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Summary: Piety and Politics in Imagining the Holy Land
Review: The photographs, maps, travelers' accounts, physical reconstructions, and studies of the Bible that are the subject of this book once fired popular fantasies of the Holy Land. Nineteenth century visitors to the Chautauqua Institution used to walk through a large scale model of biblical Palestine, sometimes tucking a blade of grass into their pockets or purses. You can still take a tour and listen to Sunday evening lectures there. At the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904, a replica of Jerusalem covered eleven acres while today, some 300 miles to the southeast, a seven story high Christ of the Ozarks looks over a modern re-creation of the Holy Land set in the hills of Arkansas. For home viewing there were tours via stereoscopic photographs, lavishly illustrated books such as Picturesque Palestine, and the reports of scholars who passed through the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem. All reached for an illusory touch of the "real" in the midst of fantasies about the Holy Land, as may still be seen in a reader friendly book written by John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan Reed, Excavating Jesus. These competing visions of the Holy Land were, and are, shaped by forms of Christianity and Judaism, and entangled with various political and ideological debates at home in America. David Gunn, Bradford Professor of Religion at Texas Christian University wrote that Imagining the Holy Land is "remarkable and important...not only pertinent to an understanding of biblical criticism and popular culture in America...but crucially important to a nuanced understanding of American public discourse about Middle Eastern affairs today."
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