Allan Chapman’s The Victorians and the Holy Land sets out to explore the origins of the strong influence the place called “the Holy Land” wields over individuals today. The book is a collection of vignettes that seek to address the people and inventions that made the modern attachment to the Holy Land in and around Palestine possible. Chapman examines ancient connections to Egypt and Palestine before turning his gaze to the more modern archaeologists and geographers like Edward Robinson and Sir Flinders Petrie, the exploits of Thomas Cook that revolutionized tourism in the Holy Land, and the inventions that brought this sacred place closer than ever: photography, improved travel, professional archaeology, and cinema. Ultimately, Chapman argues, “it was within the wider Victorian age of the nineteenth century that the Holy Land took on real meaning for most people as a place existing in space and time, rather than merely a literary backdrop to the events described in the Bible” (xi).
By “real meaning” as opposed to “literary backdrop,” Chapman, a historian of science with ties to Oxford University, does not ultimately suggest that the historical truth of the Bible was separated from the land it spoke of. Rather, Chapman asserts that these developments solidified the reality of the biblical world as opposed to the “mythos theory” of higher criticism that questioned the Bible’s historical reality (83, 200). Modern, scientific engagement with the Holy Land yielded transformation rather than disruption. In Chapman’s rendering, religiously motivated individuals set on “scholarly” research worked to “fix” the Holy Land as a distinctly modern place. As people like the biblical archaeologist Edward Robinson “did more than any other” to provide “truly scientific knowledge of the country” (117), he also “laid an essential foundation for what would become the mass tourism in the region in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, which continues unabated today” (107). Chapman effectively illustrates the ways that engagement leads to transformation, as better understanding and better access leads to change. Part of Chapman’s story is the ways increased engagement transformed an “ancient” place into a recognizably “modern” one—replete with institutes, tourists, hotels, and improved water systems.
Chapman also offers some intriguing connections that invite readers to reconceptualize the relationship between modernization and faith. In one chapter, Chapman draws our attention to the “archaeological delusions” around pyramidology and ancient astronomy. Chapman encourages us not to dismiss the “foolish or downright bizarre” when considering scientific exploits as they “formed part of the complex cross-currented ferment of ideas that lay at the heart of the Victorian age” (122). The larger, more provocative argument that Chapman makes is “how all these passionate beliefs are the product of advancing technology” (134), suggesting that modernization and technological advancement do not inherently yield disenchantment or religious doubt.
The Victorians and the Holy Land comes off as Chapman’s exploration into the culture and stories that shaped his own upbringing. The book is interspersed with memories from Chapman’s childhood culture that lends the book a certain passion that testifies to the allure and commitment around the Holy Land. That said, the book is so sweeping in scope and discursive in prose it is hard to trace any throughline besides Chapman’s own interests. There are surprising omissions throughout given Chapman’s argument that it was the Victorians who “first generated” “mass fascination with the Holy Land” (235). What of the centuries of pilgrimages? What of the historic presence of the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land? Given Chapman’s focus, more should have been said on such topics. Additionally, Chapman repeatedly crosses the line from conveying the language and worldview of the past to condoning and perpetuating its tone and logic. The reader is often unsure whether Chapman’s handling of Muslims, for example, is from the vantage point of the nineteenth century or is Chapman’s own synopsis of the situation (especially in Chapman’s discussion of the Iranian Revolution and the formation of the Islamic State). Elsewhere, Chapman casts Prince Edward (eventually King Edward VII) as a “downright immoral and a shameless womanizer” (115) and Karl Marx as an “atheistical radical” (141). Chapman occasionally couches these descriptions and judgements, but in ways that are either unclear or inconsistent to the point that the reader is left unsure of the takeaway.
And what of Chapman’s exploration into this personal attachment to the land of the Bible? Chapman at times attempts to nuance his approach by insisting that this book is not about biblical literalism (xiii). Yet, the overwhelming sense the reader is left with is that biblical literalism and the Bible’s historicity is precisely Chapman’s point. It seems clear that what is at stake in this book is Chapman’s own connection to the Holy Land of his childhood. It is why he can juxtapose the faith of folks “being empowered” by that historical reality through art and objects with the “others” who would question that reality “and were undermining that simple faith” (190). It is why a good portion of the book is Chapman’s paraphrasing of biblical stories leading up to a final sweep at “liberal educators” who “do their best to stop these highly enthusiastic parents and kiddies” from indulging in church plays and religious media with cries of “religious indoctrination” (232). And it is why he can conclude with his attachment to the films of Cecil B. DeMille who was, Chapman reminds us, “a biblical literalist himself” (234). Despite the transformation that science and technology had brought, the Holy Land is apparently still the place that Chapman knew as a child. In that regard, the book as a whole is a frequently problematic example of the ways the stories around the Holy Land can shape an uncritical and unmoored approach to the Holy Land itself.
