• 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.

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.

Holy Sepulchers

• Sarah Blick & Rita Tekippe, Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles, 2 vols., Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions, 104 (Leiden: Brill, 2005).
• Genevi?®ve Bresc-Bautier, ‚ÄúLes imitations du Saint-Sepulcre de Jerusalem (IXe‚ÄìXVe si?®cles): Arch?©ologie d‚Äôune d?©votion,‚Äù Revue d‚ÄôHistoire de la Spiritualit?© 50 (1974): 319‚Äì342.
• N.C. Brooks, The Sepulchre of Christ in Art and Liturgy, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, 7.2 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1921).
• Ludwig H. Heydenreich, ‚ÄúDie Cappella Rucellai von San Pancrazio in Florenz,‚Äù in Millard Meiss, ed., De artibus opuscula XL: Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, 2 vols. (New York, NY: New York University Press, 1961), 1:219‚Äì229.
• F.W. Kent, ‚ÄúThe Letters Genuine and Spurious of Giovanni Rucellai,‚Äù Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 37 (1974): 342‚Äì349.
• Richard Krautheimer, ‚ÄúIntroduction to an ‚ÄòIconography of Mediaeval Architecture,‚Äô‚Äù Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942): 1‚Äì33.
• Justin E. A. Kroesen, The Sepulchrum Domini through the Ages: Its Form and Function (Leuven: Peeters, 2000).
• Colin Morris, The Sepulchre of Christ and the Medieval West: From the Beginning to 1600 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
• ———-, ‚ÄúBringing the Holy Sepulchre to the West: S. Stefano, Bologna, from the Fifth to the Twentieth Century,‚Äù in R.N. Swanson, ed., The Church Retrospective, Studies in Church History, 33 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press for The Ecclesiastical History Society, 1997), 31‚Äì60.
• Damiano Neri, Il S. Sepulcro riprodotto in Occidente (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1971).
• Robert Ousterhout, ‚ÄúLoca Sancta and the Architectural Responses to Pilgrimage,‚Äù in idem, ed., The Blessings of Pilgrimage (Urbana/Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 108‚Äì124.
• ———-, ‚ÄúThe Church of Santo Stefano: A ‚ÄòJerusalem‚Äô in Bologna,‚Äù Gesta 20 (1981): 311‚Äì321.

[It is interesting to note that the same pattern of replication occurred in medieval Ethiopia, as well; see Marilyn E. Heldman, “Architectural Symbolism, Sacred Geography and the Ethiopian Church,” Journal of Religion in Africa 22 (1992): 222–241.]

Via Crucis & Sacri Monti

• Amilcare Barbero, ed., Atlante dei sacri monti, calvari e complessi devozionali europei (Novara: Istituto geografico De Agostini, 2001).
• Philippe Baud, Chemin de croix: les origines d‚Äôune d?©votion populaire (Paris: M?©diaspaul, 1995).
• David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 192‚Äì245.
• Sergio Gensini, ed., La ‚ÄúGerusalemme‚Äù di San Vivaldo e i Sacri Monti in Europa (Firenze‚ÄìSan Vivaldo, 11‚Äì13 settembre 1986), Centro internazionale di studi ‚ÄúLa ‚ÄòGerusalemme‚Äô di San Vivaldo,‚Äô Montaione, 1 (Montaione: Comune di Montaione, 1989).
• Ces?°reo Gil Atrio, ‚ÄúEspa?±a, ¬øcu?±a del Viacrucis?‚Äù Archivo Ibero-Americano 11[n.s.] (1951): 63‚Äì92.
• Pedro Jos?© Pradillo y Esteban, V??a Crucis, Calvarios y Sacromontes: arte y religiosidad popular en la contrareforma. Guadalajara, un caso excepcional (Guadalajara: Diputaci??n Provincial de Guadalajara, 1996).
• Kathryn Rudy, ‚ÄúNorthern European Visual Responses to Holy Land Pilgrimage, 1453‚Äì1550,‚Äù PhD dissertation, Art History, Columbia University, 2001.
• Am?©d?©e Teetaert da Zedelgem, ‚ÄúAper?ßu historique sur la d?©votion au chemin de la croix,‚Äù Collectanea franciscana 19 (1949): 45‚Äì142.
• Herbert Thurston, The Stations of the Cross: An Account of their History and Devotional Purpose (London: Burns & Oates, 1906).
• Dorino Tuniz, ed., I Sacri Monti nella cultura religiosa e artistica del Nord Italia (Cinisello Balsamo [Milan]: San Paolo, 2005).

Carmelite Deserts

• Trevor Johnson, ‚ÄúGardening for God: Carmelite Deserts and the Sacralisation of Natural Space in Counter-Reformation Spain,‚Äù in Will Coster & Andrew Spicer, eds., Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 193‚Äì210.
• J.M. Mu?±oz Jim?©nez, ‚ÄúYermos y Sacromontes: Itinerarios de V??a Crucis en los Desiertos Carmelitanos,‚Äù in Los caminos y el arte. Actas, VI Congreso Espan?µl de Historia del Arte C.E.H.A., Santiago de Compostela, 16‚Äì20 de junio de 1986, 3 vols., Cursos y congresos da Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 54 (Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 1989), 3:171‚Äì182.

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

This history of destruction and disregard was only reversed in the fourth century, well after all memory of the actual localizations o the Holy Places had been forgotten. What accounts for the resuscitation of interest in the Holy Land was the Christianization of the empire under Constantine (ca. 280‚Äì337). The surge of official interest in localizing the Holy Sites and relics of Palestine, some historians have conjectured, may have been orchestrated for the purposes of increasing imperial prestige. Throughout the 320s and 330s Constantine and his mother, S. Helena, carried out an aggressive campaign to recover and restore places of biblical and/or Christian significance throughout Palestine, and particularly those in the vicinity of Aelia Capitolina (which Constantine rebaptized Jerusalem in 325). In these early days, this meant essentially the excavation of buildings and objects in neighborhoods loosely thought to have been of some biblical significance, the ‚Äúidentification‚Äù of the resulting discoveries as authentic Holy Places and relics, and the construction of new, commemorative churches over them.¹ While on pilgrimage in 328‚Äì329, for example, Helena presided over the excavation of Calvary and the Holy Sepulcher, the discovery of the True Cross, and the erection of basilicas in Bethlehem and on Mount Sion.² Eusebius of Caesaria (ca. 260‚Äìca. 340), Constantine‚Äôs contemporary and the first Church historian, accordingly memorialized Constantine as the inventor of the Holy Land in his Vita Constantini.³

Within Constantine‚Äôs lifetime, the burgeoning number of Palestinian Holy Sites began to attract the attention of the wider Christian community, and pilgrims and ecclesiatical authors alike began what was to be a long process of describing and memorializing them in written texts. The principal objectives of these textual commemorations were to attest the authenticity of the Holy Sites from ‚Äòeyewitness‚Äô experience, and to publicize them to the wider Christian world in the interest of stimulating devotion to them and, ideally, pilgrimage. In so doing, these texts had the ancillary effect of weaving these sites together into a composite portrait of ‚Äúthe Holy Land.‚Äù This process of historical and topographical bricolage arguably begins with Eusebius’ Vita Constantini (cited above). In order to praise the result of Constantine and Helena‚Äôs program of excavation and church-building, Eusebius made a conscious attempt to reduce and conform the complex reality of fourth-century Palestine to a Christian Holy Land.⁴ According to Jonathan Z. Smith, ‚Äúwhat Constantine accomplished with power and wealth was advanced by rhetors like Eusebius, who built a ‚ÄòHoly Land‚Äô with words.‚Äù⁵

Overcoming Christians’ reluctance to venerate Palestine was not, however, solely a matter of ‘rediscovering’ the holy places, unearthing relics, and erecting grand basilicas. Christian theologians maintained their objections, in spite of the Constantinian restoration of the Holy Places. Their aversion was founded on scriptural, pragmatic, and theological grounds, a combination marshaled perhaps most trenchantly in the works of Gregory of Nyssa (ca. 335‚Äìpost 394). Gregory, who was born after the Constantinian restoration, delivered nothing short of a blistering attack on monastic pilgrimage as unbiblical, practically dangerous, and intellectually misguided in his letter On Pilgrimages (379).

As Gregory notes at the outset of his letter, ‚Äúit is right that we should apply … a strict and flawless measure … ‚ÄîI mean, of course, the Gospel rule of life.‚Äù And so he first puts pilgrimage to the test of Holy Writ:

There are some amongst those who have entered upon the monastic and hermit life, who have made it a part of their devotion to behold those spots at Jerusalem where the memorials of our Lord’s life in the flesh are on view; it would be well, then, to look to this rule, and if the finger of its precepts points to the observance of such things, to perform the work, as the actual injunction of our Lord. But if they lie quite outside the commandment of the Master, I do not see what there is to command any one who has become a law of duty to himself to be zealous in performing any of them.

Pilgrimage, of course, fails this test: “When the Lord invites the blest to their inheritance in the kingdom of heaven, he does not include a pilgrimage to Jerusalem amongst their good deeds; when he announces the Beatitudes, he does not name amongst them that sort of devotion.”

Things are no better when Gregory moves on to the purely practical arguments against pilgrimage. According to Gregory, the practical demands of Near Eastern travel demand the mixing of the sexes, which invites sexual sin and detracts from the Christian‚Äôs devotion. Not that there was good reason to avoid such sin on the journey‚Äîshould one manage to arrive in Palestine with virtue intact, writes Gregory, Jerusalem itself will soon steal it. For Gregory and his followers, Jerusalem had become a dangerous den of sin and iniquity, a cesspool that threatened the pilgrim‚Äôs body and soul. This was a direct consequence of Christ‚Äôs Crucifixion, which was said to have “cursed” the city‚Äîin the words of Jerome, “because it has drunk the blood of the Lord.”⁶ Thus,

there is no form of uncleanness that is not perpetrated amongst them [ie. the inhabitants of Jerusalem]; rascality, adultery, theft, idolatry, poisoning, quarrelling, murder, are rife; and the last kind of evil is so excessively prevalent, that nowhere in the world are people so ready to kill each other as there; where kinsmen attack each other like wild beasts, and spill each other’s blood, merely for the sake of lifeless plunder.

Ultimately, however, it was the theological argument against pilgrimage that Gregory found most compelling. Like his fellow patristic theologians, exceptionally concerned with ‘judaizing,’ Gregory considered it a damnable fallacy to think that the Holy Sites were somehow still imbued by a residual holiness dating to Christ’s physical presence there:

What advantage, moreover, is reaped by him who reaches those celebrated spots themselves? He cannot imagine that our Lord is living, in the body, there at the present day, but has gone away from us foreigners; or that the Holy Spirit is in abundance at Jerusalem, but unable to travel as far as us. Whereas, if it is really possible to infer God’s presence from visible symbols, one might more justly consider that He dwelt in the Cappadocian nation than in any of the spots outside it. For how many Altars there are there, on which the name of our Lord is glorified!

Gregory could speak with authority on these matters, for he had traveled to Palestine on ecclesiastical business; and even after having seen Jerusalem, still he could affirm that

We confessed that the Christ Who was manifested is very God as much before as after our sojourn at Jerusalem; our faith in Him was not increased afterwards any more than it was diminished. Before we saw Bethlehem we knew His being made man by means of the Virgin; before we saw His Grave we believed in His Resurrection from the dead; apart from seeing the Mount of Olives, we confessed that His Ascension into heaven was real.

In fact, he and his traveling companions ‚Äúderived only thus much of profit from our travelling thither, namely that we came to know by being able to compare them, that our own places are far holier than those abroad.‚Äù His conclusion? “O ye who fear the Lord, praise Him in the places where ye now are. Change of place does not effect any drawing nearer unto God, but wherever thou mayest be, God will come to thee, if the chambers of thy soul be found of such a sort that He can dwell in thee and walk in thee.”

What finally turned the tide against the objections of theologians like Gregory was not the imperial archaeology of Constantine, but rather scholarship (and here we return to the theme with which I opened this post). From the very earliest days of pilgrimage‚Äîeven prior to Constantine’s accession‚Äîone argument alone had redeemed Holy Land pilgrimage from critics like Gregory. That was the need to study the Holy Land, so as better to understand Scripture. Here the model is certainly Gregory’s great contemporary S. Jerome (d. 419), the Holy Land’s model student.

Along with Origen and Eusebius, Jerome was one of the first Christian intellectuals to advocate for the centrality of eyewitness topographical knowledge to intelligent exegesis. Against the criticism of influential contemporaries like Gregory, Jerome argued that one could not understand the historical narrative encapsulated within the Bible without first familiarizing oneself with the historical sites of Old- and New-Testament Judea.⁷ In the Preface to his Latin translation of the Septuagint‚Äôs version of the Book of Chronicles (Paralipomenon), written in 387, Jerome argued that

In the same way that one understands better the Greek historians when one has seen Athens with his own eyes, and the third book of the Aenead when one has journeyed from Troade to Sicily and from Sicily to the mouth of the Tiber, so one understands better the Holy Scriptures when one has seen Judea with one‚Äôs own eyes and contemplated the ruins of its ancient cities.⁸

Jerome repeated the comparison five years later, in a letter sent from Bethlehem to the Roman aristocrat Marcella in the hope of persuading her to join him in the Holy Land. Writing in the name of his charges Paula and Eustochium, he lauded ‚Äúthe bishops, the martyrs, the divines, who have come to Jerusalem from a feeling that their devotion and knowledge would be incomplete and their virtue without the finishing touch, unless they adored Christ in the very spot where the gospel first flashed from the gibbet. If a famous orator [ie. Cicero of C?¶cilius] blames a man for having learned Greek at Lilyb?¶um instead of at Athens, and Latin in Sicily instead of at Rome (on the ground, obviously, that each province has its own characteristics), can we suppose a Christian‚Äôs education complete who has not visited the Christian Athens?‚Äù⁹ Similarly, in a letter to Paulinus of Nola, Jerome compared the Holy Land pilgrim to the Apostle Paul, whose willingness to “go up to Jerusalem” (Galatians 1:18) proved that he was the kind of admirable man, like Pythagoras or Plato, who had “traversed provinces, crossed seas, and visited strange peoples, simply to see face to face persons whom they only knew from books” and thereby to “find something to learn” and “become constantly wiser and better.”¹⁰

Thus it was every serious Christian‚Äôs duty to study the topography of Palestine, God‚Äôs classroom, without knowledge of which the living drama of the Bible would remain an abstract document. In an effort to encourage such studies, Jerome translated Eusebius‚Äô Greek Onomasticon (ca. 330), a gazetteer of biblical place names, into Latin as the De situ et nominibus locorum Hebraeorum.¹¹

As E.D. Hunt has shown, this belief in the scholarly value of travel was one that Jerome and his peers had inherited from the classical culture in which they were raised.¹² Hunt speculates that this early Christian practice of scholarly pilgrimage is a continuation of an ancient pagan tradition of “erudite, investigative tourism favoured by leading men of learning and leisure, and reaching its heyday in the freedom of mobility afforded by the pax Romana.”¹³ He cites the examples of Demetrius from Tarsus (Cilicia) in Plutarch’s dialogue On the Decline of Oracles, who is said to have traveled on imperial orders as far as Britain “for the purposes of investigation and sightseeing,” as well as the group of Roman travelers who congregate at Delphi in another of Plutarch’s dialogues, The Oracles at Delphi.¹⁴ Perhaps the best example, however, is Pausanias’ Description of Greece.¹⁵ Hunt notes that Pausanias’ work is much less a guide to modern Greece than it is a “panorama … dominated by the vestiges of Greek antiquity,” “a committed search for what he perceived to be the roots of Greek culture and identity.” He also notes that John Elsner “has made illuminating comparisons between Pausanias’ quest for … religious self-identity [in Greece] and the Christian traveller’s immersion into the biblical landscape of the Holy Land.”¹⁶

1. For an overview of Christian imperial construction in Jerusalem, see G?ºnter Stemberger, Jews and Christians in the Holy Land: Palestine in the Fourth Century, trans. Ruth Tuschling (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2000), 48‚Äì120.
2. Jan Willem Drijvers, Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great and her Finding of the True Cross (Leiden: Brill, 1992). S. Helena‚Äôs time in Jerusalem is described in Eusebius’ Vita Constantini, III.42‚Äì47, and Rufinus of Aquilea’s Historia Ecclesiastica, X.7‚Äì8.
3. Eusebius of Caesarea, Life of Constantine, ed. & trans. Averil Cameron & Stuart G. Hall, Clarendon Ancient History Series (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999).
4. Robert L. Wilken, The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 81.
5. Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago, 1987), 79.
6. Maravall, “Saint J?©r?¥me et le p?®lerinage,” 347.
7. Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred, 69; F.M. Abel, “Saint J?©r?¥me et J?©rusalem,” in Vincenzo Vannutelli, ed., Miscellanea Geronimiana (Rome: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1920), 138‚Äì139.
8. Jerome, Praefatio in Librum Paralipomenon de graeco emmendato (395), in Biblia Sacra iuxta Latinam Vulgatam Versionem ad codicum fidem … , vol. 7: Liber Verborum dierum (Rome, 1948), 7‚Äì10. ‚Äúquomodo grecorum historias magis intellegunt qui athenas uiderint, et tertium uergilii librum qui troade per leucaten et acroceraunia ad siciliam et inde ad ostia tiberis nauigarint, ita sanctam scripturam lucidius intuebitur qui iudaeam oculis contemplatus est et antiquarum urbium memorias locorum que uel eadem uocabula uel mutata cognouerit.‚Äù
9. Jerome, Ep. 46, ¬?9.
10. Jerome, Ep. 53, ¬?1‚Äì2: ‚ÄúWe read in old tales that men traversed provinces, crossed seas, and visited strange peoples, simply to see face to face persons whom they only knew from books. Thus Pythagoras visited the prophets of Memphis; and Plato, besides visiting Egypt and Archytas of Tarentum, most carefully explored that part of the coast of Italy which was formerly called Great Greece. … Again we read that certain noblemen journeyed from the most remote parts of Spain and Gaul to visit Titus Livius, and listen to his eloquence which flowed like a fountain of milk. … Apollonius too was a traveller‚Äîthe one mean who is called the sorcerer by ordinary people and the philosopher by such as follow Pythagoras. He entered Persia, traversed the Caucasus and made his way through the Albanians, the Scythians, the Massaget?¶, and the richest districts of India. At last, after crossing that wide river the Pison, he came to the Brahmans. … After this he travelled among the Elamites, the Babylonians, the Chaldeans, the Medes, the Assyrians, the Parthians, the Syrians, the Phoenicians, the Arabians, and the Philistines. Then returning to Alexandria he made his way to Ethiopia to see the gymnosophists and the famous table of the sun spread in the sands of the desert. Everywhere he found something to learn, and as he was always going to new places, he became constantly wiser and better. … But why should I confine my allusions to the men of this world, when the Apostle Paul, the chosen vessel the doctor of the Gentiles‚Äîwho could boldly say: ‚ÄòDo ye seek a proof of Christ speaking in me?‚Äô knowing that he really had within him that greatest of guests‚Äîwhen even he after visiting Damascus and Arabia ‚Äòwent up to Jerusalem to see Peter and abode with him fifteen days.‚Äô‚Äù
11. Onomasticon: The Place Names of Divine Scripture, including the Latin Edition of Jerome, ed. & trans. R. Steven Notley & Ze‚Äôev Safrai (Leiden: Brill, 2005). See also John Wilkinson, ‚ÄúL‚Äôapport de Saint J?©r?¥me ?† la topographie de la Terre Sainte,‚Äù Revue Biblique 81 (1974): 245‚Äì257.
12. E.D. Hunt, “Travel, Tourism and Piety in the Roman Empire: a Context for the Beginnings of Christian Pilgrimage,” Echos du Monde Classique/Classical Views 28 (1984): 391‚Äì417; idem, “Were there Christian Pilgrims before Constantine?,” in Pilgrimage Explored, ed. J. Stopford (Suffolk: York Medieval Press, 1999), 25‚Äì40.
13. Hunt, “Were there Christian Pilgrims,” 36.
14. Plutarch, De Defectu Oraculorum, 419–420; idem, De Pythiae Oraculis, 395a, 397e, 400d–e; both in his Moralia, trans. F.C. Babbitt, 15 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, YYYY), 5:260, 276, 292, 402–404.
15. Hunt, “Were there Christian Pilgrims,” 37. On Pausanias, see C. Habicht, Pausanias’ Guide to ancient Greece (Berkeley, CA, 1985), 1‚Äì27.
16. John Elsner, “Pausanias: A Greek Pilgrim in the Roman World,” Past & Present 135 (May 1992): 3‚Äì29.

Entering the palace’s outer courtyard, Latour was met by a rather shabby looking porter, who volunteered to lead Latour on a guided tour of the premises. While Latour seems to have been most interested in the house’s Mud?©jar architecture, his guide, it would appear, was much more concerned to highlight the typological similarity between Enr??quez de Ribera’s simulated Sevillan Via Crucis and the actual Via Dolorosa of Jerusalem. “When I arrived at the first floor,” wrote Latour, my guide called my attention to a small recess that concluded in a narrow window and served, on the right, as the back for a tiled bench. ‘There,’ he told me, ‘is where S. Peter was seated when he denied Jesus. And there,’ he added, indicating across the way a peephole covered with a grate, hidden in the wall, ‘is where the servant-girl who recognized him paused.’”

As the tour progressed, Latour noted, he became progressively more concerned about his guide, who seemed to lose the ability to distinguish between Enr??quez de Ribera’s house and the ‘real thing’ with each passing room. “After reciting the same stories for forty years,” lamented Latour, “the simpleton has doubtless forgotten that that which he is showing to travelers is nothing more than a copy of Pilate’s house. … Back out in the street, my guide, following me still, pointed out to me a window in a wall behind us with a stone balcony: “It’s there,” he told me, “that Jesus was shown to the people wearing the crown of thorns and a scepter of reeds!” Below was another window: “It belonged to the prison where Christ was held for several hours.” Latour, noting that “The brave man’s illusion seemed to augment as my visit grew longer,” was happy finally to escape from the urchin’s demented tour.

It is safe, I think, to assume that Latour’s account of his visit to the Casa de Pilatos contains a fair quantity of fiction and exaggeration. The delusional porter may very well have been a figment of Latour’s literary imagination, a device to heighten the contrast–one of the themes of his entire book–between French rationality and Spanish benightedness. Yet even literary fictions, like many stereotypes, must contain a grain of truth if they are to be believed, and therefore to be effective. What Latour describes as the Spaniard’s confusion or “illusion,” therefore, must have been plausible to his readers as the way in which an uneducated porter might really view the world. His inability to distinguish between reality and received opinion had to ring true.

I think, therefore, that we can read Latour’s visit to the Casa de Pilatos as an attempt to contrast not just France and Spain, but also two fundamental ways in which real, premodern people encountered their world. On the one hand there is Latour’s prized rationality, a way of seeing the world that is fastidious about chronological and geographical accuracy and prizes eyewitness observation above all other testimony. On the other hand, there is the porter’s way of seeing, which emphasizes collective memory over immediate, eyewitness evidence. This way of seeing strives to create an aura of immanence by erasing the difference between Spain and Jerusalem, present and past. It seeks to convince the seer that it is possible to reproduce, or ‘relive,’ the past.

It is especially appropriate that Latour chose to mark this contrast with a vignette about the Casa de Pilatos, for its very origins in the sixteenth century embody simultaneously these two ways of seeing the world. Fadrique Enr??quez de Ribera visited the Holy Land and measured the precise distances along the length of the Via Dolorosa, reproducing those measurements in his Sevillan Via Crucis. At the same time, however, the fact that he believed that the pile of rubble he was shown in Jerusalem was the Casa de Pilatos, and that one could ‘relive’ the Passion by walking a course paced out through the streets of Seville.