Most great churches are owned by somebody. This one is shared, in fractions, by communions that spent centuries in dispute and in some cases still do not recognise each other's orders.
What the Status Quo actually is
The Status Quo is not a theological settlement. It is an administrative freeze, imposed from outside by a Muslim government that had grown tired of Christian factions fighting in its territory. An Ottoman firman of 1757 fixed the rights in the holy places as they then stood; a further firman of 1852 reaffirmed it, and the arrangement was subsequently underwritten by the European powers, which is why the internal housekeeping of a church in Jerusalem is a matter of international agreement.
Six communions hold rights inside the building:
- Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic and Roman Catholic, the three major parties, holding the Edicule in common and large areas separately
- Coptic Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox and Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo: holding smaller and in places very small shares
The last three are Oriental Orthodox churches, which are not a subdivision of the Eastern Orthodoxy of the Greeks; the two families have been separate since the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and treating the Copts or the Ethiopians as a branch of anything Byzantine gets the building's politics exactly backwards. The Ethiopian community, for its part, does not hold space inside the church at all: it occupies the rooftop monastery of Deir es-Sultan, and the question of whether it or the Copts are the rightful holders of it is unresolved.
Because the freeze applies to everything, the practical effect is that nothing which is common ground may be altered, cleaned, repaired or moved without the agreement of all the parties with an interest in it. A lamp hangs where it hung. A step is swept by whoever swept it. Where the boundary of one community's area is disputed, work stops there.
The ladder
A short wooden ladder stands on a ledge above the main entrance, under a window belonging to the Armenians, on a facade over which several communities claim rights. It appears in an engraving of 1728, so it has been there in some form for something close to three hundred years, and it has become the standard illustration of the Status Quo: it cannot be moved, because moving it would be an act of ownership over a surface whose ownership is not agreed.
That is the accurate version, and it is worth separating from the embellishments. It is not the same ladder: wood does not last three centuries on an exposed ledge, and it has been replaced and has been briefly removed more than once, including by theft. The reason nobody may move it is not a rule written down anywhere saying so. It is that under a regime which treats the existing arrangement as the whole of the law, any change is a claim.
Who opens the door
Because the Christian communities could not be trusted with the key to a building they shared, custody of it has rested for centuries with two Muslim families of Jerusalem, by an arrangement in which one family holds the key and the other performs the opening and closing. It is often told as a charming curiosity. It is better read as what it is: a neutral custodianship, of exactly the kind the rest of the building lacks.
What the restoration found
The Edicule, the small structure enclosing the tomb, was in poor condition and had been strapped with an iron cage by the British authorities in 1947 which nobody could agree to remove. In 2016 and 2017 a team from the National Technical University of Athens was permitted to dismantle, consolidate and rebuild it, a project that required the three major communities to agree, which was itself the news.
The burial bed was uncovered for the first time in centuries. Mortar sampled from between the bed and the marble slab laid over it returned a date around the middle of the fourth century, consistent with the Constantinian works rather than with a later medieval reconstruction. That does not establish whose tomb it is. What it does establish is that the structure venerated today encloses the rock that the fourth-century builders identified, and that the shrine has not, as was sometimes suggested, wandered.
The tomb is a first-century rock-cut burial of a type consistent with the Gospel accounts, in a quarry that was outside the city wall at the relevant date, marked as the tomb of Jesus by the fourth century at the latest and probably earlier. Everything beyond that is belief, and the church is honest company for it.