Adam G Beaver

In 1860, the Parisian polymath Ernest Renan (1823‚Äì1892) stepped off a ship in Syria and surveyed the landscape that unfolded before him. Renan had come to the Levant on behalf of the French government, assigned by his doting patron Napoleon III to oversee an archaeological inquiry into ancient Phoenician antiquities. Though still young‚Äîhe was not yet forty‚ÄîRenan was already considered a superstar among Western Orientalists, his published scholarship at the cutting edge of nineteenth-century Semitic philology.¹ In 1856, he was elected to the great antiquarian Acad?©mie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in recognition of his antiquarian studies of the societies of the ancient Levant. Decades after his death, later generations of Orientalists still considered Renan (to quote one among many admirers), ‚ÄúMaster of many languages ancient and modern, erudite in the lore of ages and places, expert in the technique of investigation and interpretation, imbued with the ideal as well as the methods of modern science.‚Äù ‚ÄúHe was master of all the varied and complex material of language, history, tradition, locale, which went into the making of his work,‚Äù he continued, noting that Renan‚Äôs imagination ‚Äúis the imagination of the archaeologist who constructs a city from broken stones, of the paleontologist who conceives an extinct animal from scattered bones and teeth.‚Äù² Over the course of the next two years, Renan applied his archaeologist‚Äôs sensibilities to his dig, which ultimately would yield a comprehensive and well-received report, 884 pages in length and graced with dozens of leaves of maps and plates illustrating the French team‚Äôs discoveries.³ Reading through this report, it is hard not to agree that, for all intents and purposes, Renan‚Äôs expedition is a good fit for Edward Sa?Ød‚Äôs now-classic paradigm of the ‚ÄúOrientalist‚Äù project‚Äîthe expedition and its report are textbook examples of the French empire‚Äôs attempt to use scholarship in order to lay claim to, or take possession of, the history, artifacts, and terrain of its Near Eastern subjects.⁴

Renan‚Äôs report on Phoenician antiquities was not, however, the most important text that he wrote during his stay in the Near East. That honor goes instead to his Vie de J?©sus, a radically historicized and humanizing biography of Christ which Renan published in 1863, a year before his exhaustive report on his Phoenician discoveries.⁵ The book began ostensibly as a side project, or hobby‚Äîan afterthought, really, by comparison with Renan‚Äôs official research agenda. Soon after arriving ‚Äúon the border of Galilee,‚Äù Renan explained to his lay readers, he had begun to use his weekends and holidays to ramble around the Galilean countryside, seeking greater insights about the contemporary state of the Semitic civilizations to which he had dedicated his academic career. In the course of his wanderings, and in spite of the fact that he was avowedly hostile to organized religion, he happened to visit most all of the places associated with the life of Christ. ‚ÄúI have traversed, in all directions, the country of the Gospels,‚Äù he reported; ‚ÄúI have visited Jerusalem, Hebron, and Samaria; scarcely any important locality of the history of Jesus has escaped me.‚Äù As he did so, he found himself marveling at something which he, always the skeptic, had never expected. Though he had always considered the Bible stories mere fantasies, in Palestine

All this [biblical] history, which at a distance seems to float in the clouds of an unreal world, … took a form, a solidity which astonished me. The striking agreement of the texts with the places, the marvelous harmony of the Gospel ideal with the country which served it as a framework, were like a revelation to me. I had before my eyes a fifth Gospel, torn, but still legible, and henceforward, through the recitals of Matthew and Mark, in place of an abstract being, whose existence might have been doubted, I saw living and moving an admirable human figure.⁶

To put it another way, it occurred to Renan that there might actually be sound archeological and geographical evidence capable of corroborating the biography of Christ—enough, even, to be able to write a ‘scientific’ history of the Gospels on good antiquarian principles.

This seemed a more striking discovery than his Phoenician potsherds; and so, during the course of a holiday spent ‚Äúin a Maronite cabin‚Äù in Ghazir (Lebanon), Renan collated this ‚Äúfifth Gospel‚Äù with the textual evidence for Jesus‚Äô life in the New Testament and began to write the Vie de J?©sus. Starting from the radical principle that Jesus ought to be treated as any other human subject, Renan deployed his argumentum ex terrae on almost every page in an effort to fill in the lived experience of Christ and his disciples which the (in his opinion) credulous and distorted account of the Gospels omitted.⁷ In describing Jesus‚Äô birthplace of Nazareth, for example, Renan attempted to use the landscape to gain some insight into both Jesus‚Äô mental horizons and the trajectory of his ministry:

The horizon from the town is limited. But if we ascend a little the plateau, swept by a perpetual breeze, which overlooks the highest houses, the prospect is splendid. On the west are seen the fine outlines of Carmel, terminated by an abrupt point, which seems to plunge into the sea. Before us are spread out the double summit which towers above Megiddo; the mountains of the country of Shechem, with their holy places of the patriarchal age; the hills of Gilboa, the small picturesque group to which are attached the graceful or terrible recollections of Shunem and of Endor; and Tabor, with its beautiful rounded form, which antiquity compared to a bosom. Through a depression between the mountains of Shunem and Tabor are seen the valley of the Jordan and the high plains of Peraea, which form a continuous line from the eastern side. On the north the mountains of Safed, in inclining towards the sea, conceal St. Jean d‚ÄôAcre, but permit the Gulf of Khaifa to be distinguished, Such was the horizon of Jesus. This enchanted circle, cradle of the kingdom of God, was for years his world. … [Y]onder, northwards, a glimpse is caught, almost on the flank of Hermon, of Caesarea-Philippi, his furthest point of advance into the Gentile world; and here, southwards, the more somber aspect of these Samaritan hills foreshadows the dreariness of Judea beyond, parched as by a scorching wind of defoliation and death.⁸

Not surprisingly, readers throughout the Christian world were captivated by Renan‚Äôs lyrical descriptions of the Holy Land and the fresh perspective which they cast on the biographical Christ (so much so, in fact, that many of them ignored his iconoclastic argument against Christ‚Äôs divinity).⁹

Renan’s interest in recovering the historical Jesus through the methods of biblical arch?¶ology places him squarely in the school of Higher Criticism, a historicized approach to biblical exegesis that was having its ‘moment’ in the nineteenth century. The extended century running from the rise of Napoleon to the outbreak of World War I witnessed the foundation of dozens of societies dedicated to the promotion of Palestinian geography and antiquarianism‚Äîincluding, for example, the Palestine Exploration Fund (est. 1865)‚Äîand the publication of dozens more books and treatises on the subject, many of them subsidized by official state organs.¹⁰ Among the many authors who took up the ‚Äòscientific‚Äô study of biblical antiquities were the British explorer, engineer, and soldier Sir Charles William Wilson (1836‚Äì1905), who oversaw the colonial administration of Jerusalem and wrote a narrative about his archaeological adventures (entitled The Recovery of Jerusalem [1871]), and Sir George Adam Smith (1856‚Äì1942), a Scottish theologian who, born in India, educated in Scotland and Germany, and traveled in the Levant, wrote an important treatise on The Historical Geography of the Holy Land, Especially in Relation to the History of Israel and of the Early Church (1894).¹¹ In Spain, this scholarly movement gave rise to the Benedictine monastery of Montserrat‚Äôs great Museo B??blico, founded by Bonaventura Ubach (1879‚Äì1960), known as ‚Äúel ge??grafo de la Biblia‚Äù‚Äî‚Äúthe Biblical Geographer‚Äù‚Äîwho championed the ‚Äúexperiential knowledge of the biblical landscape,‚Äù which one could only gain by ‚Äúvisiting in person, the more often and the more widely the better, all of the sites related to the Bible.‚Äù¹²

Interest in the material Levant was no less pronounced in North America.¹³ The American scholar Nathaniel Schmidt (1862‚Äì1939), for example, was one of the most distinguished Orientalists of his generation. Having studied at the University of Berlin, he was appointed Director of the American School at Jerusalem and later Professor of Semitic Languages and Literatures at Colgate and Cornell; among his many studies of biblical antiquity are Biblical Criticism and Theological Belief (1897), Outlines of a History of Syria (1902), a commentary on Ecclesiastes (1903), The Prophet of Nazareth (1905), and The Original Language of the Parables of Enoch (1908).¹⁴

This intensified interest in the archaeology and topography of the Holy Land was, in part, the product of the surging interest of nineteenth-century scholars in recovering the ‚Äòhistorical,‚Äô biographical Christ. Began in the works of theologians like Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694‚Äì1768) and Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768‚Äì1834). It reached its apogee in the mid-century critical ‚Äòbiographies‚Äô of Christ authored by the German David Friedrich Strauss (1808‚Äì1874) (Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet [1835‚Äì1836]) and Renan.¹⁵ Their pursuit of the biographical Jesus depended heavily upon reading the Gospels as historical books, of course; but it was quickly recognized that it would also require the careful reconstruction of the material environment in which Christ lived and died. This meant geography and archaeology.

Europeans‚Äô surging interest in the geography and antiquities of the biblical Holy Land was also driven by their imperial ambitions in the Levant. Whether or not one agrees with Edward Sa?Ød’s controversial thesis about the essentially colonializing agenda of Western Orientalism, one cannot deny that a striking number of the nineteenth-century scholars of the Holy Land‚Äîmen like Charles William Wilson, for example‚Äîwere directly affiliated with the business of colonial governance; and even those who weren‚Äôt were often the direct beneficiaries of the French and English governments‚Äô desire to embellish their military possession of the region with an active program of surveying their subjects, mapping their terrain, collecting their most noteworthy antiquities, and writing proper histories of this venerable region.¹⁶

Modern scholars of biblical topography and archaeology like Halvor Moxnes and Zekharyah Kallai¹⁷ have always acknowledged their debt to nineteenth-century figures like Renan and G.A. Smith.¹⁸ According to Moxnes, the nineteenth-century ‚Äúdevelopment of historical-critical Bible studies as well as Jesus research created a market for histories, geographies, and atlases of the Holy Land‚Äù which mark nothing less than ‚Äúa new beginning‚Äù in Western Christians‚Äô attitudes toward the Holy Land.¹⁹ In tracing the origins of their discipline back to this putative ‚Äúnew beginning,‚Äù they generally assume‚Äîor argue outright‚Äîthat there was something terribly unique about the convergence of historiographical innovation and imperial ambition in this time, that only at this moment was the studying of the geography and antiquities of the Holy Land affected by these stimuli. Drawing heavily on Sa?Ød’s Orientalist thesis, Moxnes highlights the ‚Äòunique‚Äô coincidence of ‚ÄúEuropean political and military engagement, followed by scientific explorations and archaeological investigations, … and eventually ‚Äòmass‚Äô tourism and pilgrimages,‚Äù speculating that it was only ‚Äú[a]s a result of these activities‚Äù that ‚Äú‚Äòthe Holy Land‚Äô became part and parcel of the imagination of Western Christians.‚Äù²⁰

From the perspective of a premodern historian, however, there is something altogether familiar about this story. Renan and his generation were hardly the first to indulge the idea that geographical evidence from the Holy Land could remedy the deficit in textual sources about biblical history. One can find the very same determination to treat the geography and topography of the Levant as a ‚Äúfifth gospel‚Äù almost as far back into antiquity as one wishes to look: Eusebius of Caesarea (ca. 260‚Äìca. 340), the first Church historian, made the same argument about the utility of the Holy Land at the dawn of the fourth century AD.²¹ Nor would Renan be the last‚Äîas the burgeoning trade in scholarly and pseudo-scholarly books on the archaeology of the Holy Land amply attest, Renan‚Äôs ‚Äúfifth Gospel‚Äù remains as seductive an idea as ever. As it turns out, however, Renan‚Äôs faith in the Palestinian landscape‚Äîthe faith shared by Eusebius, and every kindred exegete before and after‚Äîis predicated upon a deeply flawed assumption: that is, that the array of shrines and localizations that go into forming the modern Christian map of ‚Äòthe Holy Land‚Äô are the same as those known to Christ and his apostles, accurately maintained and continuously venerated across the intervening three, eighteen, or twenty centuries that separate their beholders from the historical Jesus.

1. Renan was educated at the Parisian ?âcole Sp?©ciale des Langues Orientales, the Coll?®ge de France, and the Societ?© Asiatique. There exist several excellent biographies of Renan: see Charles Chauvin, Renan: 1823‚Äì1892 (Paris: Descl?©e de Brouwer, 2000); David C.J. Lee, Ernest Renan: In the Shadow of Faith (London: Duckworth, 1996); Francis Mercury, Renan (Paris: O. Orban, 1990); and Harold W. Wardman, Ernest Renan: A Critical Biography (London: University of London, Athlone Press, 1964). [↩]
2. John Haynes Holmes, ‚ÄúIntroduction,‚Äù in Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus (New York, NY: Random House, 1927), 15‚Äì23, here at 20‚Äì21. [↩]
3. Ernest Renan, ed., Mission de Ph?©nicie (Paris: Imprimerie imp?©riale, 1864). [↩]
4. Edward Sa?Ød, Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978). [↩]
5. Renan, Vie de J?©sus (Paris: ???, 1863). [↩]
6. Renan, Life of Jesus, 61. [↩]
7. See Laudyce R?©tat, L‚ÄôIsrael de Renan (Bern: Lang, 2005). [↩]
8. Renan, Life of Jesus, conclusion of ch. 2 [↩]
9. According to Renan‚Äôs Modern Library editor, his text sold ‚Äúlike a Waverly Novel‚Äù and ‚ÄúEditions of 5,000 copies each were exhausted in eight or ten days.‚Äù It sold 60,000 copies within its first five months of publication, and made Renan virtually a household name in the West. [↩]
10. Naomi Shepherd, The Zealous Intruders. The Western Rediscovery of Palestine (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1987). [↩]
11. Charles William Wilson, The Recovery of Jerusalem: A Narrative of Exploration and Discovery in the City and the Holy Land … , ed. Walter Morrison (London: R. Bentley, 1871); George Adam Smith, The Historical Geography of the Holy Land, Especially in Relation to the History of Israel and of the Early Church (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1894). Some index of the popularity of biblical arch?¶ology in this period may be deduced from the fact that Smith‚Äôs book alone went through sixteen editions by 1910. [↩]
12. Romauld D??az i Carbonell, Dom Bonaventura Ubach. L‚Äôhome, el monjo, el biblista, Biblioteca Biogr?†fica Catalana, 34 (Barcelona: Aedos, 1962), 47. See also Carmen Vald?©s Pereiro, ‚ÄúEl Reverendo Padre Bonaventura Ubach, peregrino en Tierra Santa: el monje y su obra,‚Äù Arbor 711‚Äì712 (2005): 893‚Äì911. [↩]
13. For American interest in the Levant, see Hilton Obenzinger, American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). [↩]
14. Millar Burrows, ‚ÄúNathaniel Schmidt in Memoriam,‚Äù Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 75 (1939): 7‚Äì8. [↩]
15. David Friedrich Strauss, Das leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (T?ºbingen: C.F. Osiander, 1835‚Äì1836). [↩]
16. Gideon Biger, An Empire in the Holy Land: Historical Geography of the British Administration in Palestine, 1917‚Äì1929 (New York: St. Martin‚Äôs Press, 1994); Roza I.M. El-Eini, Mandated Landscape: British Imperial Rule in Palestine, 1929‚Äì1948 (London: Routledge, 2006). There is great similarity between the British and French experience in the Near East and their experiences in the Middle East and Indian subcontinent. See, for example, the researches of Sir Alexander Burnes (1805‚Äì1841), who charted the Indus and visited Kabul; J.E. Taylor (‚Äì), who discovered Sumerian civilization; Henry Rawlinson (), who deciphered cuneiform; A.H. Layard (), who surveyed Nineveh; and Gertrude Bell (), who surveyed the Abbasid castle of Ukhadair in Iraq. For Sa?Ød, see Edward Sa?Ød, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). [↩]
17. Zekharyah Kallai, Biblical Historiography and Historical Geography: Collection of Studies, Beitr?§ge zur Erforschung des Alten Testaments und des antiken Judentums, 44 (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 1998). [↩]
18. Megan Bishop Moore, Philosophy and Practice in Writing a History of Ancient Israel, Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies, 435 (New York: T&T Clark, 2006), 126. [↩]
19. Halvor Moxnes, ‚ÄúThe Construction of Galilee as a Place for the Historical Jesus,‚Äù Biblical Theology Bulletin 31 (2001): 26‚Äì37. [↩]
20. Moxnes, ‚ÄúThe Construction of Galilee.” [↩]
21. Eusebius. See my posts on “Digging the Bible, I & II” for more on Eusebius‚Äôs and other patristic authors‚Äô desire to use the Palestinian landscape as a source for their biblical exegesis. [↩]