5 The Out-of-Doors Gospel in Palestine: Protestants Encounter Catholic and Orthodox Shrines and Create Their Own Traditions

When traveling to Palestine, American Protestant pilgrims encountered Christians from differing traditions and ethnic backgrounds who not only had a historic presence in Palestine, but who also owned real estate upon the very sites where most of the important events depicted in the Bible had occurred. From the earliest records, American Protestants reject the indoor shrines of Palestine and worship out-of-doors. Early missionary Pliny Fisk wrote in 1823 that the “gaudy” shrine in Bethlehem “exhibited an appearance of splendor widely different from that of a stable. . . . Wholly unlike what our . . . imagination had conceived.”[1] In contrast, later, when Fisk came to the outdoor Shepherd’s Field, the “delightful valley,” “green fields,” and “barren rocky hills” made it “delightful to imagine how a multitude of heavenly host descended from above.”[2] In a fashion to become a typical Protestant pattern, Fisk experiences his best pilgrimage under the sky. Additionally, Fisk begins a pattern of outdoor worship by Protestant Americans that endures to the current day. At Mount Olivet, “we held our first Monthly Concert of prayer in the Promised Land.”[3] Finally, Fisk wanders about the fields of Nazareth in the new Protestant ritual of walking and reflection that occurs under the open skies in Palestine: “I love to reflect as I walk over the plain of Nazareth, and the hills around it, that our Lord and Savior used to walk over the same ground.”[4] Repeatedly, American Protestants will find their pilgrimages in the out-of-doors.

John Lloyd Stephens wrote in 1838 that Mount Sinai is one of the undoubtable biblical sites, “the holy mountain; and among all the stupendous works of Nature . . . for the exhibition of Almighty power.”[5] He lauded its “terrific solitudes and bleak majesty” as particularly meaningful among the disappointments of the “East, the fruitful parent of superstition.”[6] For Stephens, the day spent hiking Sinai on the mountain trail was “one of the most interesting of my life.”[7] In other instances where he lauds nature above all else in the Holy Land, Stephens “subsumes deserted ruins, however obviously of human construction, under the category of nature.”[8] A Romantic fascination with ruins is an important theme of nineteenth-century literature and is seen at times in the Holy Land travel genre. As was the case with Stephens, Americans treasured the opportunities for meaningful experiences that could be had out-of-doors, in unchanging nature, in direct contact with biblical history.

Time, history, and tradition, however, alienated American Protestants from Eastern and Catholic Christians in Palestine. In 1840, E. G. Robinson estimated that there were approximately a half of a million Christians in Palestine, only a miniscule fraction of whom were Protestant.[9] Robinson described the Christian population in terms of five various sects. They included “Greeks and Greek Catholics (the most numerous group, which also included many Arabs), Maronites/Jacobites of Syriac origin, Syriac Catholics, Armenians, and Latins (very few and only in convents).”[10] Robinson and many other Protestants wrote of his deep concern over the danger of idolatry for Protestants while visiting Palestine, then discredited and denounced many of the local shrines. Rejection of the shrines evidences Protestant piety. A clear pattern is evident in American Protestant Palestine pilgrimage: a preference for the out-of-doors as a pilgrimage site.

Providing early evidence for this trend, Clorinda Minor enjoyed the outdoor Garden of Gethsemane more than “any other of the marble-covered and cherished localities.”[11] She celebrated simple, natural elements, as would most Protestants coming after her: “The native earth and stones were bare gray; the ragged time-worn trunks of the hoary trees, like solemn witnesses stood there, with their thin foliage, bearing olives still.”[12] Protestant pilgrims avoided and condemned indoor shrines. They urged Christians to “be another Luther” to “heathen Christians” and wrote of the Reformers as the “latter day Prophets” whose ideas would cleanse the Palestine landscape of corrupt priests. Time and again, they advocated the out-of-doors experience in the Holy Land as the most aptly Protestant one.

In Maria Susanna Cummins’s 1860 novel set in the Levant, El Fureidis, the popular trend of Protestant out-of-doors worship can again be seen. As a caravan containing an American family, an Englishman, a priest, and their servants travel through Hermon at twilight under a starry sky, “the whole scene was grand, illusive, shadowy. It favored meditation, and the thoughts of all soared.”[13] Suddenly the daughter Havilah breaks into song, singing a Christian hymn about the great Shepherd among the hills. “The effect of the song was at once solemn and inspiring. It was as if they had been at worship in the temple, and the service was ended.”[14] Protestants, lacking any historical edifice for worship in Palestine, return to the idea of nature as the ultimate “grand” cathedral for “meditation” and worship in their writings set in the Holy Land.

Rejecting the existing Christian shrines, Protestants sought Christ in nature, in the out-of-doors, or erected their own parallel sites. Influenced by Romanticism, they gloried in the fields and flowers of the bold landscape, imagining a simple, natural childhood for Jesus, unencumbered by centuries of tradition. They contrasted the simple lessons of the beauty of nature to the excess trappings of ancient civilization so evident in the shrines of other Christian traditions. The historical Protestant emphasis upon Scripture and education are evident in the usage of the Bible as the “best guide book to Palestine.”[15] For some it was the only acceptable guide book to Palestine, one that led at times to “groping in the dark” and hopes for better ones in the future.[16] Traveling on pilgrimage to Palestine appeared to bring Protestants closer to their theological roots, such as elevating the importance of Scripture, rather than further away from them—they refused to follow the pilgrimage traditions of the Eastern and Catholic shrines that they had historically defined themselves against.

THE DANGER OF IDOLATRY IN PALESTINE

One method pilgrim authors used to distance the veneration of the Holy Land from any notion of idolatry was to insist upon the otherworldly truth of the gospel, as a religion primarily of “heart” and not of “place”—while lauding certain spaces above other spaces. This option diffused some of the danger of the beatification of the Holy Land. Most Protestant pilgrims vehemently decried the superstition and idolatry they found in Palestine. Only a few lone voices differed, such as high church Episcopalian William Henry Odenheimer,[17] who compared Palestine shrines to the secular iconography of America found on such sites as Plymouth Rock.[18] This was the exception, however, as most rejected Catholic and Eastern shrines altogether as idolatrous. Henry Van Dyke, concerned about the danger of idolatry, wrote a “Psalm of the Unseen Altar” while in Palestine.[19] Unlike the churches in front of him on his Holy Land tour, this sanctuary was an altar of the “heart” rather than of a “shrine.”[20]

Philip Schaff also expressed discomfort with the danger of idolatrous attachment to the Holy Land: the intensity of spiritual connection to material elements in Palestine, which were physical rather than purely spiritual.[21] Surveying the actual Calvary he wrote, “there is a better Calvary, which, like the manger of the nativity and the spot of the Ascension, has a spiritual omnipresence in Christendom, and is imbedded in the memory and affection of every believer.”[22] Schaff represented a common conviction among preachers who sought to clarify the nature of their commitment to the idea of a holy sight and to distance themselves from the evils of shrine veneration. Perhaps such sentiments contributed to the definition of Palestine as a Jewish Holy Land rather than a Christian one.

Maltbie D. Babcock, like Schaff, was concerned about the potential for idolatry at the sight of the cross and insisted that in “the true cross we may find in supreme loyalty to the will of God.”[23] Nevertheless, Babcock wanted to retain the idea of a pilgrimage site for Protestant Christians in Jerusalem.[24] He writes, “Jerusalem, more than Rome or Greece, is the center of light for the whole earth.”[25] Behind this statement is a provision for a Protestant alternative and a rejection of both Roman Catholicism and modern philosophy.

Fosdick also noted this paradox for Protestants.[26] Christians, he claimed, must not become excessively caught up in the excitement of the newly rediscovered Holy Land by attempting to understand Christ purely in terms of his environment:

In Jesus’ day, as now, the fountain, the village [Nazareth] that stood near it, and the villagers who lived there—the entire physical and human matrix in which his life was set—were probably to ordinary eyes thus dull and drab and uninspiring. . . . You cannot explain Christ by his environment; his secret runs far back into the abysmal depths of personality.[27]

For Fosdick, the environment did not provide the only key for understanding Jesus—even though it provided a powerful one. The contrast between the Spirit of Jesus on the one hand, and historic Christianity or Palestine on the other, was especially shocking in Palestine, where Fosdick was forced to conclude that “in the end even the traveler who at first is shocked discovers the real Jerusalem.”[28] Nevertheless, the real Jerusalem lay in the hearts and minds of believers rather than in a particular landscape when one is concerned about the dangers of idolatry. In the end, Protestants would conclude that Palestine should be a homeland for Jews, not Christians. Palestine’s natural landscapes are the most important signifiers; they help to point to an ethereal, spiritual reality that resided in another realm.

According to Schaff, Fosdick, and others, one must always keep “real” spiritual Christianity in tension with the “material” revelation offered by the Holy Land. It was necessary for these pilgrims to make disclaimers in their narratives, stating that Christianity cannot be fully understood through the exegesis of the Holy Land. This disclaimer revealed the extent to which the Holy Land had captured popular imagination and influenced popular theology. Protestant leaders wanted to retain the idea of pilgrimage, while erasing its negative associations.

Frances Willard, writing in 1870 on tour in Palestine, spoke of “mankind” as inevitable “golden calf makers.”[29] She ruminated that the shrines so often visited in Palestine “are consecrated only by the credulity of ages [because] Christ our Savior cared too much for the Spirit & too little for the letter.”[30] The “real” places in Palestine have been lost, and the imitations become holy only by virtue of historical tradition. In his essence, the spiritual Christ rejects the physical worship of golden calves, or the “letter.” Another Protestant pilgrim wrote that on his journey he struggled “not to find an empty, open tomb as one who sought the Asian Sepulcher. I seek the kingdom of the Risen One Within.”[31] The question of the larger journey or pilgrimage of life for a Protestant—whether interior or exterior—also occupied some pilgrims.

While Willard rejected the indoor shrines, a favorite thought of hers was the idea of walking where Christ had walked while she was outdoors. This was an idea that often passed through her pilgrimage group like electricity:

I have so often noticed . . . how often such sentences as these would break the silence: “To think that He has passed this way!” “I wonder what He meant by this passage,” or “Do you imagine His journeys included the section through which our route lies today?” Hardly ever is the name mentioned—the name that thrills our hearts here as never before that inspires all our researches and has set our long procession winding among these hills & vales.[32]

Like most Protestants, Willard enjoyed the religious aspects of her Palestine pilgrimage while she was outdoors. The popular idea of “walking where Christ walked” was a sought-after experience. Willard seems to sense the divine only when she is outdoors in Palestine. In one instance, she is “baptized” by a storm into her own race:

This was a memorable ride to me for the ocean in a storm stirs my nature like no other spectacle;—it speaks to me of God—of the mystical past & the wonder that shall be in unborn ages;—it baptizes me with its feather spray into the vast army of my race that have sailed over its billows in triumph or sunk beneath them in despair.[33]

Willard experiences an anointing of sorts from Nature while riding along the Mediterranean in Palestine. She feels a kinship with the “army” of her “race” at the beach, whereas she feels only disgust and anger at the non-Protestant indoor Palestine shrines. A few days later, these feelings cause her to reflect upon the role she hopes her race might have in Palestine. She depicts the Arabs as an elderly race “far gone in decrepitude” whose “dull eyes” will be closed by her “children,” who will take her place and fill it with their “active enterprise.”[34]

The active enterprise that Willard sought and prized was to walk out-of-doors where Christ walked. In Jerusalem she reports that she “followed Christ’s path when coming from Jordan and went through the probable wilderness.”[35] While camping, Willard enjoyed the singing: “we all sing ‘Rock of Ages’ & these good men lift their thoughts in prayer & I try to do the same.”[36] The Armenian and Catholic services in Jerusalem were a disaster for her. Willard enjoyed reading aloud for her companions the chapters of the Bible “as related to Jesus’ teachings from Mount Olivet” after visiting there.[37] Palestine was thought to particularly illumine the Bible. “What force-freshness & added pathos I found in all these wonderful words after the experience of this marvelous week.”[38] As was the case for most American Protestant pilgrims, Willard enjoyed the outdoors and direct study of the Bible while in Palestine.

When Willard stood outside alongside the pool of Siloam she wrote that “the divinity of the religion in which I place my hopes thrilled through my heart as perhaps never before.”[39] Whether in the City or out in the countryside, the preference was clearly to be outside and walk where Christ walked. At the mountains of Moab she reflected upon the crucial Palestine Holy Land: “what a matchless landscape this—impossible to rival on the wide face of the beautiful earth;—more significant to the Christian heart than all the classic plains or poetic mountain heights.”[40] The most critical pilgrimage experiences with the Divine in Palestine are found within the larger landscape, nature, and the outdoors. The dark shrines seemed to promote idolatry and were often avoided and met with disgust.

Willard was not the only Protestant to feel strange in an unfamiliar Orthodox setting. One American pilgrim of Scottish Calvinist background wrote as he entered a Greek Orthodox shrine: “I feared my Scotch ancestors within me might make protest in the presence of all the ritualistic emblems . . . but they were, after much argument, reconciled and forgot their differences in their approach to this hallowed place.”[41] German Reformed minster Benjamin Bausman wrote in 1861 that “the Greek Easter is the greatest moral argument against the spot [Church of the Holy Sepulcher] . . . probably the most offensive imposture to be found in the world.”[42] Of the Garden of Gethsemane missionary William Thompson wrote: “The Latins . . . have succeeded in gaining sole possession of it . . . and seem disposed to make it like a modern pleasure garden. . . . The Greeks have invented another site a little north of it.”[43] The very foreignness of other Christian traditions was difficult to resolve in many cases.

In rejecting the Holy Land as an object of veneration, Protestants participated in an ancient Christian tradition of spiritualizing the Holy Land.[44] Discussions regarding Christian pilgrimage can be traced back to Gregory of Nyssa (335–394 C.E.), who was both an adherent and a detractor of Holy Land pilgrimage. Gregory called holy places “saving symbols,” and he believed that the Holy Land had received the “footprints of life itself.” Gregory of Nyssa wrote that just as perfume leaves its fragrance in a jar, so God has left traces of God’s presence in Palestine.[45] At other times, however, Gregory stated that God is no more present in one place than in another. This example is somewhat representative as there is a tradition of Christian ambivalence about the Holy Land, regularly discussing where the difference between a pilgrim, a traveler, and a tourist lies. Palestine/Israel has also been viewed as a part of the romantic, chivalrous medieval tradition that began with the first crusades, the renewed interest in the Holy Land during the English Reformation, and the ongoing interest in pilgrimage. Actual pilgrimage was in deep decline among Protestants from the Reformation until the nineteenth century when the Holy Land is being rediscovered with the advent of steamship travel, although actual Holy Land pilgrimage or crusade has remained a popular literary focus in the Western tradition.[46]

In the literary Holy Land tradition of seventeenth-century England, Milton portrayed the Holy Land as a land of wonder and terror, and during the eighteenth century, another period of low Protestant pilgrimage participation, hymns of the Wesley’s, Cowper, and Watts portray it as a pastoral, miraculous place. Hymnody of the eighteenth century depicted the Christian life as a pilgrimage. In addition, during the nineteenth century, Palestine became a symbol of truth for Romantic poets such as Blake,[47] while pious ministers begin to travel there and write spiritualized narratives for their congregations.[48]

The tradition of Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land started with the pilgrimage of Constantine’s mother, Helena, to Jerusalem in the fourth century. Little has been written on the topic of Christian Holy Land pilgrimage itself, although particular voyages such as that of Egeria of Spain in the early church period, and that of English Margery Kempe in the late medieval period are well known. The books on pilgrimage in Christian history, which do not focus on a particular character, tend towards devotionalism in some cases, while others seek to illumine the impact of pilgrimages to the East on art and literature in the West. Many of the books above are listed in order to show that they exist and to demonstrate the scope and limitations of interest in this topic among Christians.

In general, the early church highly valued pilgrimage to Jerusalem. During the medieval period, large extensive tours were often the norm. For example, in 1064 the bishop of Mainz led a pilgrimage of seven thousand people to Jerusalem. There they were able to purchase sacred items and bring them home. They touched their rings to the site of the crucifixion and carried Jordan water back with them. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are set in a pilgrim’s inn as strangers meet on their journey to tell their tales on the way to Jerusalem. Pilgrimage was a central element of medieval life that was later rejected and disparaged by the leaders of the Protestant Reformation.

While Protestants did not begin to travel to Palestine en masse until the nineteenth century, it was a living ideal as well as an important place on the cultural map in theology and art. When Protestant ministers begin traveling there, however, the cultural associations evolve and change in new ways. In nineteenth-century popular culture, the East is broadly associated with the exotic and with permissiveness, a trend reflected in fashion and popular literature.[49] Protestant pilgrimage authors fashion a more pious East for a Christian audience. In their clear preference for the out-of-doors, Protestant pilgrims fashion parallel sites by the turn of the century.

General Gordon’s Garden Tomb is created as a Protestant Calvary alternative to the Holy Sepulcher—a site rejected for its superstitious idolatry and excessive tradition.[50] General Gordon’s Tomb is a wholly outdoor site, wherein visitors sit on simple benches in the midst of a garden under the canopy of trees and sky, surrounded by a garden of typical Palestine foliage. From these benches they have a vantage of the landscape and the outcropping of rock that Gordon called “Golgotha.”

Similarly, Robinson’s Arch is an out-of-doors site that must be viewed from a simple nature path around the back of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. There, American Protestants can stand in the midst of a natural, parklike setting under the sky and survey a previously hidden archaelogical wonder discovered by an American scholar, untrammeled by predecessors, unfettered by centuries of tradition. In 1870 Frances Willard described her visit to Robinson’s Arch: “we all sit on the lower stone of the arch or recline in the fragrant wheat near by & Dr. Goodwin reads to us at length.”[51]

American Protestants claimed their pilgrimage sites in the open places—charting a clear path away from the others whenever possible in order to safely practice their earnest faith. The American Protestant preference for the out-of-doors in Palestine as the clearest pathway to the most important spiritual reality is perhaps the most unique and defining characteristic of their pilgrimages. They claimed the rocks, hills, trees, gardens, ancient walls, and sky as their own religious heritage and most important sites of contact with the sacred. When necessary, these out-of-door sites were institutionalized, named, and venerated as signifiers and links to the central tenets of Protestant religion, namely, the rejection of idol worship (outward forms), the emphasis upon science and education, and the insistence upon returning to the most simple, untrammeled reflection of the Bible and its geographical sources.

LEISURE-TOURISM AND PILGRIMAGE

What is the role of leisure-tourism in such American Protestant pilgrimage? Many pilgrimage sites of the nineteenth and early twentieth century are full of the trappings of consumer commercialism and the opportunity to shop for souvenirs. During the mid-nineteenth century, the souvenir, this enduring, historical element of pilgrimage (and perhaps all travel), was also crucial. The records of the presence of religious memento hawkers outside of a Christian religious site testifies to this ancient traveling tradition and the eagerness to buy. For example, one 1838 traveler returned to Germany with “rosaries, mother-of-pearl tablets, crucifixes, petrified olives, and peas, and a certificate of his visit to the Holy Sepulcher.”[53] At home, the themes of the East and Orient were the hottest ideas for early department store marketing, because for many the East symbolized a sensuality and openness that Judeo-Christian culture lacked.[54] During the nineteenth century, travel, no matter how thrilling the voyage, was often justified as a repair for ill health rather than for enjoyment’s sake alone. Travel to Palestine was defensible as an especially worthy use of time due to its religious significance, i.e., a Christian vacation or a sanctified vacation. Protestants rarely cast their journeys as pilgrimage, rather more as a pious, educational adventure.

While many Protestants continued the ancient Christian theological tradition of ambivalence about the significance of the Holy Land, they remained outspoken about the dangers of idolatry. Willard warned of “golden calf makers,” while other leading Protestants such as Schaff, Babcock, and Fosdick urged readers to seek a more spiritual Jerusalem or Holy Land. This spiritual Holy Land, they asserted, was the true one.

“BE ANOTHER LUTHER” TO “HEATHEN” CHRISTIANS

The busy and crowded ancient shrines of Jerusalem provided the economic backbone of the city during the nineteenth century, as it was often full of foreign pilgrims. The industry of the monks and other religious leaders provided a significant source of cash for local monastic and religious communities. The earliest Protestant missionary to Palestine, Pliny Fisk, was pulled aside by a “padre” in a Palestine monastery during the 1820s. He related the conversation:

He said he was aware, that the English wish but the distribution of books to form a party in the East. But said he in a confidential manner, as if telling me something very important, I perceive they do not know the character of the people in the Levant. One third of the money, which they spend for books, if distributed secretly, would form a large party. Whereas, by distributing books, they effect nothing . . . the fact that this is the method adopted by the Catholics in order to make proselytes, make me believe, that he was sincere in what he considered the best method of converting men. This man has been thirty years a missionary without learning the language of the country.[55]

This realistic portrayal of the missions field prompted Fisk to state the real object of the Bible Society to give the Bible to the locals in their own dialect due to their ignorance of the Scriptures. Fisk’s other principle object had been to begin “regular Protestant worship in the Holy City.”[56] The missions field was a complex one, but Fisk worshipped in a Protestant fashion both in his own room, and also in the out-of-doors. A Protestant pilgrim traveling during the 1850s wrote, “The support of Jerusalem is its holiness. Pilgrims sustain it entirely. In Easter week their number is immense, and all the year round it is considerable.”[57] Yet Protestant institutions did not benefit financially from pilgrim activity, having no basic claim to any holy locations or shrines in Jerusalem. In addition, they resented the piety of the other traditions, which was hardly familiar to them. Protestants commonly viewed Catholics as a mission field.[58] The types of non-Protestant Christians in Jerusalem in 1840, according to E. G. Robinson, were “mostly Greeks and Armenians, very few Latins were seen; and only now and then a straggling Copt.”[59] Over time, Protestants came to view the Holy Sepulcher as a modern version of the Israelite temple of Jerusalem—overrun by moneychangers and robbers.[60] Protestants wanted to “cleanse the temple” of corruption and inappropriate elements just as Jesus had done in his day, and also as the Protestant Reformers had done in their own time. Yet the desire to preserve the holy places and shrines unchanged was a central focus of the late nineteenth-century Catholic approach to the Holy Land.[61]

E. G. Robinson wrote despairingly of the state of Jerusalem in the 1840s while proudly reflecting upon Protestant worship in light of the foreign forms of worship he saw: “The simplicity and spirituality of the Protestant worship was to me affecting and doubly pleasing in contrast with the pageant of which we had just been spectators.”[62] Having been delayed in his travels, he narrowly missed all of the events of the Holy Week for Christians and the Jewish Passover celebrations and counted himself lucky. He wrote:

In consequence of our late arrival we thus missed all the incidents of the Holy Week. This however we counted as no loss, but rather a gain; for the object of our visit was the city itself, in relation to its ancient renown and religious associations; not as seen in its present state of decay and superstitious or fraudful degradation.[63]

The dilemma of the Protestant traveler to Palestine reflects a larger conflict in Protestant biblical theology in general. This is seen in the way that they found the biblical past of the imagination and the Bible in a situation of historical decay in a derelict, outlying Turkish village. Robinson was careful to reject “superstitious” pilgrimage piety—jumping over centuries of tradition back to biblical origins and affirming instead the solid ground of science for the Christian scholar-traveler. According to Robinson, Protestants of all varieties laid aside their distinctions in Jerusalem, finding they had more in common than they had perhaps once believed. Besides, in a setting like the Holy Land, “each religion was obliged to define itself, to show that the others were different and of lesser value.”[64] In the face of such obstacles, Protestants were more likely to overcome their differences and focus on their similarities instead.

Protestants described the “grafting onto Jerusalem” of “a vast mass of tradition, foreign in its source and doubtful in its character; which has flourished luxuriantly and spread itself out widely.”[65] For missionaries during the first half of the nineteenth century “the curse of Islam had been divinely sanctioned to punish Christians for corrupting worship with rites and rituals alien to the spirit of the Bible. Exporting Christian purity back to the Holy Land was a crucial divine duty.”[66] Protestants doubted the sincerity and validity of the shrine operations that served many pilgrims. Writing during 1870, Frances Willard made note of the contrast between the extreme poverty of the throngs of pilgrims in contrast to the expensive clothing and elaborate hairstyles of the priests. She found the rituals repetitive:

There was little of novelty [at the Holy Sepulcher]. The same dirty, longhaired, ill-smelling crowd of feverishly eager worshippers, the same priests with locks like a woman’s hanging down their backs & gorgeous robes of purple, green, & gold. The same singsong ritual though without the splendid harmony.[67]

Many Protestants began to see the local Christian priests as a corrupt, wealthy class of persons who took advantage of the multitudes of poor, non-Protestant pilgrims who traveled to Palestine. Their rituals were hardly familiar, and were regarded by Protestants as cacophonous rather than orderly. Willard later wrote that the “Reformers” are the “prophets” of the later ages. Indeed, many Protestants of the nineteenth century suggested that the biblical mantle of prophecy had fallen upon Protestants who needed to speak out to the corrupt priestly class in Jerusalem, just as Jesus had done almost two thousand years earlier to the religious elite of his time, the Pharisees and Sadducees.

In another fashion, one 1910 pilgrim quoted a Psalm lamenting the public defeat and humiliation of warring Christian groups while referencing the legendary fighting he witnessed between Christian groups, particularly at the Holy Sepulcher. He wrote, “Now I know at least one reason why Mohammedans despise Christians, ‘Thou makest us a reproach to our neighbors, a scorn and a derision to them that are round about us.’”[68] An official U.S. mapping expedition was rescued from a throng of thousands of disorderly pilgrims by their “Bedawin friends.” They wrote, “Strange that we should have been shielded from a Christian throng by wild children of the desert.”[69] Eastern Christians were often seen as an embarrassment to American Protestants, who saw them as hopelessly superstitious, corrupt, and disorderly.

The policing role of the Muslim soldiers in 1880 at Christian shrines remained a sign of Christian disunity and discord. Many Protestant pilgrims felt ashamed that Christians were not able to maintain peace and order at their own shrines. One pilgrim described the melee at the Holy Sepulcher:

The crowds of pilgrims and devotees calling themselves Christian, who were only kept from flying at each others’ throats over the tomb of the Founder of their Religion by a strong guard of Moslem soldiers, evidently inspired the latter with a contempt and disgust which one felt compelled to share. Nor can we wonder that the followers of the Prophet who are called upon to protect the degrading rites and superstitions practiced in this bitter and fanatic spirit, should regard some forms of modern Christianity as little better than paganism.[70]

In this instance, the fighting between Christians witnessed and literally policed by armed Muslim soldiers was viewed as a radical departure from the tenets of the Christian religion. “In all the wild haste of a disorderly rout, Copts and Russians, Poles, Armenians, Greeks, and Syrians . . . on they came . . . talking, screaming, shouting in almost every known language under the sun.”[71] The false notions of the other pilgrims were perceived as ignorant, debased, and corrupt—similar to “paganism.”[72] In fact, Eastern Christians were also blamed for the ascendancy of Islam in the Holy Land. The belief in saints and relics was viewed by Muslims as idolatrous practices that blocked Muslims from perceiving the merits of Protestant salvation.[73]

During the nineteenth century, Protestants chose more often to see themselves as scholars, scientists, and reporters for an audience back home than as humble pilgrims. Sometimes, they chose to see themselves as adventurers. While pilgrimage is often theologically associated with relics and superstition among Protestants, Protestant travel was often overtly associated with education and connection to a historical past (a traditional Protestant emphases) rather than with miracle and spirituality. “Pilgrimage” smacked too much of ignorance and spiritual sentimentality for Protestants, who also often viewed themselves in terms of the influence of the Enlightenment and the progress of science.

The nineteenth and twentieth century would see the development of a multitude of Protestant parallel sites in Palestine—a clear rejection of the centuries-old venerable Orthodox shrines. Protestants often did not identify with other Christians in Palestine. Instead, they often treated them with hostility and disdain. E. G. Robinson wrote, “All ecclesial tradition in and around Jerusalem and throughout Palestine is of no value except as it is supported from scriptures or from other contemporary testimony.”[74] Robinson further recommended for the sake of honest research that one avoid contact with the monks altogether, instead applying for information solely to the native population, and going off the beaten track.

For many Protestants, other Christian traditions were depleted of the vitality and force that only contact with the West could give them: “Western civilization is living and effective, and, while it is progressing in the West, it is actively regenerating the effete civilization of the East.”[75] One representation of the idea of clash between “civilization” and “nature” discussed above is exemplified in the insistence by many Protestant ministers that the out-of-doors was the true pilgrimage site, as opposed to the sacramental sites offered by Eastern Christian churches. Upon seeing the Eastern churches, Philip Schaff lamented that the Holy Land was “fearfully desolate and neglected now”—the abundance of nature was nowhere to be seen.[76] These Eastern churches, for Schaff, remained unchanged, like the Bedouin Arabs: the “Armenians, Nestorian, and Copts have been providentially preserved in a petrified state.”[77] In contrast, the out-of-doors remained pure and untrammeled (truly unchanged and more biblical)—more ready for analysis by Protestant preachers. Heavily incense-scented, darkened, ornate, candle-liturgical, icon-containing churches and shrines of the Eastern church in Palestine presented American preachers with what was likely a new religious experience. In general, they did not respond well to this different approach to Christian worship.

According to Schaff, it was no heresy to dissent from any of the “monkish” traditions concerning the holy places in Palestine, because the church has never claimed geographical and topographical infallibility. In fact, Protestants strongly begged to differ with the piety of their Eastern Christian brothers and sisters: “I cannot say that I have been favorably impressed. I would gladly recognize piety and devotion to Christ even under the crude and distorted forms of superstition. But I could not restrain the feeling that this is not the worship in Spirit and in truth which our Savior demands.”[78] Schaff, along with others, remained convinced that Eastern Christians were insincere idolaters.

Dwight L. Moody also engaged in a heartfelt conversation with an Eastern Orthodox priest from America while in the Holy Land. Moody urged him to preach the gospel of Christ to his people, while encouraging him to be “another Luther” to his “superstitious” and “deceptive” people.[79] One can only imagine his response, which is not recorded in the narrative. Similarly, John Haynes Holmes wrote the following condemnation of Eastern Orthodox Christians: “It is a beautiful system—build a church, give it a reputation through the world as the place where Jesus did something or other, and then sit at the seat of customs and rake in the money of those who have to see everything that is properly advertised.”[80] Clearly, Holmes viewed his own marketing and profit of the Holy Land through the sale of his pilgrimage narrative in a different light. Protestant preachers viewed their own veneration and retailing of the Holy Land in another way altogether.

This fear and/or mixed contempt for Eastern worship and the love for the out-of-doors quickly turned into a call for missions among pilgrims to the misguided Eastern Christians. The earliest American Protestant mission efforts to Palestine were made by Pliny Fisk and Levi Parsons in the 1820s. Both died of disease approximately five years after arriving in the distant Land, and were widely considered Protestant martyrs.[81] Their stated goal was to “rekindle the flame of primitive piety on the crumbling altars of a long corrupted Christianity.”[82] The feeling was mutual: in 1846, an Armenian bull of “perpetual excommunication and anathema forever” barred all Protestants permanently from membership in the Armenian Church.[83] The idea that Christian identity was universal among believers and that it transcended any other cultural or regional commitment was pervasive among Gilded Age Protestants during the heyday of the American foreign mission enterprise. These ministers conflated Christianity and Western civilization in their writings, as many liberal proponents of missions would do during the Progressive Era. They shared many of the common assumptions of the missionary mood as they traveled abroad to the Holy Land. According to William Hutchinson, this mood included “convictions about the Adamic or Christ-like innocence of the Americans, a national destiny made manifest in biblical prophecy, and America’s redemptive role within the divine plan.”[84] Thus, Protestant ministers’ views of the Armenians, Nestorians, and Copts of the Holy Land as “heathens” in need of true salvation must be understood within the context of the imperialistic American conceptions of national destiny guiding relations with cultures deemed primitive by the Western world.

Writing in this mood, Schaff concluded his travel narrative with a call for missions to the misguided inhabitants of the East. He wrote, “Once Europe called upon Asia, ‘come over and help us!’ Now the same cry comes from Asia and Africa to Europe and America.”[85] For Schaff, the lands of the Bible comprised a vast mission-field. It must be “conquered with spiritual weapons for Christ and Christian civilization by the Western nations, in discharge of a debt of gratitude for the blessings received from them.”[86] Yet when Protestant missionaries began to appear in the Holy Land, they appeared in an area where the Church had existed for centuries. Most initial efforts, however, were directed toward Muslims.[87] In time, with their knowledge of Greek and Syriac and their Hellenistic/ Byzantine cultural background, Eastern Christians would play key roles as mediators between Protestants and Muslims.[88] Protestants believed that Americans should not neglect the “heathens” inhabiting the Palestine landscape in the broader mission enterprise.

THE CHRIST CHILD IN NATURAL PALESTINE

Protestant pilgrims were somewhat undecided about the roles of “civilization” and “nature” in the Holy Land and ruminated on this topic at length. Though civilization gave them their knowledge and credentials as Anglo-Saxons, they recognized that civilization could corrupt and that it had the potential to banish the religious romance and power of the Holy Land. For example, Talmage wrote that he was glad he was able to see the Holy Land before the inevitable “civilized” development occurred. When a planned train from Jaffa to Jerusalem was realized, he noted, one would no longer need physical strength and diligence on such tours. Instead, sadly, anyone would be able to respond to the conductor’s cry, “all aboard for Jerusalem!”[89] The conflict between the excesses and the benefits of civilization was somewhat resolved, however, as Talmage presented his trip in the best possible light.

At the moment of the book’s production in 1890, Talmage hoped to present to his readers the pinnacle of what civilization could offer, combined with the pristine, untouched, blank slate of a holy, biblical landscape unspoiled by the excesses of this same civilization. The abundance of God afforded by the land notwithstanding, Talmage claimed, “[n]othing but Christian civilization will ever roll back the influences which are spoiling the Egyptians.”[90] Yet fortunately, the lack of civilization in the Orient had preserved the Orient as a record of the Christian past. This conundrum, i.e., placing the benefits and costs of Anglo-Saxon civilization at odds with each other, was a paradoxical theme running through the Holy Land tour genre.

The transformation of social anxieties into physical ones was also apparent in the Holy Land tour genre’s discourse on “civilization” and “nature.” In contrast to the “civilized” American city with all of its social problems, the landscape of Palestine was unencumbered. Talmage’s elegant sermon rhetoric back home denounced the evils of urban life.[91] In contrast to the ugly lives of urban immigrant children, Christ’s childhood was a fresh and direct encounter with nature. His boyhood was spent “among birds and flowers” while “drinking from wells and chasing butterflies.”[92] There were no factories or bureaucratization in Christ’s childhood. The only disruptions, according to Talmage, came from majestic exhibitions of the power of nature. It is not surprising that Protestants would conclude that the wide vistas of unsettled Palestine were the perfect homeland for crowded ghetto residents of the West.

The real, spiritual Jerusalem could be found in pristine nature, and some pilgrims spiritualized an imagined clash between civilization and nature. For Schaff, the victory of Protestant Christianity in Palestine must be a spiritual victory rather than an earthly, civilized one. Christians must not make the mistake of the Crusaders once again. Fosdick also noted that “if one would get at the real Jerusalem as it was at first, one must leave the present city altogether.”[93] The true Holy Land was actually found in the areas where “primitive” Arabs reside close to nature: “One lives here in the atmosphere of the Arabian Nights. The world of normal regularity and scientific law grows dim and the mind is transported back to pre-scientific days, when anything could happen and everything that did happen was immediately ascribed to God.”[94]

The intended audience for some Holy Land tour accounts, however, was the geographically distant, civilized white American male, ensconced as it were and quite removed from “nature.” According to Talmage, his account From Manger to Throne (1890) was a life of Christ which “a business man, getting home at eight o’ clock at night and starting from home next morning at seven o’ clock may profitably take up, and in the few minutes before he starts and after he returns, read in snatches and understand.”[95] Talmage here was specific about the civilized racial stream of which he is a part, positioning himself at the forefront of the evolutionary development of the Anglo-Saxon race, citing with pride his white forebears:

We shall tell the story in Anglo-Saxon, the language in which John Bunyan dreamed and William Shakespeare dramatized, and Longfellow romanced and John Milton sang, and George Whitfield thundered. What is the use of dragging dead languages into the service of such a book? Sailing on the Atlantic Ocean I asked where did all this water come from, and answered it by saying, “the Hudson, the St. Lawrence, the Mississippi, the Amazon, the Seine, the Tagus, and the Guadalquiver.” And so I thought all the rivers of language, freighted with the thoughts of all lands and all ages, have emptied into the ocean of Anglo-Saxonism. Blessed to me was the hour when my mother taught me how to frame the first sentence out of it, and my last word on earth shall be a draught upon its inexhaustible treasury.[96]

Talmage explained his choice to write a less scholarly book in the vernacular English, or Anglo-Saxon. His own language, English, was loaded with evolutionary benefits coming from ages of civilized intellectual development. In fact, all of the intellectual developments of the world had emptied themselves into the “ocean” of Anglo-Saxonism. This Anglo-Saxonism, therefore, was superior to dead languages, and the civilized middle-class, white, male reader should know that the language and culture he received at his mother’s knee was an especially great one, if not the greatest. The Protestant minister viewed a primitive Arab biblical landscape, interpreted it in terms of Anglo-Saxon civilization, and made it available to the same more refined culture. They simply chose not to regard historically present Arab Christians as a source of wisdom or information in any sense.

Also evident in the Holy Land tour genre was the influence of Romantic religion, especially with its lack of concern for evil, pain, and death and the treatment of sin as blindness to nature. The commitment to the ideal of immediate awareness of God through sense-experience of nature and landscape in the Holy Land was related to the Transcendentalist mood sweeping antebellum America.[97] Perhaps the distant land of Palestine allowed popular, orthodox Presbyterian preachers the intellectual space to experiment with such ideas regarding the divine in nature in a safe way.

Many of the travel accounts called forth a Romantic Christ in direct communion with nature and in rejection of the excesses of civilization. For example, Talmage wrote: “One day I see that Divine boy, the wind flurrying his hair over his sun-browned forehead, standing on a hilltop.”[98] Jesus’ Romantic encounter with nature was pure and direct, as was that of the English Romantic poets: “[T]hese mountains and seas could not have touched his eye without irradiating his entire nature with their magnificence.”[99] In some senses, the Palestine landscape itself became divine. God channeled important prophetic messages and power through the conduit of nature, “and all this spring and song and grass and sunshine and shadow woven into the most exquisite nature that ever breathed or wept or sung or suffered.”[100] The modern city may be “stinking and evil,” but Palestine, the land of Christ’s youth, like Wordsworth’s Lake District, remained pure and natural, ready for observation by American Protestants.

A turn-of-the-century pilgrim wrote that the simplicity of Christ’s surroundings held the keys to understanding some of his essential teachings. He writes, “The simplicity of this Syrian life,—both in village and open country,—makes a deep impression upon me, and as I try to penetrate the meaning of Christ’s message. . . . I return, repeatedly, to this primitive mode of human life.”[101] Similarly, for many pilgrims Gethsemane became the place where “nature held communion with nature’s God.”[102] Here it became clear that a not-too-infrequently stated mission against German “rationalism” (the Modernist Controversy) uses the imagery and philosophy of Romanticism as a vehicle for divine truths over and against the methods of the turn-of-the-century Modernists. Supernatural events became a transformation of damaged nature. In Talmage’s biography of Christ, as Christ rises there is “a benediction upon the whole earth until every mountain is an Olivet of consecration, and every lake a Galilee on whose mosaic of crystal, and opal, and sapphire divine splendors shall walk.”[103]

Adding his voice to the chorus of the celebration of nature over civilization, Philip Schaff concluded, “Nature cannot be destroyed by the mismanagement of the Ottomans.”[104] Fosdick weighed in with the conviction that “nature is the true pilgrim’s Palestine.”[105] For Fosdick, the Master’s world was an out-of-doors world with flowers, husbandmen, children, and God. When Fosdick surveyed the landscape, he concluded: “There is hardly a hillslope in that blossoming land in springtime on which the Master could not point to the profuse and brilliant beauty of the flowers, and one who walks by the Sea of Galilee finds Wordsworth’s picture of the daffodils of England true to the poppies and anemones of Palestine.”[106] Similarly, Maltbie D. Babcock identified the American pilgrim’s love for the Holy Land with the Romantic poet’s love for England, stating to friends and admirers back home that he favored the poems of Wordsworth during his time in Palestine.[107] The celebration of God’s presence in nature that Holy Land tours often brought about for Protestant ministers recalled for them the English Romantic poets’ love for the British countryside.

This framework, which juxtaposed the benefits and disadvantages of civilization and nature as two opposing worlds, adds to the picture of orientalism in the Holy Land tour genre regarding Arabs. Like Americans who travel to Africa strictly in order to view wildlife and topography while overlooking living Africans and their culture, Americans who traveled East were forced to integrate various stimuli into the primitivist perspective in order to conjure biblical primitivism. Civilization was an asset only for those distant from primitive origins. Nature, on the other hand, was an asset to areas and peoples deemed closer to relevant religious origins.

The civilization discourse regarding the primitive biblical past received a new challenge, however, when pilgrims confronted the shrines of the Eastern churches that they believed were hopelessly overcivilized and removed from biblical origins. Protestants constructed an idea of untouched nature as a shrine unto itself, and understood nature as the true stage or key to Christ’s earthly life. In so doing, they were able to create an alternative to the Christian shrines that were hardly familiar to them, and they feared were hopelessly corrupt. They made the hills into monuments to freshness and youth.

THE OUT-OF-DOORS AS A PROTESTANT SHRINE

Frustrated by the confusing experience of visiting strange and unfamiliar Christian shrines, one pilgrim wrote, “if ever an altar rises for all Christendom to the man of Galilee, it should be here upon these hills where he walked, looking across the sea and the plain . . . toward the mountains.[108] By the turn of the century, Protestants had not only created official parallel shrines (e.g., the alternate Golgotha, General Gordon’s Tomb) but also had begun to look to the out-of-doors in order to create sacred spaces in Palestine. A 1910 pilgrim claimed that the hills of Palestine were almost infallible, in that they had been untouched by humans, and therefore remained enduringly and reliably the same. He wrote, “These and many more places we cannot know. . . . Men cannot take away the mountains, nor put the lake in some other place. There they remain; and it is to see them, in fact or in imagination, that I intend to take you.”[109] Undestroyed by human, corrupt traditions, the bald, unchanged faces of nature deliver the Protestant pilgrims safely to the holy place that they seek in Palestine but are often frustrated in their attempts to find. General Gordon’s Garden Tomb and Robinson’s Arch were both institutionalized responses to this Protestant conundrum.

By the time of his Holy Land tour narrative, taking place four decades after that of Philip Schaff, Harry Emerson Fosdick promised to present Christians with a new vision of “the most impressive portion of mankind’s spiritual drama,” which was played out on the hills of Palestine (note, not at the locations of the shrines).[110] It also demonstrates the changes that had taken place in the ways that Protestants viewed the sacred spaces of Palestine. By the time of Fosdick’s tour, Palestine pilgrimages had become increasingly commercialized and increasingly ambivalent about the shrines important to Latin and Orthodox traditions. Liberal Fosdick (1878–1969), who rejected Fundamentalist assertions about the church and Christian faith throughout his career weighed in. He was associated with evangelical liberalism and the creation of the interdenominational Riverside Church in New York City in 1931 after his refusal to capitulate to conservative Presbyterians at the “First Church.” By the time Fosdick published his pilgrimage narrative, In the Steps of the Master, he was a renowned author worldwide, having published six successful books between 1908 and 1920. After visiting Europe at the end of World War I, he became an outspoken pacifist, and also championed racial and economic justice throughout his life, engaging in a popular, prophetic ministry, even as neo-orthodox challengers would bring about the muting of his reputation along with that of other religious liberals in the postwar period.[111] For Fosdick, nature in Palestine could be the only true Protestant shrine if there was to be one.

Henry Van Dyke also sought the elusive sense of place that came along with pilgrimage to Palestine: “That Spirit of Place, that soul of the Holy Land, is what I fain would meet on my pilgrimage—for the sake of Him who interprets it in love. And I know well where to find it,—out-of-doors.”[112] The primitive, undeveloped nature of Palestine provided the conditions that led to the possibility of sacred encounter for Van Dyke, who wrote, “The cities have sunken into dust: the trees of the forest have fallen: the nations have dissolved. But the mountains keep their immutable outline: the liquid stars shine with the same light, move on the same pathways.”[113] The sense of history and time standing still in Palestine that is so characteristic of travel narratives is here pronounced in the physical, natural landscape.

Historical Christian pilgrimage is often centered upon the moment of approach to the sacred altar or site wherein the pilgrim is momentarily transformed into the savior and the redemptive tradition through a process of identification with the divine. This moment makes up the converse of a ritual of affliction, wherein Christians emphasize their alienation from the holiness of God. Instead, the pilgrim has a moment of powerful recognition and identification with religious sacra. Protestants reacted to the ritual experience in predictable patterns. The altars of the local shrines provided a strange and confusing experience for many Protestants, who in turn “created” a shrine out of the hills and flowers they saw in nature while visiting Palestine.

Another constructed “altar” was that of Protestant scholarship and Bible reading. Protestant ministers typically brought several volumes of learned scholarship on their tours of primitive biblical lands in consonance with typical journeys of civilized males to uncivilized lands at the turn of the century. It was necessary for Talmage to load the saddlebags of his horse on his journey with many volumes of learned books. In order to produce From Manger to Throne, he claimed to have “ransacked the world of literature, sacred and secular.”[114] He provided a lengthy list of the scholarly tomes to which he was indebted, thus asserting his qualifications as a learned authority on the life of Christ. The theme of the manly Anglo-Saxon male abroad, viewing the untrammeled pristine biblical past through the lens of civilization, was represented in his discourse. Like Theodore Roosevelt, Talmage brought the trappings of the civilized male with him on journeys to primitive lands. Thus, readers and vicarious pilgrims were assured that there was a strong intellectual heritage undergirding his observations of the primitive, elemental, biblical landscape.

Harry Emerson Fosdick lauded the out-of-doors as the place where true pilgrims remember the life of Christ, as opposed to the indoor shrines offered by Eastern Christians. As Fosdick put it: “It is only the out-of-doors that matters much [in the Holy Land]. Almost everything that men have put under a roof they have spoiled for the intelligent.”[115] After making this observation and planning to spend his entire pilgrimage out-of-doors (Fosdick deliberately eschewed contact with civilization by refusing to ride trains or stay in hotels; instead, he only rode a camel and camped), Fosdick attacked the Eastern church for its greed and worldliness: “Wherever they have found an excuse they have built a chapel or a church and ecclesiastical hangers-on have gathered there to live under the benefactions of the pilgrims. This is an ugly side to Palestine but is has one good effect: it drives the traveler out-of-doors.”[116] Fosdick, as a Protestant, sought to differentiate himself from the long tradition of Catholic pilgrimage to shrines that the Protestant reformers had criticized so harshly. He condemned the Eastern churches for their “pretentious and ugly paganism mingled with disgraceful imposture.”[117] Fosdick and other Protestants found the true Holy Land Christ in the natural out-of-doors in a way that is suffused with popular Romantic sensibilities and Victorian sentimentalism.

Henry Van Dyke also developed a new conviction while in Palestine, namely, “that Christianity is an out-of-doors religion.”[118] He rhetorically asked his readers, “How shall we understand [Christianity] unless we carry it under the free sky and interpret it in the companionship of nature?”[119] Van Dyke also imagined the boy Jesus in communion with, and surrounded by, the bounty of nature. The boy Jesus, according to Van Dyke, often gathered flowers out-of-doors upon the hilltops of the Holy Land in a Romantic encounter with nature.[120] While in Jerusalem, Van Dyke experienced a silent understanding among his fellow travelers characterized by a sense that Christ’s crucifixion had actually occurred in the open air of the out-of-doors, rather than inside any of the buildings containing Eastern Orthodox shrines. Here, the out-of-doors became a shrine unto itself. Indeed, for many Protestant pilgrims the shrines of the Eastern churches were “intolerable.”[121] They looked elsewhere for shrines and there were none they found suitable, so they created their own.

Like Fosdick, Dwight L. Moody eschewed “civilization” on his Holy Land tour in order to experience the land in a similar fashion to Christ. Moody insisted on walking whenever possible, stating, “I am not going to drive where my Lord footed it.”[122] Echoing these sentiments, Van Dyke declared, “I will not sleep under a roof in Palestine, but nightly pitch my wandering tent beside some fountain.”[123] Van Dyke refused to take a convenient train from Jaffa to Jerusalem, because he did not want his first glimpse of Jerusalem to be from a “car window” in a “mechanical way”; rather, he wanted to “take the old high road.”[124] Later in his pilgrimage, Van Dyke lamented the fact that God had ever suffered humanity to build the city with all of its idolatrous shrines.

Many Protestant pastors and other pilgrims looked to the out-of-doors or to hills and valleys in order to find the altar or shrine that they were seeking while in Palestine. They avoided the overcivilized trappings of excessive, grafted-on tradition that Eastern churches and shrines represented. They sought the simple and fresh childhood of Christ, and looked to the vistas of unchanging landscapes of nature in order to gain this understanding and thus were able to fashion almost out of nothing altars and shrines that served a Protestant understanding of the Christian faith. Later, they would argue along with Zionists in favor of the resettlement of the urban Jews of the ghettos to these vistas, in order to usher in a new millennium and hasten the return of Christ.

In summary, Protestant pilgrims employed various methods in order to create culturally relevant shrines or altars while in Palestine. They rejected outright the worship of “idols” or “golden calves” by setting up other Christian traditions as negative examples, and warned of the danger of idolatry in Palestine while asserting that true Christianity was spiritual rather than material. Protestant pilgrims also began to urge missions towards Eastern Christians, whom they often regarded as heathens or pagans. They sought to “be another Luther” and to cleanse the temple of the “money changers” who materially benefited from the simple piety of peasant pilgrims. Turning away from the ancient shrines already in place in Palestine that were hardly familiar to them, they looked to nature in a Romantic sense in order to find the essence of Christ’s life. Avoiding the corrupting affects of civilization while hopefully retaining the positive ones such as book-learning and scholarship, they were able to seek a spiritual rather than physical reality by describing the Child Christ in unmitigated contact with fresh and pure nature. The out-of-doors became the new altar or Protestant shrine, since Protestants insisted that anything found inside while traveling in Palestine was essentially worthless. Protestants thus conjured up new elusive altars for themselves and were able to boldly survey the hills and valleys and proclaim them as mighty unchanging sermons to the life of Christ, uncorrupted icons of creation.

NOTES

1. Alvan Bond, Memoir of Pliny Fisk, A. M.: Late Missionary to Palestine (New York: Crocker and Brewster, 1828), 291.

2. Bond, Memoir of Pliny Fisk, 292.

3. Bond, Memoir of Pliny Fisk, 298.

4. Bond, Memoir of Pliny Fisk, 342. See also, “To walk over the ground where our Lord used to walk, will neither make us holy, nor subdue our sins. It is only imitating his example that will do this. Here he went about doing good. May I also be an instrument of doing good, as I go about in the same place,” 343.

5. John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land (New York: Harper & Bros., 1838), 124.

6. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, 125.

7. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, 122.

8. Brian Yothers, The Romance of the Holy Land in American Travel Writing 1790–1876 (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2007), 68.

9. E. G. Robinson (1794–1863), American biblical researcher, translator, and academic who, through his travels to Palestine, became known as the “Father of Biblical Geography.”