Traditionally considered, the argument in its favor runs thus: Such was the popularity of Jesus, and such the publicity of his death, burial, and resurrection, as to stamp the place of their occurrence with imperishable memory; that the descent of the Holy Ghost, the conversion of three thousand, the early founding of his Church in the city of his rejection, and the maintenance of its unity for thirty-seven years, combined to cherish in the public mind the recollection of the place; that though, just previous to the siege of the Holy City by Titus, his followers fled to Pella, beyond the Jordan, it was but a temporary departure, and that, after the storm of war had spent its fury, they returned to the city of their choice; that the desolation of seventy years which followed the conquest of the Romans was partial, and that, while the more wealthy of the population were sold into captivity, many of the common people retained their humbler homes; that, from the year 130 A.D. to the present time, Jerusalem has been an inhabited city, and that the Emperor Hadrian rebuilt the city, and, to dishonor alike the Jew and Christian, he reared a fane in honor of Jupiter on the site of Solomon’s Temple, and covered the tomb of Jesus with a temple to Venus; and that this temple to Venus remained standing for two hundred years after its erection, and was seen by Eusebius in the year 326 A.D. Illustration: GROUND PLAN OF THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE. Such is the evidence for the identity of the Holy Sepulchre as the tomb of Jesus, from his resurrection down to the commencement of authentic history. It is unwritten tradition, and, at best, presumptive proof. Extending through a period of three hundred years of wars, revolutions, and desolations, it is the most unreliable period of all the centuries subsequent to the Christian era. Whatever may have been the temporary interest attached to Golgotha and to the tomb of Joseph to the idle and curious, to the friend and foe of Jesus, it is evident, from their inspired narrative, that the sacred writers neither shared the excitement, nor considered it incumbent on them to describe with minuteness the scene of their Master’s death and burial. They were too much absorbed in recording the stupendous facts of our Lord’s expiatory sufferings, and the glory of his resurrection, to entertain their readers with an accurate account of the rock on which he expired, and of the sepulchre from which he arose triumphant. The place is forgotten in the significance of the event; the actor, and not the stage, is the burden of their history. Their simple story is, They led him away to crucify him;[229] When they came to the place which is called Calvary, there they crucified him;[230] The place where Jesus was crucified was nigh to the city;[231] Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid.[232] This is the sum of their record.