Palestine Twilight: The Murder of Dr Glock and the Archaeology of the Holy Land. Edward Fox

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СКАЧАТЬ by which to govern ourselves in our examination of the Holy Land,’ he wrote. ‘The first was, to avoid as far as possible all contact with the convents and the authority of the monks; to examine everywhere for ourselves with the Scriptures in our hands; and to apply for information solely to the native Arab population. The second was, to leave as much as possible the beaten track.’

      Emphatic typography expresses the principle Robinson followed in his three-month journey through the biblical landscape: ‘all ecclesiastical tradition respecting the ancient places in and around Jerusalem and throughout Palestine, IS OF NO VALUE, except so far as it is supported by circumstances known to us from the Scriptures, or from other contemporary testimony’. This was a radically new approach. For the first time, a respected scholar was able to say and to demonstrate that a good many of these traditions didn’t make sense historically or rationally. Most conspicuously, the complex of shrines inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem, which it was claimed, contains both the site of the Crucifixion and the tomb of Christ, not to mention the stone on which the body of Christ was anointed for burial and related sacred attractions, is manifestly unrealistic and convincing only when seen through the most powerfully filtered lenses of faith. ‘I am led irresistibly to the conclusion’, he wrote, ‘that the Golgotha and the tomb now shown in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, are not upon the real places of the crucifixion and resurrection of our Lord. The alleged discovery of them by the aged and credulous Helena, like her discovery of the cross, may not improbably have been the work of pious fraud.’

      This conclusion was the most publicly sensational of Robinson’s observations, and it was hotly debated for decades afterwards, with the arguments for and against the historicity of the site falling along sectarian lines: the Catholics (who had maintained a stake in the Holy Sepulchre since the Crusades, and therefore had a vested interest) arguing for it, and the Protestants arguing against. (The best current archaeological thinking favours the traditional location of the Holy Sepulchre as the most probable place of the crucifixion.) The whole superstitious business of the Holy Sepulchre, epitomized by the annual spectacle of fairground spirituality in the ceremony of the Holy Fire at Easter, when crowds thronged the church to witness the miracle of a lamp over the tomb of Christ being lit by divine agency, ‘was to a Protestant painful and revolting’.

      Robinson’s work was, strictly speaking, biblical geography, rather than biblical archaeology, since he only conducted a surface survey, and carried out no excavations. Less sensationally than his attack on the tradition of the Holy Sepulchre, his accomplishment lay in the meticulous record he made of his survey, linking biblical place names with their contemporary Arabic equivalents, without reference to legend. He favoured local Palestinian folklore, seeing in it a more reliable, continuous tradition, and by this method he correctly identified the site of Megiddo, for instance, an identification which formed the starting point for the later archaeological study of that site.

      Robinson was motivated by a strong Protestant attachment to the text of the Bible, which he took as literally true. In this he was violating an elementary principle of geography, of course, articulated in antiquity by the second-century geographer and astronomer Ptolemy: that the landscape is more important than the map. Instead, he saw the map (the Bible) as more important than the landscape. But the degree of Robinson’s intellectual rigour is impressive, for his time, and there is no obvious instance in the three volumes of his principal work that suggests he distorted anything he saw to meet what he expected, out of reverence for the Bible. The only distortion was that he wasn’t interested in anything in the land and history of Palestine that wasn’t to do with the Bible.

      Robinson explains that his journey to the Holy Land was the fulfilment of a lifelong ambition, one that had emerged from his experience of growing up in New England. For the child growing up in the Puritan culture of New England in the early nineteenth century, ‘the names of Sinai, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, the Promised Land, became associated with his earliest recollections and holiest feelings’, he wrote. For Americans from a variety of backgrounds – for Edward Robinson, for Albert Glock and for millions of others – the sacred geography of the Holy Land (itself abstracted from the geography of Palestine) was superimposed on the geography of North America. The notion of America as the new Israel, a God-fearing, perfect society set apart from the rest of mankind, ‘a city on a hill’, was imported with the first English settlers in the seventeenth century, and remains an essential part of America’s idea of itself.

      This sentiment gave rise in Edward Robinson to a ‘scientific’ curiosity, to explore the country whose place names were already so familiar to him. In exploring Palestine he was, in a sense, exploring New England: he was fathoming his own experience, his own identity. ‘In no country of the world, perhaps, is such a feeling more widely diffused than in New England.’

      But this feeling was widely diffused in a number of places besides New England. Turn, for example, to the earliest report of the Palestine Exploration Fund. This was established in London in 1865 with a purpose similar to Robinson’s: to study, according to its original prospectus, the ‘archaeology, manners and customs, topography, geology, natural sciences (botany, zoology, meteorology)’ of the Holy Land, on the grounds that ‘No country should be of so much interest to us as that in which the documents of our Faith were written, and the momentous events they describe enacted.’ Founded by the great and the good of Victorian Britain, with Her Majesty the Queen herself as its patron, the PEF was launched amidst great popular enthusiasm, combining the adventure of discovery with the high goals of scholarship, Christian piety, and the emotional appeal of national purpose and pride. Its aim was to send expeditions to Palestine that would be funded by public contributions. In its first general meeting, the Archbishop of York, who chaired the gathering, expressed the project’s fundamental motivation.

      This country of Palestine belongs to you and to me, it is essentially ours. It was given to the Father of Israel in the words: ‘Walk through the land in the length of it, and in the breadth of it, for I will give it unto thee.’ We mean to walk through Palestine in the length and in the breadth of it, because that land has been given unto us … It is the land to which we may look with as true a patriotism as we do this dear old England, which we love so much. (Cheers.)

      So Palestine belongs to the Englishman, as well as to the American. It also belongs, one discovers, to the French, the Russians, the Germans, the Armenians, the Ethiopians, the Jews and the Muslims, and a few other groups as well. Each of these nations has a claim to the Holy Land that is exclusive and incommensurate with the others, because it is based on either a claim to territory or property that overlaps someone else’s, or on an idea, which can’t be argued about because it is entirely subjective and non-rational and cultural. Since the beginning of the Christian era, Palestine has been the focus of this multitude of claims to produce an effect of what one might call negative cosmopolitanism. The usual sense of cosmopolitanism denotes an outlook in which a person from one location identifies with a wide variety of places. Negative cosmopolitanism means the opposite: the identification of people from a wide variety of locations with one place.

      The Protestant attachment to the Holy Land was separate from the tradition of Helena but it too was subject to imaginative conceptions of the holiness of the Holy Land, and nowhere more than in Victorian England at the time of the founding of the Palestine Exploration Fund. In its first years, the subject that dominated the pages of the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement was the location of the sites of the crucifixion and the tomb of Christ, which the earlier Catholic tradition established inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Reason required the rejection of the Holy Sepulchre as the historical location of these sites, but faith required an alternative, and one was soon found. The modern tourist can now visit a walled garden outside the old city, near the Palestinian bus station and the Damascus Gate, known as the Garden Tomb. It contains a pair of stone grottoes that probably were used as tombs at some point in history, but Protestant tradition has settled on one of the grottoes as the likely tomb of Christ, and it has come to be invested with holiness. Its tranquil setting and physical simplicity compared to the hectic Holy Sepulchre СКАЧАТЬ