The Garden Tomb and the Misfortunes of an Inscription

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On November 7, 1889, the Northern Christian Advocate (Syracuse, New York) published a note from an anonymous correspondent in Jerusalem: “There are strange rumors afloat about an inscription found at St. Stephen’s [St. Étienne’s monastery] (north of Damascus Gate). It is said that the Romanists are anxious to hush up the discovery, as it would damage the credit of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Its contents are to the following effect: ‘I, Eusebius, have desired to be buried in this spot, which I believe to be close to the place where the body of my Lord lay.’”

Those who believed the Garden Tomb to be the burial place of Jesus were overjoyed. Here was unambiguous evidence that General Charles George Gordon had been correct, because St. Étienne’s monastery lay immediately to the north of the Garden Tomb, the tomb Gordon had identified in 1883 as the burial site of Jesus. Protestants, who had never been permitted to worship in the Holy Sepulchre, scented victory. The pious fraud of the traditional site—the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—was on the verge of being exposed. Only this climate of thought explains why secondhand and highly dubious information printed in an obscure American newspaper should have been reproduced by the prestigious British-based Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) for the benefit of English readers.¹ The PEF went further and commissioned Conrad Schick, a German architect living in Jerusalem, to look into the facts.

The cause of all this excitement was a thick stone slab measuring 51 inches (1.3 m) long and 31 inches (80 cm) wide. It came to light in the early summer of 1889. The French Dominicans were excavating the atrium of the church of St. Stephen, which had been built by the Empress Eudocia in 460 A.D. When they took down a large medieval wall, they found that it had been built across a Byzantine grave cut into the rock below the pavement of the atrium. The inscribed slab, set into the pavement, covered the steps leading down to the tomb. Although cracked by the weight of the wall, all the pieces of the slab were in place. The seven-line Greek inscription was intact. The many abbreviations made it difficult to read at first, but very quickly consensus emerged among the experts that the wording was:

Theµk(eµ) diapher(ousa) Nonnou diak(onou) Onis(imou) teµs hag(ias) tou Ch(risto)u A(nastaseoµ)s k(ai) teµs mo(neµs) auteµs.

“The private tomb of the deacon Nonnus Onesimus of the Holy Resurrection of Christ and of this monastery.”

This text does not have a single word in common with the version reported in the Northern Christian Advocate. But it is easy to see what happened. In the Byzantine period the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was known as the Church of the Holy Resurrection. Those who had been looking desperately for evidence to support Gordon’s theory heard the rumors of the discovery and took in only what suited them. It was enough that the inscription mentioned the Holy Sepulchre. On that they embroidered the version they wanted to find. If the deacon buried here served the Holy Resurrection, the nearby Garden Tomb must be the sepulcher of Jesus!

Far from identifying the church of St. Stephen with the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the inscription does precisely the opposite. Nonnus Onesimus was a monk in the monastery attached to the church of St. Stephen; at the same time he served as deacon of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (the Church of the Holy Resurrection). Such a combination was far from unusual. Cyril of Scythopolis, the sixth-century historian of Palestinian monasticism, mentions a “Gabriel who was both priest of the Holy Resurrection and superior (of the monastery) of St. Stephen” (Life of St. Euthymius, n. 39). The analogy with the Nonnus Onesimus inscription is striking.

As deacon of the Holy Sepulchre, Nonnus occupied the second highest position in the hierarchy of the Jerusalem church. This explains why he was granted the dignity of a private tomb where his remains could rest undisturbed.

In view of the highly acrimonious debate that developed between partisans of the Garden Tomb and the defenders of the traditional Holy Sepulchre,² mention must also be made of another inscription. It was found in 1885 in part of the tomb complex to which the Garden Tomb belongs, and reads simply, “Private tomb of the deacon Euthymius Pindiris.” Since this contributed nothing to the proof that Gordon’s supporters were seeking, it had attracted little attention. But the inscription remained a vague popular memory with bizarre consequences.

Confusion between the Nonnus inscription and the Euthymius inscription is already evident in the Northern Christian Advocate report. The place of discovery and the mention of the Holy Sepulchre belong to the Nonnus inscription. But the name Eusebius comes from the Euthymius inscription. There is enough similarity of sound between the elements of the two four-syllable names for the original Euthymius to be transmuted into the better known Eusebius.

Such confusion would have been impossible had the author of the Northern Christian Advocate report consulted the full publication of the Nonnus inscription by Father Germer-Durand in July 1889,³ a full three months before the Northern Christian Advocate report appeared.

In a letter to the PEF, Professor Edward Hull proclaimed “In my opinion the recent excavations in the neighborhood of “Jeremiah’s Grotto,” … all tend to confirm the view that this spot is without doubt the site of the Crucifixion and of the Holy Sepulchre.”⁴

Hull’s interpretation was of less consequence than the totally misleading use of the Nonnus inscription in a long, and apparently scientific, article by James Edward Hanauer, which the PEF published in 1892. As the clinching argument in favor of the Garden Tomb as the authentic Holy Sepulchre, Hanauer noted “close by we have not only the ruins of the great church, dedicated in A.D. 460, to the proto-martyr Stephen, but also a medieval Christian cemetery known, whatever the reason may be, as that “Of the Holy Resurrection (Anastasia) of Christ.”⁵

The least of the errors in this statement by Hanauer is the presentation of the tombstone of the deacon Nonnus as if it was the sign over the gate of a cemetery! But that did not worry those who wanted to believe. A committee was formed in England to buy the Garden Tomb as the probable site of the Holy Sepulchre. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Anglican bishops of Salisbury, Rochester, Ripon and 055Cashel, and the archdeacons of London and Westminster were listed as supporters of this cause in a letter to the London Times (September 22, 1892) appealing for funds.⁶ A wily German speculator had secured the property and was holding out for much more money than it was worth.

Religious fervor was at such a pitch that even when sanity spoke with the sonorous voice of the Thunderer it fell on deaf ears. The precise references of Claude Conder (surveyor of western Palestine for the PEF in the late 19th century) to the inscriptions that had given rise to all the trouble—“Two inscriptions giving the names of deacons of the Greek church, and, by the characters used, dating from the Byzantine period, have been found near the tomb”⁷—was ignored. Father Marie-Joseph Lagrange’s detailed report in 1894 on the excavations at St. Stephen’s, with a full account of the Nonnus inscription, went unread.⁸ Irish archaeologist Robert Macalister’s insistence that neither of the inscriptions mentioned anyone buried near his Lord was of no avail.⁹

As the arguments based on the exegesis of Gospel texts and on archaeology began to be recognized as fallacious, even to those who wanted to believe in the Garden Tomb, the argument based on the inscriptions gained in importance. It would be futile to detail all the distortions that piety demanded of facts. The culmination came in a book entitled Palestine Depicted and Described, published in 1911. The author, M. G. E. Franklin, claimed to have followed the excavations at the Garden Tomb from the beginning and to have participated in the discovery of the inscriptions: “Two of the slabs contained inscriptions in Greek, one referring to Nonnus and the other to Onesimus ‘deacons of the Church of the Resurrection buried near my [sic] Lord.’ These stones have now been placed in the land adjoining the church of St. Stephen, where they are shown to Catholic pilgrims. But they are not in their original place, since I noted their transfer.”¹⁰

At this point farce had given way to fraud, and men of good will threw up their hands and turned to other things. The Nonnus inscription, so variously exploited in the service of a vain hope, stands today in the atrium of St. Étienne’s monastery three yards from where it was discovered. Its place in the pavement has been taken by a metal plate that can be lifted with ease. In the tomb beneath rest the bones of Nonnus undisturbed by the storm that raged about his epitaph.

On November 7, 1889, the Northern Christian Advocate (Syracuse, New York) published a note from an anonymous correspondent in Jerusalem: “There are strange rumors afloat about an inscription found at St. Stephen’s [St. Étienne’s monastery] (north of Damascus Gate). It is said that the Romanists are anxious to hush up the discovery, as it would damage the credit of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Its contents are to the following effect: ‘I, Eusebius, have desired to be buried in this spot, which I believe to be close to the place where the body of my Lord lay.’” Those […]