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Standing inside the rustic grotto known as the Garden Tomb during my first trip to Israel was as close as I came to apprehending that Jesus really did everything the Gospels said he had done. Not that I doubted the Scriptures; I believe them with all my heart. But something about feeling the dampness of the cave walls, smelling the musty air, visualizing the strain with which Joseph and Nicodemus would have heaved Jesus' lifeless body through a narrow entrance, and fathoming the darkness that would have swallowed it up once the daylight was sealed out of it startled me with the brutality of the Incarnation and the grisly cost of our salvation.

Prior to this moment my musings had focused on catching a phantasmal glimpse of Jesus walking the dusty hillsides of Nazareth or hearing his distant echo on the Mount of Beatitudes. His ghost was remotely perceivable as we crossed the Sea of Galilee when the mist on the lake brought me within an angel's breath of seeing him out there walking on the water.

But the physicality of the tomb brought me down to earth. Jesus' corpse seemed to lie beside me inside that cave, even though our guide persistently reminded us, "We can't say for sure that this was where his body was laid." But standing there puts you in the situation as it would have occurred, he said.

The irony of my climactic moment in the Garden Tomb lies in the fact that the site was not part of our tour's itinerary. Our escort and guide from the Israel Government Tourist Office, Tsion Ben-David, insisted on bringing us to the Garden Tomb because "evangelicals like going there."

The Garden Tomb is regarded as a distant third cousin of the Christian "holy sites." Prior to this stop we had toured the other Christian holy site attributed to the place of Jesus' passion, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Greater prestige and historical veracity are ascribed to this locale, winning the affirmation of historians and archaeologists as marking the spot of Jesus' last hours. "It was built only 300 years after Jesus," Tsion said, "so there is a better chance that this will be the place."

T he original edifice for the Holy Sepulcher was built around a.d. 326 by Constantine's pious mother, Helena, who made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land after her son legalized the faith. Eusebius wrote in the mid-fourth century that Helena was shown "the very spot that witnessed the Savior's sufferings." Tsion explained, "She got a native guide—an Arab or Jew, we do not know," who took her and showed her all the places associated with Jesus' life and death.

John McRay, professor of New Testament at Wheaton College and author of Archaeology and the New Testament, is confident that Helena's "guide" would have been a reliable associate of the Jerusalem bishopric whose tenure over the Christian church there had been unbroken since the days of Pentecost. "The memory of a place so sacred would never have been forgotten," he says. "The bishops there would have passed that information down to Helena."

In any case, Helena was fully convinced that "the places" this guide showed her were the authentic spots of the events pertaining to Jesus' life and death. So she built churches on them—three, to be exact. The Church of the Ascension stands on the Mount of Olives; the Church of the Nativity encloses what the guide said was the place of Jesus' birth in Bethlehem; and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher holds forth the banner of Christendom inside the walls of Old Jerusalem. Eusebius writes: "The emperor [Constantine] now began to rear a monument to the Savior's victory over death, with rich and lavish magnificence."

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March 3 1997, Vol. 41, No. 3