[1] In 1848 Samuel Gobat, Bishop of Jerusalem, opened the cemetery and dedicated it as ecumenical graveyard for congregants of Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed (Calvinist) and old Catholic faith.

Mount Zion Cemetery is reached passing the site of the former Bishop Gobat School, since 1967 housing the Jerusalem University College, founded as American Institute of Holy Land Studies in 1957.

In January 1844, during negotiations with Constantinople about the firman for building the [Christ] church, Nicolayson also asked the Sublime Porte for a permit to buy a plot of land for a cemetery on Mount Zion outside the city walls, where other Christian burial grounds were situated.

"[5] The other Christian burial grounds on Mount Zion are an Armenian, a Greek Orthodox and the Roman Catholic Franciscan cemetery, the latter containing also the grave of Oskar Schindler.

"Only in spring of 1848 did the British consul general in Constantinople and his colleague in Jerusalem,[ James Finn,] receive a firman to purchase a cemetery plot for the Protestant community.

[6] Between early 1850 and September 1852 Gustav Thiel (1825–1907) and his wife Maria Katharina Großsteinbeck (1826–1862) were employed as gardeners and guards of Mount Zion Cemetery at an annual income of 75 taler.

Carl Schlicht (1855–1930), then Evangelical pastor in Jerusalem, however, came out in favour of the continued cemeterial community and Blyth assured, an Anglican consecration would not exclude non-Anglicans from being buried.

[26] Since the extension, which the CMS was to buy, measured a four times bigger area than the reserve land to be ceded, the parties agreed upon contributing to the purchase price.

Brown (Christ Church, Jerusalem), Bussmann, Dickson, Schmidt and H. Sykes (CMS) signed the protocol determining the purchase, obliging the British and German governments to provide each for a quarter of the price amounting altogether to 1,440 Napoléons d’or (= 28,800 Francs of the Latin Monetary Union, or = £1,152).

Between 1914 and 1917, during World War I, the Sublime Porte expelled Britons as enemy aliens from the Ottoman Empire, thus leaving the joint administration of Mount Zion Cemetery to the Evangelical Protestants of German nationality.

[31] On 26 July 1921 Bishop Rennie MacInnes had convened the burial board and only two Evangelical representatives could take part, due to the flight or the expulsion of many German citizens from the Holy Land by the British Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (OETA).

Gustaf Dalman, director of the German Protestant Institute of Archaeology and representing the expelled Provost Friedrich Jeremias (1868–1945), presented the annual financial statements for the years of 1914 to 1917, when Britons could not participate in the joint board.

The Evangelical board members proposed that each congregation should contribute to the purchase price of approximately Palestine-£ 4,500 (at par with the British £) according to its expected share in the overall burials.

This objection was most probably advanced because of their shortage of locally achievable funds combined with the Nazi dictatorship in Germany only very reluctantly allowing German missions to buy foreign exchange for mostly inconvertible reichsmarks (ℛℳ).

Since Germany started the Second World War in 1939 the Anglicans had to maintain the cemetery alone, because the Evangelical seats on the board remained vacant, since most of the Christian Germans were interned in Bethlehem in Galilee, Waldheim and Wilhelma as enemy aliens by the British mandate government by mid-1940.

[42] The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan (and the Holy Land) (name extension as of 2005), which had been established and royally recognised in 1959, was not represented on the board, since the new statutes based on a draft already prepared before 1959.

The board started fundraising for a general renovation of the cemetery in order to thoroughly reconstruct the enclosing walls, to terrace slopes for gaining additional grave sites, and to repair the paths.

In the following years youth groups from German Protestant congregations and of the Johanniter-Unfall-Hilfe helped maintaining graves and cemetery while staying in a holiday camp in Israel.

So between 1994 and 1998 the administrator of Mount Zion Cemetery appealed several times at Bishop Samir Kafity to convene the board in order to commission a reconstruction of the walls.

In 2005 Bishop Riah Hanna Abu El-Assal told Protestant church representatives from Germany on their visit in Jerusalem that he is planning to convert Mount Zion Cemetery into a park.

In early 2007 members of the Diaspora Yeshiva, seated in the building of David's Tomb, usurped a site in the designated area for the city walls park outside of Mount Zion Cemetery.

For several weeks water poured out of the improperly installed leaking pipe flooding part of the cemetery and thoroughly soaking the earth at the section of the graves of soldiers killed in World War I.

At the instigation of the representative for the non-Jewish religions in Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupolianski personally promised the provost on 13 April, to take care of the issue.

On 6 August 2008 a representative of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the provost, the Evangelical administrator and the director of Jerusalem University College, who meanwhile has advanced to a guard of the cemetery, inspected the damages in the burial ground.

However, before that the archaeologist Yo'av Arbel (יואב ארבל), Israel Antiquities Authority, asked and was allowed to enter with a colleague through the insecure crater into the cavern underneath in order to explore the excavation tunnel presumably to be assigned to Bliss and Dickey.

"[56] British Foreign Secretary Stafford Northcote, 1st Earl of Iddesleigh replied: "The Archbishop [of Canterbury, Archibald Tait,] most readily concurs in the desire expressed in Count Hatzfeldt's letter as to the future harmonious cooperation of the Churches and the continued common use of the churchyard as hitherto.

On Mount Zion Cemetery a number of Bishops of Jerusalem have been buried, such as Michael Solomon Alexander, Joseph Barclay, Samuel Gobat, and George Francis Graham Brown.

There are a number of graves of educators, who built up educational institutions in the Holy Land, like Johann Ludwig Schneller (Syrian Orphanage, Jerusalem), the deaconesses Charlotte Pilz, Bertha Harz, and Najla Moussa Sayegh (Talitha Kumi Girls School, Jerusalem until 1948, now Beit Jala), scientists and artists, William Matthew Flinders Petrie (Egyptologist), Conrad Schick (architect), Gustav-Ernst Schultz (Prussian consul, Egyptologist), Anglican and Lutheran clergy, e.g. the first Arab Protestant pastor Bechara Canaan (father of Tawfiq Canaan), deaconesses running the Protestant German Hospital, Adalbert Einsler, doctor at Lepers Hospital Jesushilfe, and many other parishioners of the Anglican and Lutheran congregations of Arabic, English, and German language.

[67] The unauthorised burial carried out by members of the adjacent Jerusalem University College in 1989, unconsented with the board of cemetery or any of the enfranchised congregations, aroused their unrest.

However, under Israeli law limited tenures on grave sites, as introduced in 1929, are not allowed any more, so that Mount Zion Cemetery will definitely reach its maximal capacity one day.