A deep-dive tour around the Holy Land

“That book looks interesting,” observed the person waiting next to me at the barber shop. It was my turn at the scissors, and as I closed the book and rose to put myself into the barber’s chair, he persisted. “Do you mind if I look at it while you get your hair cut?” This recent interaction underscores what seems to be a resurgent interest in not only Victorian England, but in the Holy Land. The ongoing conflict between Israel and Gaza has no doubt exponentially increased current interest in the region.

Academics are not known for being the most riveting of wordsmiths, but Allan Chapman, an Oxford scholar and professor of the history of science, is cut from an entirely different bolt of velum. His interests range widely, his fascination with his subject matter is contagious, and his previous books have created something of a Chapman fan base.

His latest book, The Victorians and the Holy Land (Eerdmans, 266 pp.), leaves no bone worth chewing un-gnawed, featuring Egyptologists, linguists, archaeologists, adventurers, opportunist tour guides, and exploitative entertainers out for plunder, fame, and fortune. Victorian technological innovations—photography, steam-powered transportation, the telegraph—all exposed the public to new discoveries in the Holy Land, its monumental tombs, mummies, and treasure troves of gold and precious gems, and everyone wanted to visit for themselves.

Chapman devotes an entire chapter to Thomas Cook (1808–1892), the first man to organize package tours to ancient Bible lands. Cook was arguably the vanguard, travel-agent entrepreneur. He started with tours to teetotaling events in England, successful excursions that rapidly set his sights on Holy Land tours. Cook led travelers to the major rivers featured in the Bible where he reimmersed himself in the Jordan—on the exact spot where John baptized Jesus, he told his enthralled tour group—then again in the Euphrates, then again in the Nile, though, Chapman adds, “watchful for crocodiles when dipping in the Nile.”

For those who couldn’t afford a Holy Land tour package, many of the artifacts, including mummies, were brought back to England to be displayed at the Great Exhibition (1851), as well as at the rapidly expanding British Museum. Just as Constantine’s mother Helen plundered Jerusalem and brought its relics to Rome, so Britain transported shiploads of artifacts and ancient treasures to its national museum. All of this further fueled the nation’s appetite for the Holy Land. Chapman describes the flourishing of Victorian art, literature, and music, including Victorian church music, and finds a connection between fascination with the Holy Land and these artistic phenomena.

Chapman delves into the important rise of the “Victorian photograph.” He notes that it was skilled Assyriologist William Henry Fox Talbot who developed the paper negative in the 1840s, and that along with other advances, “photography now hit the road in a serious way.” And one of the first serious photographers to follow that road to the Holy Land was Francis Frith. The results of Frith’s travels in the Bible lands produced his first published book of photographs in 1860; the book’s success prompted Frith to produce a second, larger volume of Holy Land photographs shortly after. Up to this time, Chapman explains, artists had depicted Bible scenes such as the wilderness wandering as if the wilderness resembled the heather-clad moorlands of Scotland.

Photography induced painters to travel to the Ancient Near East and paint on location—the Holy Land as it really appeared to the naked eye, and not as it had heretofore appeared to the romanticized European imagination.

Meanwhile, something sinister was afoot across the Channel. The Victorian age, Chapman points out, had its concurrent philosophical and theological age on the Continent in German higher criticism of the Bible. While Victorians were fascinated with the Holy Land, German philosophers and scholars called into question whether the Bible contained anything like a historical account. German critics placed the Bible alongside folklore, the stuff of Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Chapman is not amused. If the Germans were right, “were Abraham, Moses, and—heaven forbid!—Jesus himself no more real than Snow White or the Pied Piper of Hamlin?”

Chapman demonstrates how Hegelian dialectic ideas critical of the Bible crept into Oxford, and, thus, into the minds of intellectual Victorians. Minds so influenced came to believe that the stories of Jesus and the Bible were “just fabulous tales.”

And then along comes Victorian archaeology and new discoveries in the Holy Land. Though Chapman spends a few too many pages speculating about the possible natural causes of the ten plagues and the destruction of Sennacherib’s army, on the whole, he concludes that Victorian archaeologists’ fascination with the Holy Land shifted “the balance in favor of the authenticity of the Bible, and especially of the Christian story.”

Chapman is captivated by the ancient pyramids and all they contained, the 1799 discovery of the Rosetta Stone that would unlock ancient languages, the discovery of rose-red Petra in 1812, and so much more—but his real interest seems to be in the Biblical history, religious identity, and moral values learned from these discoveries. Though Chapman is committed to Christ and the pure doctrine of the gospel, he maintains a posture of academic objectivity assumed throughout the book. Nevertheless, Christians will find the book absorbing for the vast scope of its content and for what it unearths and confirms about Biblical history. The author hastens to emphasize archaeological discoveries don’t “prove the Bible to be true in a literal sense,” but he insists that they provide a “wholly credible context … a ‘stage-set’ for the enactment of the Bible story.” And throughout the book, Chapman credits Victorian interest in the Holy Land for setting that stage.