The Tomb of Christ

Martin Biddle's The Tomb of Christ, published by Sutton Publishing in 1999, is a scholarly archaeological and architectural study of the aedicule enclosing the traditional tomb of Christ within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, drawing on Biddle's own detailed survey of the structure, its Crusader era and later reconstructions, and the surviving physical and documentary evidence for its history. Biddle was a senior British archaeologist with a substantial record of work on historic ecclesiastical architecture. Its strength is direct architectural survey combined with documentary history, produced ahead of, and confirmed usefully by, the 2016 conservation project that briefly opened the tomb itself. Its limit is that Biddle studies the structure's documented architectural history since antiquity, not the underlying question of the site's authenticity as the actual burial place of Jesus, which rests on a separate and much older tradition of identification.