Though it has been up for several months, only today did I notice David Plotz’s “Digging the Bible” series over at Slate.com. The series is essentially Plotz’s travel journal from an extended visit he made to Israel, in the course of which he toured a number of archaeological sites associated with the Bible. As he told readers during a recent chat session, his decision to visit the holy places in situ was inspired by the year he spent “Blogging the Bible” for Slate. (I highly recommend both series, for their humor as well as their educational value.)
I was interested to read about Plotz’s experience because it struck a chord with my recent research into biblical antiquarianism of the Renaissance. In many ways, my subjects‚Äîfigures like Benito Arias Montano and Joseph Scaliger‚Äîtraveled much the same intellectual arc as did Plotz. Determined in the first instance to understand the Biblical text, and to “translate” its arcana into useful knowledge for their contemporaries, Renaissance antiquarians and Plotz alike found themselves drawn ineluctably into the study of biblical geography and biblical antiquities.
The existing scholarship on the Renaissance version of this phenomenon is fairly unanimous in attributing the rise of proto-modern biblical archaeology in the Renaissance to Renaissance exegetes’ decision to borrow the antiquarian methods developed by classical scholars like Poggio Bracciolini and Flavio Biondo and apply them to Christian subjects. This makes a lot of sense, as many of the early biblical antiquarians were also accomplished scholars of Greco-Roman antiquity. (Arias Montano, for example, cut his teeth on Roman coinage in the 1540s, long before he wrote his famous critical apparatus to the Antwerp Polyglot Bible in the 1560s and 1570s.) Yet I also think that there is another, parallel tradition inherent within Christian thought that is equally capable of explaining exegetes’ persistent desire to connect the biblical text to its material context.
Most modern travelers to the Holy Land, knowing little or nothing about the early history of the Christian holy places which they visit, probably assume that they have been there forever. In fact, however, this is not the case, and (with the exception of a few Christian cults surrounding the Cave of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the Garden of Gethsemane) the vast majority of Palestinian sites that modern Christians venerate as canonical Holy Places had ceased to exist within the first century after Christ‚Äôs crucifixion.1 Responsibility for erasing the reminders of Christ’s earthly presence lay primarily with Palestine‚Äôs Roman governors. Their periodic anti-Christian persecutions, the emperor Titus’ destruction of the biblical Jerusalem in 70 AD, and Hadrian‚Äôs decision to reconstruct the city west of its original site in 135 AD, renaming it Aelia Capitolina, all guaranteed that most all of the places that Christians might reasonably have claimed as sacred spaces had disappeared.2
Quite remarkably, however, a significant portion of the blame could also be attributed to Christians themselves. Their commitment to the notion of their Church as a universal and purely spiritual entity led them to supress the worship of concrete sites or material remains as sacred.3 In Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony‚Äôs apt phrasing, when it came to memorializing the Christian Holy Sites ‚Äúthe pursuit of the culte de m?©moire was a delicate matter, provoking‚Äîsometimes simultaneously‚Äîharsh theological, political, and personal declamations.‚Äù4 Early Christian theologians read the New Testament, and particularly John 4:21‚Äì22, Ephesians 2:20‚Äì22, and Galatians 4:11, as calling Christians to abandon traditional concepts of sacred space. Theirs was to be a religion of the Spirit that filled the whole world, ‚Äúa universal religion of the whole oecumene without geographical boundaries.‚Äù5 Animating this opposition to localized devotion was the Christian community‚Äôs great concern to distinguish the new faith from Judaism, which theologians concluded could be defined as much by its veneration of sites of religious-historical importance as by its adherence to the Law. Consequently many of the most influential early theologians, like Tertullian and Origen, denounced the worship of Palestine as a Christian ‚ÄòHoly Land‚Äô as Judaizing. Indeed, several eschewed Palestine as a wicked land, polluted rather than sanctified by Christ‚Äôs Crucifixion and burial on its soil. This was an argument derived as much from practical observation as from textual tradition‚Äîthe tragic and confused state of Palestinian affairs under the late Empire confirmed for many Christians familiar with Josephus the futility of venerating the fallen, and therefore sinful, land of Judea.6
For more, continue reading “Digging the Bible, II” …
- Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred: The Debate on Christian Pilgrimage in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 20. [↩]
- C. Saulnier, “La vie monastique en Terre Sainte aupr?®s des lieux de p?®lerinage (IVe s.),” in Miscellanea Historiae Ecclesiasticae, vol. 6: Congr?®s de Varsovie, 25 juin‚Äì1er juillet 1978 (Brussels: ?âditions Nauwelaerts, 1983), 223‚Äì248, here at 224. [↩]
- Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred; P.W.L. Walker, Holy City, Holy Places? Christian Attitudes to Jerusalem and the Holy Land in the Fourth Century (Oxford, 1990); Robert L. Wilken, ‚ÄúEarly Christian Chiliasm, Jewish Messianism, and the Idea of the Holy Land,‚Äù The Harvard Theological Review 79 (1986): 298‚Äì307; W.D. Davies, The Gospel and the Land: Early Christianity and Jewish Territorial Doctrine (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974); Marcel Simon, ‚ÄúLes p?®lerinages dans l‚Äôantiquit?© chr?©tienne,‚Äù in F. Raph?§el, ed., Les p?®lerinages de l‚Äôantiquit?© biblique et classique ?† l‚ÄôOccident m?©di?©val (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1973), 97‚Äì115; idem, Verus Isra?´l. ?âtudes sur les relations entre chr?©tiens et juifs dans l‚Äôempire romain (135‚Äì425), 2nd ed. (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1964), 203‚Äì207. [↩]
- Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred, 14. [↩]
- Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred, 21. [↩]
- Pierre Maravall, ‚ÄúSaint J?©r?¥me et le p?®lerinage aux lieux saints de Palestine,‚Äù in Yves-Marie Duval, ed., J?©r?¥me entre l‚ÄôOccident et l‚ÄôOrient: XVIe centenaire du d?©part de saint J?©r?¥me de Rome et de son installation ?† Bethl?©em. Actes du Colloque de Chantilly (septembre 1986) (Paris: ?âtudes Augustiniennes, 1988), 345‚Äì353, here at 347. See Jerome‚Äôs epistle 46.8, in which he says that certain people considered the Holy Land to be a wicked place ‚Äúbecause it had drunk in the blood of the Lord.‚Äù [↩]