he was in Jerusalem. Gibson states: “Today, a consensus of opinion exists among scholars that Herod’s Palace on the west side of the city was the same as the Praetorium and that in its immediate vicinity Jesus was tried and condemned to death.”
Further evidence that Pilate used Herod’s old palace as his residence is found in the writings of Philo of Alexandria.

Annas
In addition to the Palatial Mansion that has been identified as the residence of Annas (mentioned above), the tomb of Annas the High Priest has been discovered and is further testimony to his wealth as it is one of the most richly decorated tombs of the Second Temple Period.

Caiaphas
In 1990, a construction team that was building a water park in the Peace Forest near Jerusalem, stumbled upon a first-century cave when their bulldozer plowed through the tomb’s roof. Archaeologists discovered a variety of ossuaries (bone boxes used in the first-century), including an ornate one that inscribed with the name “Joseph son of Caiaphas.” The ancient historian, Josephus, records that Caiaphas’s full name was Joseph Caiaphas. Inside were the bones of a 60-year old man. Scholars are convinced that this is the ossuary of the high priest who played a prominent role in the trial of Jesus.

Pontius Pilate
In 1961, Italian archaeologists discovered a stone inscription while excavating an amphitheatre near Ceasarea Maratima. The limestone block was part of a dedication to Tiberius Caesar from “Pontius Pilate, Prefect of Judea.” The ring bearing the name of Pontius Pilate was discovered in the late 1960s, one of thousands of artifacts found in the excavation of Herodium, an ancient fortress and palace south of Bethlehem, in the West Bank.It reads “of Pilates,” in Greek letters set around a picture of a wine vessel known as a krater.

Golgotha
All four biographies of Jesus in the Bible record that Jesus was crucified at a place called Golgotha, which means “The Place of the Skull” (Mk 15:22; 27:33; Lk 23:33; Jn 19:17–18). John’s gospel records that “At the place where Jesus was crucified (ie. Golgotha), there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had ever been laid” (19:41). This means that Golgotha was a large area that contained both the ex*****on site, the tomb, and a garden. Archaeologists generally agree that the real site of Golgotha is in the vicinity of the “Rock of Calvary” in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The tomb of Jesus
Both Jerome (395 A.D.) and Eusebius (337-340 A.D.) record that the Roman emperor Hadrian built a large platform over the tomb of Jesus and then placed a statue of Jupiter over the spot. When Constantine and his mother, Helena, dismantled the pagan shrine, a tomb was indeed found beneath it.They then built the original church on the edicule window site in 330 A.D. Other first-century tombs are found within the church, confirming that the area was an ancient cemetery. The tomb of Jesus and the burial bed is surrounded by a shrine, known as the edicule. It was recently uncovered for the first time in almost 500 years for restoration and cleaning. In Dec. 2017, results from tests done on mortar samples taken during the renovations were announced. They confirm the history of the site, with the mortar taken from between the limestone burial bed and the marble slab dating to the time of Constantine’s construction of the original shrine at the tomb.The evidence clearly points to this being the actual location of the tomb of Jesus.

Source: Bible Archaelogy Report