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The chronicle of pilgrimage to the Holy LandLandmine?THE CHRONICLE OF PILGRIMAGE TO THE HOLY LAND This is a cleverly devised and fascinating book about what happened to Jerusalem after Jesus’s birth and up to the present. Shaped like an atlas and packed with nearly 1,000 maps, illustrations and photographs, each page is clearly dated above well-defined ‘boxes’, sometimes four or five to a page, and all of them headed by catchy titles to imitate newspaper headlines. So, during Jesus’s ministry in the first chapter we have ‘A miraculous wedding in Cana’ and ‘Demoniac’s Wits Return: Pigs Jump To Their Deaths’ — and in 1815 (to cite just a couple of examples from thousands throughout the text) ‘Princess of Wales Visits Holy Land’ and ‘Lady Stanhope’s Treasure Hunt’! 11 chapters cover the relevant eras — ‘The Footsteps of Jesus’, ‘The Byzantine Period’, ‘The Early Arab Period’, ‘The Kingdom of Jerusalem’ (i.e. the Crusader era) — and so on through the Mamelukes, the Ottomans and the tourist explosion which began in the 19th century and continues unabated — which is explanation enough for the financial rationale behind the project, namely, a wide international audience and big sales. Each chapter has a fairly substantial historical introduction. These are necessary and useful. The somewhat gimmicky ‘boxes’ making up the majority of the text, for all their fascinating traveller anecdotes from the past and excellent material on contemporary archaeological discoveries, would be inadequate. The two-page surveys help to fill in the background. Distance from polemicalHowever, one major weakness is their religious blandness. Not surprisingly, in view of Israel’s current volatility, nor, too, of the strength of feeling about who is to blame for the present mess, the authors keep a careful distance from anything polemical. Their own convictions are, therefore, unclear. Pope John Paul II’s 2000 AD ‘Jubilee Pilgrimage’ appears prominently at the end and that may be revealing, but not necessarily so. At the same time almost nothing is said about the equivalent attention paid to Jerusalem by (mostly) American evangelicals — whether that is good or bad! But apart from the fact that the authors are Jewish and the publishing house and printing derive from ‘the Holy Land’, the religious provenance is veiled. One omission impressed me though — the Bonar/McCheyne visit to the Holy Land in 1839. As soon as I realised what I was looking at I turned to the relevant page — only to be disappointed. Here were two young Presbyterian ministers, whose preaching had triggered revival in Scotland and who by no stretch of the imagination could be described as ‘wacky’, going out to the Holy Land as convinced premillennialists who longed to see gospel outreach to God’s ‘special people’, the Jews. That would have been a great addition to an already fascinating and useful book. Ranald Macaulay, © Evangelicals Now - December 2009 |