How Did Christianity Need To Locate A Holy Place

Throughout the history of Christianity, in the first few centuries, Christians had no intention to locate a holy place. Unlike Judaism whose believers consider locating holy places with hierophanies and building temples to mark the center of the world as the core of their religion, Christianity was a spiritual religion that did not have the emphasis on physical holiness. (Markus 1994: 258). Christianity, symbolizing the replacement of the Old Covenant, considers Jesus and the Christian community as the new Covenant and the spiritual temple. As long as Christians had Christ in their hearts, Jesus was with them so that they could pray to him in any places. Christians felt no need to locate a holy place to worship. However, in the process of Christians

According to Paul Haupt, a Semitic scholar, Constantine the Great ordered Bishop Macarius to search for the tomb where Jesus was buried, and the Bishop reported that the holy tomb was under a Roman Temple, the Temple of Aphrodite (Haupt 1920: 237). Some other scholars, like Dan Bahat, disagreed with what Haupt argued, and claimed that it is the mother of Constantine the Great, Empress Helena, who initiated a pilgrim with commissions to find the holy sites related to Jesus. She found the True Cross upon which Jesus was crucified and other evidences suggesting the location of the tomb where Jesus was buried at the Temple of Jupiter (Bahat 2011: 78). Also according to Bahat, in the fourth century, Constantine ordered the Temple of Jupiter to be tore down and commanded that in that very place, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher be built (78). While there are controversial issues over who discovered the location of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, the implication that the locality of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is the place where Jesus was killed and later ascended to heaven stands valid. Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection is very crucial to Christianity. Jesus entered the city of Jerusalem and foretold the destruction of the Eastern Hill and Solomon’s temple. After he died and the city was ruined, he is believed to have resurrected from the dead, which fulfilled his prophecies and also symbolized the rebirth of the Temple - as Jesus was the new temple. The crucifixion of Jesus brought people salvation, and his resurrection proclaimed himself as the Messiah, the anointed one. The event was often referred to be the “starting point of Christian faith” (Moltmann 1993:112). Therefore, constructing the Church of the Holy Sepulcher to house the Golgotha associated the locality to the core of Christian