[CHORAL MUSIC]
Welcome to Jerusalem's church of the Holy
Sepulchre, the most hallowed Christian shrine on earth.
According to tradition, this is the very location where
Jesus died and was buried.
The church is, in a word, breathtaking.
The very air that hangs inside seems
infused with something holy.
But this is also a place of mystery,
because as sacred as this structure
is, nothing that you see here today
existed in the time of Jesus.
The Bible tells us that Jesus was crucified on a barren hill
called Golgotha.
His body was then laid out on a stone
before being placed in a rock-cut tomb.
Over 300 years later, when Christianity spread to Rome,
the Emperor Constantine dispatched
his mother Helena to the Holy Land
to identify the exact site.
She was led here.
The church she placed here was destroyed and rebuilt
over the centuries, as Jerusalem changed
hands between Christians, Moors, and Jews.
This is, religiously speaking, a high-traffic area.
Today, the top of the crucifixion hill
is under the floor of the church.
One can also place their hands on the stone
where Jesus' body was laid out.
A few hundred feet away, still inside the massive building,
is the tomb itself--
the place where scripture says Jesus
was interred for three days before rising from the dead.
With so much destruction and renovation
here, the question has always persisted--
was this church built in the right spot?
Well, a recent excavation here might just answer
that question once and for all.
The tomb had been badly weathered by time and millions
of visitors, so in 2016, scientists were called in
to do an emergency restoration.
They were given just 60 hours to peer
beneath the tomb for the first time in centuries.
Beneath a layer of fill, they found a piece of marble
stamped with a cross from the time of the Crusades.
Deeper down, even older marble from the time of Constantine.
And at the bottom, they found the original limestone bed,
confirming the existence of a burial cave.
All of this supports the claim that Constantine and Helena
built on the right spot and that this may well have been
the true tomb of Jesus Christ.