Where
did the Christian Holy Land came from? An initial reaction might be
that it came from the Christians of Galilee and Jerusalem who knew
Jesus and were present at the events of Jesus’ life and ministry. It
seems logical, does it not? When we read the gospels, we learn about
Jesus and his interactions with the people around him in specific
places. Jesus’ teachings changed people at the locations where they
heard him, would they not then revere and commemorate those places?
Logical,
yes. Correct? No. It turns out that the Christian Holy Land was created
by people who did not live in Palestine/Israel. Furthermore, the Holy
Land idea was developed for people who lived outside the land, not
those who lived there. This was true not only when the Holy Land was
first created but later as well.
When Constantine the Great
became emperor of the entire Roman Empire in 324, after more than
twelve years of war, he organized the Christian Church. He sponsored
the first empire-wide church council at Nicea, in which basic matters
of Christian theology were first decided. Building a new imperial
capital at Constantinople (now Istanbul in Turkey), he made patriarchs,
bishops, and other church leaders key members of his court.
Constantine’s
mother Helena, a devout Christian, determined that she would travel to
Palestine, as it was called then, to identify the sites of events in
Jesus’ ministry. In Galilee, she located Nazareth, Jesus’ childhood
home, Cana, where Jesus turned water into wine, and Capernaum, the
headquarters of Jesus’ ministry. In Bethlehem, she identified the
stable where Jesus was born, and in Jerusalem she identified the sites
of the events of Jesus’ last week of life, including the location of
his trial, crucifixion and burial. In following decades, churches were
built on these sites, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in
Jerusalem. As other sites were identified, including ones from the Old
Testament, and they too received churches, or even monasteries.
Few
of the priests and monks who served these sites were local; they came
from countries around the Mediterranean Sea. Although a few
congregation members came from the local population, the churches
served large numbers of pilgrims who came on journeys of weeks or even
months. So the Christian Holy Land was created by an outsider, Helena,
maintained by the Church outside Palestine, for the benefit of pilgrims
who traveled to the Holy Land.
Over the centuries, the church
lost control of Palestine, and the church itself splintered, first into
Catholic and Orthodox, then into many Protestant denominations. The
importance of the geographical Holy Land as a pilgrimage destination
was lost. Palestine became a backwater.
In the nineteenth
century, Protestants turned their attention to the Holy Land. The USA
established an embassy with the Ottoman Empire in 1830, which arranged
access for Americans interested in traveling to the sites of the Bible.
Despite the hardships of desert heat, sand, and dirt, of camping for
weeks on end, and even of bandits, an increasing number of Americans,
English, and other Europeans came to the Holy Land. They brought their
Bibles and traveled to sites where they believed biblical events had
taken place. Before the end of the decade, Edward Robinson, Professor
of Scripture at Union Seminary, used Arabic town names to identify lost
sites such as Eshtemoa and Gibbon, while the artist David Roberts
painted scenes of sites well-known from biblical stories, many of which
were commemorated by churches or chapels centuries old. Robinson
published his research, Roberts his paintings, and other travelers
wrote travelogues (including Mark Twain). All these served to excite
Protestants and draw more to the region.
One thing eluded
Protestants in their rediscovery of the Holy Land; they controlled no
site related to Jesus’ Passion and resurrection. Centuries earlier,
these sites had become worship centers of eastern churches of
Christianity, worship quite foreign to Protestant sensibilities.
In
1882, the British General Charles Gordon created a new location for
Jesus’ crucifixion, Golgotha, by looking out his hotel window and
deciding a particular hill looked like a skull (the meaning of Golgotha
in Aramaic). Nearby stood an ancient tomb, which Gordon declared was
the “Garden Tomb” in which Jesus had been buried. The Anglican Church
acquired the property and established it as a Protestant worship site.
Although the site has no historical validity, which its own literature
recognizes, the site has since become a favorite of Protestant
Christians touring Jerusalem because of its western character.
The
nineteenth-century Protestant rediscovery of the Holy Land followed the
pattern established by Helena more than a millennium earlier. Christian
outsiders came into Palestine/Israel to identify the sites for even
more religious travelers from outside the land to visit. The Holy Land
of Orthodox and Catholic pilgrims had become a holy tourist destination
for Protestant travelers of all stripes.
posted by Paul Flesher