Mapping the Word, Reading the World: Biocartography and the “Historical” Jesus

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 447-497
Author(s):  
John D. Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Word Reading ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sunday Schools ◽  
Religious Educators ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Biblical History ◽  
Historical Fact ◽  
Gospel Narratives

In the early nineteenth century, the study of “sacred” geography gained traction in American Sunday schools, buoyed by the popular belief that students needed to familiarize themselves with the Holy Land in order to understand the Bible. As religious educators designed geographic curricula, they turned to cartography for assistance and developed map-based lesson plans that would, they hoped, enliven the study of scripture by making visible the spatial layout of ancient Palestine. This article tracks the emergence and widespread use of a particular type of thematic map that featured the life of Jesus superimposed onto the Holy Land, a form of biographical mapmaking that I call “biocartography.” To help students visualize scripture, mapmakers translated the gospel narratives into vectors that crisscrossed Palestine, which meant that they had to overlook the New Testament’s textual discontinuities in order to create a seemingly authentic mosaic of biblical history. Paying close attention to the semiotics of cartography, I explain how biographical circuits that were largely (if not entirely) speculative were regarded as historical fact and how educators who used such maps invented a wide range of cartographic activities to help students comprehend and internalize the Bible’s most salient passages.

Milman’s History of the Jews: a Real Place with Real People

2000 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 319-328
Author(s):  
Alistair Mason
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Real Place ◽  
Real People ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Speaking

For English-speaking Protestants in the early nineteenth century, the Holy Land lived in the Bible. In that Land God had done his mighty works, and every name recalled an episode in the history of salvation. Its placenames were as real and resonant to believers as those of their own home district. Chapel-names like Mizpah and Shiloh were not just ‘somewhere in the Old Testament’, as they are to modern readers. Filtered through the anachronism of its readers’ imaginations, and haloed with devotion, the Holy Land was indeed holy.

Jeremiah 7 and Flavius Josephus on the First Jewish War

2013 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tucker S. Ferda
Keyword(s):  
Synoptic Gospels ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical History ◽  
City Walls ◽  
The City

Abstract Study of Josephus’ interpretation of the Bible has focused on the paraphrase in Antiquities, but Josephus continued to engage Scripture in his post-biblical history. This article contends that Josephus, like the authors of the synoptic gospels and later Jewish exegetes, saw the events of 66-70 C.E. through the lens of Jeremiah’s temple sermon (7:1-34). The accounts of Jesus ben Ananias and Josephus’ speech before the city walls, among other examples, show recourse to Jeremiah 7.

Burke O. Long. Imagining the Holy Land: Maps, Models, and Fantasy Travels. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. xi, 258 pp.

AJS Review ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 395-398
Author(s):  
Rehav Rubin
Keyword(s):  
American Culture ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Indiana University ◽  
New Towns ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Good Book ◽  
Special Place ◽  
Land Of Israel

Many of the pioneers and settlers who came to America held the Bible in their right hands and were strongly inspired by this “Good Book.” They believed they had come to the “New Promised Land,” and consequently gave Biblical names to the new towns and villages, as well as to their children. It was, therefore, almost natural that the remote land in the east, known as the Holy Land, Palestine, the Promised Land, or The Land of Israel, had, and probably still has, a very special place in American culture and society.

Studying with Maps: Jerusalem and the Holy Land in Two Thirteenth-Century Manuscripts

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna Vorholt
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
British Library ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Medieval Manuscript ◽  
Biblical Study ◽  
Biblical History ◽  
Manuscript Production

This chapter focuses on two closely related diagrammatic maps of Jerusalem and the Holy Land in two thirteenth-century manuscripts now in Brussels (Bibliothèque Royale, MS IV 462) and London (British Library, MS Harley 658). On the basis of a comparison between the maps and their transmission contexts it is argued that the maps served as didactic tools, aiding the study of biblical history. The layout of the maps is analysed in relation to wider developments in Western medieval manuscript production and learning during the second half of the twelfth and first half of the thirteenth centuries, particularly in relation to the emphasis on a more systematic and rigorous structuring of knowledge. The manuscripts are seen as indicative of how topographical information concerning the Holy Land was put to use in biblical study, and of how scholasticism could have influenced the ways in which Jerusalem was represented and perceived.

The Shifting Discourse Culture of Methodism, 1791–1832

2019 ◽  
pp. 142-175
Author(s):  
Andrew O. Winckles
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Hannah More ◽  
Sunday Schools ◽  
Discourse Practices ◽  
The Church

This chapter lays out some of the shifts in Methodist discourse culture that occurred during the early nineteenth century and suggests that, in response to these changes, Methodist women found new ways to reach their audiences and work around the Methodist hierarchy. In particular, it focuses on the lives and writings of Sarah Crosby, Mary Bosanquet Fletcher, Mary Tooth, and other members of their circle in order to illustrate how they adapted earlier Methodist discourse practices for new and potentially subversive purposes. It then turns to the work of evangelical Anglican Hannah More in the 1790’s and early 1800’s to consider how a very well-known female evangelical within the Church of England negotiated a shifting discursive terrain, especially in her Cheap Repository Tracts and her work with the Mendip Hills Sunday Schools which led to the Blagdon Controversy.

Reading Henry Maundrell’s Sacred Geography in Eighteenth-Century England and Germany

2019 ◽  
pp. 210-226
Author(s):  
Simon Mills
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Sacred Geography ◽  
History Of

This chapter explains the remarkable popularity of Henry Maundrell’s A Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem at Easter AD 1697 (1703). It argues that Maundrell’s eye-witness reportage of his travels in the Holy Land provided the book’s readers with a storehouse of geographical observations and descriptions of eastern customs with which they could recreate imaginatively the world of the Scriptures. Tracing the book’s use by editors, commentators, translators, and paraphrasts, it argues that Maundrell was most often put to work in defence of the Bible against attacks on its claims to truth. Yet in the hands of Maundrell’s late eighteenth-century German translator, the naturalist and historicist tendencies inherent in his account were brought into sharper focus; ‘sacred geography’ was transformed into a history of biblical culture.

The Rising Power of Yeast

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Carbon Dioxide ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Alcoholic Beverages ◽  
Bakery Products ◽  
Formal Description ◽  
Higher Alcohol ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Rising Power

In the last chapter, yeast was mentioned a few times as one of the generally less-problematic microbial denizens of food systems, and in fact the roles of yeast in the production of two of our most common and popular food categories, alcoholic beverages and bakery products such as bread, are so critical that it is worth dedicating a whole chapter just to the consideration of the science of these products. The ability of yeast to grow in a wide range of raw materials and convert sugars to alcohol, carbon dioxide, and other interesting products is the basis for production of products such as wine and beer, as well as higher-alcohol-level spirits, and is a process that has been exploited for the purposes of human pleasure for thousands of years. The origins of alcoholic fermentations, like those of many food products, are somewhat murky, but it is thought that honey or fruit may have been the original basis for the fermentation of such products, and that wine arose because of accidental adventitious spoilage of grapes and their juice that turned out to have, well, interesting consequences. The Greeks and Romans had wine-making down to an art, and it features frequently in their art; it also makes many appearances in the Bible (including a nonscientifically verifiable production protocol based apparently solely on water). The main reason alcoholic fermentation became of interest was as a way to prevent bacteria or other undesirable microorganisms from growing in juice by allowing a different kind of microorganism to get there first, use up the goodies, and produce products that made conditions highly unsuitable for colonization by later invaders. We routinely associate the word “intoxicated” with a formal description of the result of overconsumption of the outputs of such fermentation, but the heart of that word is “toxic,” which reminds us that alcohol is a poison. It just happens to be one that humans can tolerate only up to certain levels, beyond which poisoning and death can readily occur, but at lower levels has a range of effects that need not be described here.

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