Palestine Twilight: The Murder of Dr Glock and the Archaeology of the Holy Land. Edward Fox
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СКАЧАТЬ of Protestant spirituality. The site had other advantages for nineteenth-century Protestant sensibility as the true site for the tomb of Christ. The rocky mound out of which the tomb was cut bore a physical resemblance to the dome of a human skull, which conforms to the meaning of the biblical word ‘golgotha’ used to describe the place of the entombment: the place of the skull. Like Helena, the Victorian Protestants were seeing what they wanted to see, finding what they wanted to find.

      The Orthodox tradition saw no need to identify the ‘true’ sites of the events of the life of Christ. To Russian Orthodox pilgrims, whose liturgy retained the mysticism of an older form of Christianity, the Holy Sepulchre complex was not supposed to be historically realistic. This was a place where the cosmic realm penetrated into the earthly realm. Normal physical reality was pushed aside here by metaphysical reality, and time was replaced by the eternal. The tomb of Christ was a three-dimensional icon, a miraculous object possessing real supernatural power, not just representing it. If it looked like a normal tomb, or was held to be one, it could not be the tomb of the son of God and it would not put the beholder in touch with the divine. In entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre the pilgrim was entering a zone of divine reality, not a real place but something higher. Like the earliest Catholic pilgrims, he sought to be amazed, not reassured.

      The Protestant Golgotha inspired the visionary imagination of one especially eminent Victorian: the British military hero General Charles Gordon, the martyr of Khartoum. Before he embarked on his doomed expedition to confront the rebel forces of the Mahdi in the Sudan, and after his victorious campaign crushing the Taiping rebellion in China in 1864, Gordon spent a year in Jerusalem as a solitary mystic, studying the Bible and the topography of Jerusalem. His research led him to the conclusion that the sacred sites were set out on the landscape of Jerusalem in the form of a vast human skeleton. The skull-shaped hill, with two caves resembling eye-sockets, was its skull, Solomon’s Quarries were its chest, the lower back lay on the Temple Mount, with the Dome of the Rock at its pelvis, the knees at the Dung Gate and the feet some distance outside the Old City. Gordon propounded this theory in the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement in 1885. Why a skeleton? Because it would represent sculpturally an enormous human sacrifice on the Temple Mount.

      Gordon’s idea is of interest mainly for its eccentricity, but it is a good example of the tendency towards biblical mysticism that thrived among members of the ruling class of Victorian England, and motivated the work of the Palestine Exploration Fund, despite the ‘scientific’ nature of its expeditions. A more widespread notion, similar to one held by contemporary American fundamentalist Christians, was the desirability – as the fulfilment of biblical prophecy – of the ‘restoration’ of the Jews to Palestine from their world-wide diaspora, a development which would be followed by their conversion to the true (Anglican) Christian faith and the return of the Messiah as the leader of a thousand-year era on earth of peace and justice, before the end of the world. This belief (called chiliasm) led to the establishment of missionary societies dedicated to the conversion of Jews in England and even in Palestine itself. Although the success rate of organizations like the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews (established 1808) was dismal, making only about six or seven converts a year even after thirty years, its members remained optimistically active throughout the nineteenth century.

      The best-known proponent of this movement was the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, better known now for his campaigns for benevolent social legislation, such as the Ten Hours Bill, limiting the working hours of factory workers. The same evangelical Christianity that inspired his social campaigning at home led him to work equally hard for the conversion of the Jews, and he became president of the ‘Jews’ Society’ in 1848. Although he saw little evidence that mass conversion had begun, as he hoped, Shaftesbury had considerable success in influencing British foreign policy in line with his ideas. He persuaded the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, to establish a British consulate in Jerusalem in 1838, charged with the protection of local Jewish interests, and granting Palestinian Jews British citizenship. A few years later, his lobbying bore fruit in the creation of an Anglican bishopric in Jerusalem, with a converted Jew as its first incumbent.

      Eventually, in 1875, Shaftesbury became President of the Palestine Exploration Fund. In his first address to the PEF as its President he called with undiminished enthusiasm for ‘the return [to Palestine] of its ancient possessors’. His mystical belief in Britain’s instrumental role in returning the Jews to Palestine – for the sake of Christianity, rather than Judaism – was the ideological force behind Britain’s increasing political involvement in Palestine throughout the nineteenth century, an involvement which could be seen later in British support for Zionism, as expressed in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and in Britain itself assuming the government of Palestine in 1921, and holding it for nearly thirty years in the form of the British Mandate. To understand politics it is sometimes necessary to understand the power of irrational ideas.

      In its first years, the pages of the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement were dominated by reports from the field despatched by the leaders of the expeditions sponsored by the Fund. These were eventually published as books which have become the classics of early biblical archaeology. Notable among these is the expedition of Charles Warren, a captain in the Royal Engineers, who used military mining techniques to excavate the tunnels and subterranean chambers under and around the Temple Mount in 1867. His account was published in 1876 as Underground Jerusalem. This was one of the first expeditions sponsored by the PEF, and it nearly bankrupted the Fund, obliging the tireless Warren to postpone excavation work for weeks at a time due to lack of money to pay labourers.

      The object of Warren’s exploration was the Temple of Solomon, and in his search for it he exemplifies the mystical tendency of Victorian Englishmen towards anything to do with the Holy Land. His search for the original Temple of the biblical Israelites set in motion a popular obsession which persists to this day. Warren was motivated in his curiosity by his experience as a Freemason, a membership which was common among English military officers. Freemasons consider themselves members of an unbroken tradition of occult knowledge that begins with the builders of the first Temple and its founder, Solomon, whom biblical legend has given the character of an archetypal complete being, supreme in both power and wisdom. The rituals of Freemasonry, in which the individual ascends a hierarchy of esoteric lore through progressive initiation, are based on metaphors of the construction and architecture of the Temple. To Freemasons, Solomon’s Temple is a radiantly meaningful symbol, rich with associations of power and practical knowledge, deepened to a condition of mystical enlightenment, held in the collective hands of a closed fraternal institution. Adding to the sum of knowledge of the Temple would have been of enormous importance to Freemasonry, and Masonic lodges donated regularly and generously to the Palestine Exploration Fund in the years when Warren’s reports were being published.

      Warren therefore had a definite object in mind when he began his work. The image of the Temple in his mind formed the template into which all of his discoveries fitted, and almost immediately his expectations were rewarded with results that confirmed them. He dug shafts along an exposed side of the Temple Mount, and then tunnelled under it. Illuminating his way with strips of burning magnesium, he discovered pottery fragments inscribed with the word ‘the king’ and markings in Phoenician characters on stones near the base of the structure, which he took to have been made by the Temple’s original builders. He pronounced the area he was exploring to be the corner of the palace Solomon built for himself adjoining the Temple, in fact a highly dubious attribution. If a Temple built by Solomon ever existed, no trace of it has been found.

      In the course of his exploration of the hidden part of the western wall of the Temple Mount, he found a long vault to which he gave the name ‘the Secret Passage’, believing it to be part of a secret tunnel used by King David (Solomon’s father, according to the Bible) to walk from his palace to his place of prayer on the Temple Mount, an idea originating in a fifteenth-century description of Jerusalem that Warren had read: this is an attribution based entirely on pious folklore. No such tunnel could have existed. ‘This passage would have been revealed whenever anyone living on the street above installed a cistern СКАЧАТЬ