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>> 29 1 Knowing the Holy Land Sunday School Lessons and the Six O’Clock News Helen has worshipped at the same Baptist church for fifty years. It is a small red-brick building with a classic white steeple in the countryside east of Raleigh, North Carolina. The main artistic adornment is a walllength baptistery painting at the front of the sanctuary depicting the Jordan as a wide river with fast-moving rapids in the foreground and majestic mountains in the distance. The bright blue water is flanked by an idyllic green prairie graced with palm trees, a touch of Holy Land exotica.1 The Jordan, as Helen finally saw it in 2009, looks nothing like the image she had known for decades. It is a narrow slow-moving stream with dark greenish water and dense foliage crowding the bank. Instead of mountains, waterfalls, and palms, there is a large modern tourist complex, a souvenir store, and restaurant. American pilgrims come to the Holy Land familiar with a multiplicity of preexisting images. Writing of nineteenth-century Protestants , historian Hilton Obenzinger identifies an “intertextual layering” of three main influences: the Bible, travel accounts, and millennialist fantasies.2 Generations of Americans have also described Holy Land images infused with sentimental associations gleaned from childhood. Though it was tongue in cheek, Mark Twain’s 1869 travel account gives a sense of the power of these expectations. He was “surprised and hurt,” he writes, upon seeing regular-sized fruit in Palestine: a cherished illustration in his childhood Bible showed the Israelites bearing a “monstrous bunch” of grapes.3 Given how deeply embedded and diffuse Holy Land imagery is, it is not surprising that pilgrims today have trouble pinpointing which particular moments, teaching tools, or visual media influenced them most. They describe biblical images that come from “I don’t know where” or that give them an “odd sense” of recognition.4 They 30 > 31 American Holy Land Mania Among Protestants, “Holy Land mania,” as Obenzinger puts it, dates to the latter half of the nineteenth century.6 It encompassed the development of tourism, such as the Cook’s tours mentioned earlier, but it was much broader too, since the Holy Land was implicated in how American Protestants responded to ideas stemming from the European Enlightenment . When historical criticism raised questions about the authorship and inerrancy of the Bible and the veracity of miraculous events, liberal Christians reacted by adopting a moral hermeneutic based on the human side of Jesus’ ministry. Conservatives defended biblical literalism , formulating a response using Scottish Common Sense philosophy. In its American form, this intellectual current posited that reality— including right and wrong—could be experienced directly through the senses from the material world. For liberals, descriptions of the Holy Land thus added important and edifying details to what was known about Jesus’ earthly life. For conservatives, the geography and ancient Figure 1.2. A photo of the Jordan River baptismal site today. Courtesy of Kathy Martin. 32 > 33 Jesus in his own time: they were taught to picture incidents in the Savior ’s home or school life, which were invariably similar to their own, in order to draw moral lessons about how a Christian should behave.11 Biblical archeology was central in these atlases, and today it still features strongly in how Israeli guides lead evangelical tours. Among conservative Christians, especially those of a more intellectual bent, archeology appealed as an Enlightenment science that was understood to serve the interests of faith against historical criticism and Darwinism. It did not hurt that it was also tied to longstanding anti-Catholicism. Protestant criticism was particularly harsh concerning the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, built on the site where the Catholic and Orthodox churches believe Jesus was crucified and buried. Widely read travelogues grimly remarked on the Church’s dirtiness and gaudiness , and the outbursts of violence between resident priests. The sepulchre exemplified the “puerile inventions of monkly credulity,” one nineteenth -century visitor sniffed, and today some evangelicals still dismiss it as the “Church of Bells and Smells.”12 From the 1880s on, Anglo-American Protestants promoted their own site, a quiet spot owned and operated by the English called the Garden Tomb (also called Skull Hill because of its shape or Gordon’s Calvary, after the British general who popularized it). To prove its legitimacy, supporters shored up decades of archeology. William W. Orr, a pilgrim in 1960, wrote about the tomb for Moody Monthly. “Was this really the place...

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