General Gordon had not then been long in Palestine, and he was not aware that this tomb had been described already, and had been attributed to a much later age than that of our Lord. He was not versed in Palestine archæology, and the arguments brought forward by the supporters of this opinion are not convincing. The fourth Gospel[313] says that “in [or “at”] the place where He was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new sepulchre” which was “nigh at hand,” but not of necessity in the cliff of Calvary, which would indeed be a very unlikely position for a private tomb. Others have urged that since the “deacons of the Church of the Marturion,” named Nonus and Onesimus,[314] were buried near this place, and one of their texts speaks of a deacon as “buried near his Lord,” there must have been an early Christian tradition pointing to this site. But the church so described was that built by Constantine, and the texts are not earlier at most than the fourth century, when the whole Christian world accepted the present traditional sites of Calvary and the Sepulchre. The “Garden Tomb” is not a Jewish tomb, and there is good reason to suppose that it is not older than the twelfth century A. D. It was first excavated in 1873, when I visited and described it.[315] When opened, it was found to be filled to the roof with bones, and when these were cleared away by Herr K. Schick, two Latin patriarch’s crosses, in red paint, were found on the east wall of the inner chamber. These could not have been painted before the twelfth century, since the Greek cross is always found alone earlier in Palestine. East of the tomb there are marks of vaults supported against the rock. It is well known that the Hospice of the Templars[316] was here built, for pilgrims visiting Jerusalem, not earlier than the end of the twelfth century, and it was called the Asnerie, or “place for asses,” because the asses used by the travellers were here stabled. The remains of mangers were still visible in 1881, at the south-west corner of this building, in the flat ground below the cliff to the south. The hospice thus appears to have been about 200 feet square, and the tomb in all probability was connected with it, as a sepulchre for pilgrims or for Templars. The immense accumulation of corpses, here hurriedly buried, may have been due to the Kharezmian massacre in 1244 A. D. The inner chamber of this tomb, to the east, had three graves on the floor. It does not in any way answer to the tomb described in the Gospels, nor is it at all like the Greco-Jewish tombs of the first century A. D. [Illustration: TOMB WEST OF CALVARY. From the Author’s sketch.] [Sidenote: THE NEW TOMB]