Church Of The Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem,Israel‎

More pictures from the new excavation inside the Holy Sepulchre Church and below the church the cistern that goes back from the crusade, and we can see the original bed rock tomb of our Lord Jesus Christ .
A New excavation inside the Holy Sepulchre Church ⛪️

Finding the ruins of the pagan temple of Aphrodite and mosaics dating back to this temple, which dates to the year 132 AD, during the restoration of the floor around our church in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, from the right side next to the Holy Tomb.
This temple was built during the period of Roman persecution of Christians during the rule of Emperor Hadrian between the years 132-135 AD, on the place where Jesus was buried. Hadrian built this temple on the place of the tomb in order to permanently distance the Christians from the place, and he also erected a statue of Zeus over the place of the crucifixion as well, in order to keep the Christians away from the place and desecrate it, because the early Christians used to worship in the place of the crucifixion and the tomb, even before Queen Helena built the first church by hundreds of years.
The existence of the temple continued until the year 331 AD, after Emperor Constantine the Great allowed Christians to worship freely and stopped persecution by the “Edict of Milan in the year 313 AD,” and then he converted to Christianity. Queen Saint Helena demolished it when she came to the lands based on the blessing of the Council of Nicaea, which was held in 325 AD and blessed Queen Helena’s going to the Holy Land, where she built the Church of the Resurrection, which she finished work on in the year 339 AD.
The tomb was not in this current form but was composed of two rooms carved into the rock. Hadrian filled the two rock-hewn chambers with dirt and made a square shape to hold the foundations of the statue of Aphrodite above the rock-hewn tomb. When Queen Helena came and demolished the statues and the temple, she discovered that because of the method of construction and that Hadrian filled the tomb with dirt, he preserved the tomb. So, she cleaned the rocks around the tomb, made a circular ring around it, and built a dome for it, and it was called the Dome of Resurrection.
The church built by Queen Helena is very different from the current church in terms of architecture, but the place of the Holy tomb is always the same. It was in the middle. In the days of Queen Helena, there was an open space like a garden between the tomb and the Martyrium, “the place of crucifixion” or Golgotha, and the architectural form of the church differed from its current form.
This temple is part of the temples, walls and other buildings built by Emperor Hadrian within the city he called “Cologne Aelia Capitolina”, which was built on the ruins of the city destroyed by Titus in the year 70 AD.