Early Shrine Found Under Site of Jesus’s Grave
The Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem was supposedly built over the cave where Jesus was buried. Over the years, water seeping from the dome down into the shrine below has eroded the iron clamps that hold the 19th century structure together, causing cracks to form in the walls and the stones at its base to shift. Scholars have taken advantage of this by poking a tiny fiber-optic video camera down between the cracks and have discovered earlier shrines below it.
“The way a doctor uses an endoscope to look down one’s tummy, we used the same thing, except it was an industrial endoscope,” says Martin Biddle, professor of medieval archaeology at the University of Oxford. “We could look in and see there were earlier structures inside.”
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