Download PDF | Ora Limor_ Guy G. Stroumsa - Christians and Christianity in the Holy Land_ From the Origins to the Latin Kingdoms-Brepols (2006).
544 Pages
INTRODUCTION
Guy G. Stroumsa
In a document published in December 2003, ‘Reflections on the Presence of the Church in the Holy Land’, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem H. B, Michel Sabbah and the members of the diocesan Theological Commission expressed their conviction that in these troubled times, Christians of the Holy Land, living among both Muslim Arab and Jewish Israeli societies, should provide a leaven ‘contributing to the positive resolution of the crises’ through which this torn land is passing.
At the dawn of the third millennium, this document reflects, inter alia, the anguish of local Church leaders at the continuously dwindling numbers of the Christian communities and at the subsequent erosion of their role in Palestinian society.
Now a small minority caught up between Jews and Muslims, the Christians of Palestine and Israel are certainly entitled to their hope to play the role of a leaven, and perhaps of a bridge, between two national communities whose identities are so strongly coloured by religion. Of the three monotheistic faiths, Christianity is actually the only one to have arisen in the Holy Land.
Throughout the last two millennia, its relationship with the land of its birth has undergone ups and downs, following a path of many violent turns. But of the three Abrahamic religions, Christianity is the one with the deepest involvement with modernity and its transformation of the role of religion in society. More than Jews and Muslims, although after too many centuries, Christians have been learning, in the pluralistic societies of the West, to respect and even cherish the boundaries between collective identity and private experience.
If they could transmit this hard-learned lesson to Muslims and Jews alike, they would certainly appear to be a leaven of peace. The present volume seeks to offer a series of synthetic studies, all written by leading scholars from a non-theological viewpoint, on the history of Christianity in the Holy Land from the beginning to the Latin kingdoms. We had originally hoped to deal also with the subsequent phases of this history, throughout the second millennium.
Such an encompassing history, however, proved to be unachievable at this stage, and must remain a task for future research. As indicated in the table of contents, the volume has been organized along a dual pattern: the first part deals with the historical narrative, while the second contains a series of essays on various aspects of Holy Land Christianity. Even within the chronological parameters of this volume, its chapters are far from encompassing all aspects of Christian life, letters, and material culture in the Holy Land.
It is clear to us that in both parts, other contributions could have dealt with aspects that are barely touched upon in the book as it stands. Indeed, it was not our intention to offer a ‘definitive’ history of Christians and Christianity in the Holy Land, but rather to present together ‘state of the art’ essays on the different periods and from the viewpoints of the various disciplines involved, in the hope of encouraging further research.
One of various aspects that could not be treated here, for instance, is the vexed question of the Christian population of Palestine in the different periods. While there are various recent studies (in particular, Claudine M. Dauphin, La Palestine byzantine: peuplement et populations (Oxford: Archaeopress, 1998) about the Byzantine period, this is not yet the case with later periods, and any evaluation is bound to remain highly speculative.
While research on many aspects of the history of Christianity in the Holy Land has been remarkably dynamic in the last generation (and we are fortunate indeed that some of the leading scholars have agreed to contribute to this volume), it seems to me that a major landmark, perhaps underevaluated today, was Maurice Halbwachs’s La topographie légendaire des évangiles en terre sainte: Étude de mémoire collective, originally published in 1941.
Together with Aby Warburg, one can legitimately consider Halbwachs as having launched the concept of cultural memory. He taught us that religious memory is a special case of collective memory. In the case of the loca sancta, what is particularly interesting is the fact that they are not only the ipsissima loca where the Lord had lived his earthly life, in illo tempore. They are also the places where the final act of Redemption will be played out.
Early Christian eschatology, indeed, put great emphasis upon Jerusalem. Despite the fact that Christian apocalyptic thought was soon to be neutralized, the peregrinatio ad loca sancta, which developed in late antiquity as the pilgrimage movement, was never only meant to cultivate the loca sancta as lieux de mémoire, but also implied the power of these loca in the Endzeit.
The permanent memory of the Holy Land in Christian consciousness throughout the centuries, whether or not the Holy Land was in Christian hands, is not only a memory of the Land of origins. The religious power of geographia sacra can be adequately understood only when we recognize that the search for what happened where is imbued with soteriology, and is ipso facto a search for what will happen there. Indeed, from Constantine to the Crusaders, and up to the travelers and missionaries of the nineteenth century, we can observe more than a search for the localization of memories: the will to transform reality through the activation of religious memory.
The Land of the Passion is bound to remain a land of passion. Dream, promise, devotion, jealousy: all these create a powerful mix, at times explosive, in particular when confronting another such mix coming from competitors such as Jews and Muslims. For Christians as well as for Muslims and Jews, although in different ways, the constant presence and power of the Holy Land is a major factor that is ignored only at high risk.
Throughout history, the Holy Land has remained a fixed pole in the changing elliptic field of Christianity, retaining for two millennia its magnetic power. Jerusalem vero interpretatur visio pacis. ‘Jerusalem’, truly, should be translated ‘vision of peace’. Since the days of Prosper of Aquitaine, at least, the dream of a Jerusalem heralding what it seems to lack most — peace — has been a standard calling Christians to this too common oxymoron: a spiritual war.
This volume deals mainly with Christianity and Christians in the Holy Land, rather than with the Holy Land in Christian consciousness. It is meant to take stock of the achievements of research so far, in order to encourage and facilitate future studies. Since the contributors come from several scholarly traditions and disciplines, the editors have not attempted to achieve complete uniformity in the manner in which they cite classical and ecclesiastical authors.
This volume is the outgrowth of a scholarly conference, conducted in May 1999 in Jerusalem under the auspices of Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi with the financial support of Yad Hanadiv. A few scholars were later invited to contribute chapters. At the Center for the Study of Christianity of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mr Sergei Minov has compiled a tentative bibliography relating to Christianity in the Holy Land. We had initially planned to include the relevant parts of this bibliography as an appendix to this book, but it proved too voluminous to be incorporated.
Instead, the bibliography has been put on the Web site of the Center for the Study of Christianity, where it can be consulted. The editors are much in debt to Jonathan Cahana for having agreed, at short notice, to undertake the preparation of the index, and to the Center for the Study of Christianity, of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for its financial support of this undertaking.
The editors wish to express their thanks to Yohai Goell, who coordinated the preparation of the volume for the press, and spared no efforts to ensure the highest possible quality. Heather Padgen’s careful preparation of the manuscript for publication is to be highly commended.
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