• In early March, I’ll be in Oslo, Norway for a conference, organized by Halvor Moxnes, on “Holy Land as Homeland.” While most of the speakers focus on the supposed origins of modern biblical criticism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I’m planning to use my paper—entitled “Nihil sub sole novum? Early Modern Approaches to the Holy Land”—to encourage the group to look further back, to the Renaissance, for important precedents for later scholars’ historical and archaeological approach to biblical antiquity.

• In mid-March, I’ll be at the Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Los Angeles. Together with Daniel Stein Kokin and Marion Leathers Kuntz, I’ll be part of a panel on Early Modern Promised Lands. My paper, entitled “Nebuchadnezzar’s Jewish Legions,” traces the legend that Spain was settled by Jews from the Babylonian Captivity through its various incarnations in Renaissance historiography.

The genetic signatures of people in Spain and Portugal provide new and explicit evidence of the mass conversions of Sephardic Jews and Muslims to Catholicism in the 15th and 16th centuries after Christian armies wrested Spain back from Muslim control, a team of geneticists reports.

Read the full article here.

While my admiration for Davis’ work remains unchanged‚Äîif anything, hearing her former students’ tributes and watching her in action at her 80th birthday symposium only increased it‚ÄîI do, nevertheless, have one big question for Davis about her portrait of Leo Africanus. I will probably begin my remarks on Martire tomorrow evening by justifying my decision to study his embassy, and I plan to make a claim that Spain’s engagement with the Muslim empires of the Levant left a measurable imprint on development of modern Spanish state, society, and culture. In other words, figures like Martire mattered beyond the intrinsic interest of their individual stories. If we take away Ramusio, whose later editions of Leo Africanus’s works were crucial in preserving their author’s historical memory, can the same be said of Leo Africanus? Did his description of Africa demonstrably change Europeans’ impressions of the continent and its peoples? Or does he matter more simply for the possibilities that his individual story reveals? In other words, I suppose I’m asking‚Äîto borrow a distinction beautifully drawn by Jill Lepore in her “Historians Who Love Too Much”¹‚Äîis he a biographical figure, or merely the vehicle for a microhistory of North Africa and Renaissance Rome?

1. Jill Lepore, ‚ÄúHistorians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,‚Äù Journal of American History 88 (2001), 129-144. I should note that I was only reminded of this article, fortuitously, by reading Rebecca Goetz’ terrific syllabus.

In my talk I will focus not on the De orbe novo, however, but rather on another, smaller work which Maritre appended to several of its first printings. Entitled simply Legatio Babylonica, it consists of three humanist epistles which Martire first drafted in 1501‚Äì1502 in the course of his embassy to Egypt on behalf of the Catholic Monarchs. As I’ll attempt to show, the Legatio ought to receive as much attention as the more famous De orbe, for two reasons: first of all, because it reminds us of the relatively greater importance of the Near East vis-?†-vis the Americas in shaping Spanish policy in the early sixteenth century; and secondly, because its record of Martire’s reactions to, and negotiations with, the Mamluk empire offer an opportunity to question much of what we think we know‚Äîwhether from Edward Sa?Ød, or more recent books by Nancy Bisaha and Margaret Meserve, for example‚Äîabout the history of “orientalism” in the Renaissance.

I hope to see you there, and to hear your feedback on my talk!

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, “Introduction,” in Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus (New York, NY: Random House, 1927), 15–23, here at 20–21.
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’s Modern Library editor, his text sold “like a Waverly Novel” and “Editions of 5,000 copies each were exhausted in eight or ten days.” 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, “Nathaniel Schmidt in Memoriam,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 75 (1939): 7–8.
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, “The Construction of Galilee as a Place for the Historical Jesus,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 31 (2001): 26–37.
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.

Two paintings in particular stood out to me. The first was Juan Bautista Maino’s 1612 Adoration of the Magi. (Apologies for the terrible picture, but it’s all that I could find to link to. A better image is available in the slideshow on the MFA’s website.) To my untrained eye, the painting looks virtually identical to one of the belenes, or cr?™che scenes, still popular in Spain. The ivy on the stones, the appearance of the Magi… Maino’s scene is a dead-ringer for its modern three-dimensional counterparts. This makes perfect sense to me: “Belenismo,” the art of making lifelike belenes, was essentially imported from Naples in the early seventeenth century, at precisely the time that Maino was painting. (Fow what it’s worth, iIt is still considered a high art in Spain, and every December the city of Madrid assembles a walking tour of the city’s most impressive examples.)

The other painting that caught my eye was Luis Trist?°n de Escamilla’s 1613 Crucifixion. (No online photo, I’m afraid.) As one of my fellow participants pointed out, deep in the background of the painting, barely visible behind the crucified Christ’s feet, the city of Toledo stands in for Jerusalem. This may just be an example of a tendency which I tend to associate with northern art of the period: that is, to transpose biblical events to local landscapes, perhaps to make it easier for the beholder to feel that he/she is really witnessing the scene before him/her. But this may also be a reference to the legend, popularized in the early 1570s by the court historian Esteban de Garibay, that Toledo literally was the New Jerusalem. The legend rested on two bases: first, the alleged topographical identity of Jerusalem and Toledo; and second, the fact that Toledo is supposed to have been founded by a contingent of Israelites brought to Spain in the sixth century BC by Nebuchadnezzar, in the period commonly known as the “Babylonian Captivity.”

In any case, it is a terrific show, and I hope that it will receive many visitors!

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” …

1. Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred: The Debate on Christian Pilgrimage in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 20.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred, 14.
5. Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred, 21.
6. 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