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The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is one of the oldest prominent Christian churches in current use and has undergone a number of different buildings and changes in control by different denominations. ==Construction== In the early 2nd century AD, the site of the present Church had been a temple of Aphrodite; several ancient writers alternatively describe it as a temple to Venus, the Roman equivalent to Aphrodite. Eusebius claims, in his ''Life of Constantine'', that the site of the Church had originally been a Christian place of veneration, but that Hadrian had deliberately covered these Christian sites with earth, and built his own temple on top, due to his hatred for Christianity.〔Eusebius, ''Life of Constantine'', 3:26〕 Although Eusebius does not say as much, the temple of Aphrodite was probably built as part of Hadrian's reconstruction of Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina in 135 AD, following the destruction of the Jewish Revolt of 70 AD and the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–135 AD. Emperor Constantine I ordered in about 325/326 that the temple be demolished and the soil - which had provided a flat surface for the temple - be removed, instructing Macarius of Jerusalem, the local Bishop, to build a church on the site. The Pilgrim of Bordeaux reports in 333: "There, at present, by the command of the Emperor Constantine, has been built a basilica, that is to say, a church of wondrous beauty".〔''Itinerarium Burdigalense'', page 594〕 Constantine directed his mother, Helena, to build churches upon sites which commemorated the life of Jesus Christ; she was present in 326 at the construction of the church on the site, and involved herself in the excavations and construction. During the excavation, Helena is alleged to have rediscovered the True Cross, and a tomb, though Eusebius's account makes no mention of Helena's presence at the excavation, nor of the finding of the cross but only the tomb. According to Eusebius, the tomb exhibited "a clear and visible proof" that it was the tomb of Jesus.〔Eusebius, ''Life of Constantine'', Chapter 28〕 Socrates Scholasticus (born c. 380), in his ''Ecclesiastical History,'' gives a full description of the discovery (that was repeated later by Sozomen and by Theodoret) which emphasizes the role played in the excavations and construction by Helena; just as the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem (also founded by Constantine and Helena) commemorated the birth of Jesus, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre would commemorate his death and resurrection. Constantine's church was built as two connected churches over the two different holy sites, including a great basilica (the ''Martyrium'' visited by Egeria in the 380s), an enclosed colonnaded atrium (the ''Triportico'') with the traditional site of ''Golgotha'' in one corner, and a rotunda, called the ''Anastasis'' ("Resurrection"), which contained the remains of a rock-cut room that Helena and Macarius identified as the burial site of Jesus. The rockface at the west end of the building was cut away, although it is unclear how much remained in Constantine's time, as archaeological investigation has revealed that the temple of Aphrodite reached far into the current rotunda area,〔Virgilio Corbo, ''The Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem'' (1981)〕 and the temple enclosure would therefore have reached even further to the west. According to tradition, Constantine arranged for the rockface to be removed from around the tomb, without harming it, in order to isolate the tomb; in the centre of the rotunda is a small building called the ''Kouvouklion'' (Kουβούκλιον; Modern Greek for small compartment) or ''Aedicule''〔Americans spell this as ''Edicule''〕 (from Latin: ''aediculum'', small building), which supposedly encloses this tomb, although it is not currently possible to verify the claim, as the remains are completely enveloped by a marble sheath. However, there are several thick window wells extending through the marble sheath, from the interior to the exterior that are not marble clad. They appear to reveal an underlying limestone rock, which may be part of the original living rock of the tomb. The discovery of the kokhim tombs just beyond the west end of the Church, and more recent archaeological investigation of the rotunda floor, suggest that a narrow spur of at least ten yards length would have had to jut out from the rock face if the contents of the Aedicule were once inside it. The dome of the rotunda was completed by the end of the 4th century. Each year, the Eastern Orthodox Church celebrates the anniversary of the consecration of the Church of the Resurrection (Holy Sepulchre) on September 13〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://ocafs.oca.org/FeastSaintsViewer.asp?SID=4&ID=1&FSID=102593 )〕 (for those churches which follow the traditional Julian calendar, September 13 currently falls on September 26 of the modern Gregorian calendar). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「History of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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