Friday, November 1, 2013
The Christian pantheon of Holy Land explorers
The Christian pantheon of Holy Land explorers |
Walled off, neglected, vandalized, the Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion tells the story of a generation of legendary 19th century explorers who studied the Land of Israel • A new article by Israeli archeologists investigates this unique site.
Nadav Shragai
Nadav Shragai
The Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion
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Photo credit: Reuven Milon |
Christopher Costigan was a young theology student at a Jesuit college near Dublin on his way to becoming one of the world's better known Dead Sea explorers. On the hot August days of 1835 he sailed along the Dead Sea coast for more than eight days in an effort to measure the depth of the water, but the heavy heat got the better of him and he became ill with malaria. He was evacuated to the Franciscan San Salvador monastery in the Old City of Jerusalem, where he died at the young age of 25.
Costigan was buried in the Catholic cemetery on Mount Zion. One of his successors, American explorer William Francis Lynch, who went on to study the Dead Sea for another 13 years, named the sea's northern cape after him, and to this day it is still known as Cape Costigan. Costigan himself, however, was never afforded true peace -- his body disappeared and his gravestone was vandalized and uprooted. It was only rediscovered many years later, after the 1967 Six-Day War, thanks to extensive efforts by one of Israel's best known researchers, Professor Zev Vilnay.
These days, two modern day archeologists -- Gabriel Barkai and Eli Shiller -- have recently published a new study in the periodical Ariel (a magazine geared toward lovers of the history of Israel) detailing the stories of additional characters and heroes from the gallery of 19th century explorers of this land who are buried in the Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion, not far from where Costigan was buried.
Since the second half of the 19th century, 1,040 graves were dug there in what has become a mini-pantheon of well-known explorers who studied the Holy Land during that time. But much like the mystery of Costigan's grave, here, too, the documentation becomes more and more challenging with time due to neglect and vandalism, with the cemetery's gravestones all faded and partially smashed.
There have been nearly no new graves dug in this cemetery since the 1948 War of Independence. Though the war did leave the cemetery within Israeli territory, the burial there ceased because the main Protestant centers were in the eastern part of the city -- under Jordanian sovereignty. Even after the city was reunited in 1967, the cemetery remained abandoned (with very few exceptions).
Officially, the site is among a list of British military cemeteries under the care of the British Commonwealth Council. In practice, it is not particularly cared for, but even in its state of disarray a visit to this special collection of graves can still be enlightening, fascinating and satisfying. Much like a visit to other famous burial sites in Israel, like the Kinneret Cemetery near the banks of the Sea of Galilee,
the gravestones speak, telling the story of a generation, an era and the people who populated it.
The Protestant section of the cemetery, which was the focus of Barkai and Shiller's paper, serves as a landmark in the history of the individuals who dedicated their lives to study the history of the Land of Israel and the discovery of its most hidden secrets.
The names on the gravestones appear in a plethora of languages: English, German, Arabic and even Hebrew. Most of the people buried there were converts to Christianity, though some were Jews who died at the various missionary hospitals in Jerusalem and subsequently rejected from Jewish cemeteries in their communities. The cemetery also houses the graves of soldiers killed during World War I as well as British soldiers and police officers killed in operations perpetrated by the Jewish underground. One such example is Thomas James Wilkin, who was killed by Lehi men during the rebellion in retribution for ordering the capture and execution of the first Lehi leader, Yair Stern.
The "celebrity" stories
In February 1867, when famous archeologist Charles Warren began excavating in Jerusalem, he was accompanied by three fellow members of the British Royal Engineers. One of them became ill, and was replaced by Corporal James Duncan, who became ill as well shortly after and died of malaria in Aug. 1868. The gravestone marking his burial site in the Protestant section of the Mount Zion cemetery is unique.
The gravestone is made of a cylinder that, according to the research of Barkai, was one of the legs of a stone table from the Second Temple era, which was taken from an underground storage room at the foot of the Temple Mount. The stone leg was too heavy to be shipped back to England, so Warren placed it on Duncan's grave. Over the course of the years, the table leg sustained extensive damage and is now split.
Another "celebrity" buried in the adjacent plot is Charles Tyrwhitt-Drake, who, a year after Duncan's death, tried to recreate the wanderings of the Israelites in the Sinai Desert. He traveled some 600 miles by foot and visited many locations that no one had explored before him.
His writings, in which he documented many additional areas of the Land of Israel that he had explored, are varied and extensive. Drake was the also the first to head the Survey of Western Palestine, which was taken over by the more well-known explorer Claude Reignier Conder only after his death.
Two more interesting personalities to have been buried at the site are James Edward Hanauer (1850-1938) and Dr. Dallas Young (1910-1980). The first was a Christian clergyman, but he was the descendant of Jews. Hanauer wrote a famous book titled "Walks About Jerusalem," but he is remembered mainly for being the first to discover the cardo -- a north-south-oriented street typical in Roman cities -- in Jerusalem, the first Byzantine-era columned avenue in the Old City of Jerusalem. Today, every tourist who visits the area knows this street.
Young was the founder and director of the American Institute of Holy Land Studies (or as it is called today, Jerusalem University College). He paved the way for hundreds of students who studied the history of the Land of Israel. The marker on his grave site is also unusual. He selected his own gravestone while he was still alive: two large hewn Second Temple-era stones from the first wall built in Hasmonean times.
Another interesting story hiding among the stones at this cemetery is the story of English doctor and researcher Ernest William Gurney Masterman (1867-1943), who was the first to explore the changes in the water level of the Dead Sea. His frequent visits to the stone he used to mark the changing water levels raised the suspicion of the area Bedouin, who made sure to destroy his markings. But the stone, which has since become a well-known landmark, can still be seen on the side of the road near Ein Feshkha.
Danish missionary Hans Nicolajsen, also known as John Nicolayson, who died in 1856, is also buried on Mount Zion. Nicolajsen founded the British mission hospital in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City, which was the first hospital in the city.
Despite being buried in Jerusalem, British archeologist James Leslie Starkey, meanwhile, worked far from the city, in the Judean plains. He was the chief excavator of the first archaeological expedition to the important site of Lachish in the 1930s.
Starkey is considered to have discovered the Lachish letters. These were discovered during his third excavation of the site, in which he discovered the clay ostraca. These ostraca featured ancient Hebrew writing, apparently sent by the commander of Lachish on the eve of Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar's conquest of the city. The Lachish letters are considered to be a momentous discovery that has shed a lot of light on the history of the Babylonian siege. Four years after he discovered them, on Jan. 10, 1938, Starkey was murdered by Arabs.
Additional celebrities buried in this pantheon of explorers are: Paul Palmer, who drew the Madaba Map after the discovery of the floor mosaic in the early Byzantine church of Saint George at Madaba, Jordan. Palmer's drawing from 1906 still serves every beginning researcher who approaches the famous mosaic, even though it is over a hundred years old by now. Johannes Rudolph Roth, whose expedition first discovered in 1837 that the Dead Sea and the Jordan Rift Valley were situated below sea level. And Carl Sandreczki, a Polish doctor who came to Israel in 1849 and became famous for the in-depth research he conducted on street names in the Old City.
There is also one particularly sad story in the history of the Mount Zion cemetery, Shiller and Barkai recount. It involves dozens of residents of the American Colony whose bones were brought to the cemetery in the middle of the night, after having been packed in boxes. The bones were transferred from the nearby American cemetery, which no longer exists. "It was done under the directive of American Consul Selah Merrill who bore a grudge against the residents of the American Colony."
The residents of the colony were buried in improvised graves, to the right of the entrance gate, without any gravestones save one, shared by all. "And that is after some of the bones were scattered during the move to Mount Zion."
The residents of the American Colony weren't archeologists or explorers, but their photography endeavor, which documented thousands of sites across the Middle East including Israel, contributed immensely to the knowledge we have of the history of the region. Some of the photographs have become symbols of an era, documenting important historical events like the visit to the Land of Israel by German Emperor Wilhelm II in 1898. The American Colony photography department also documented British General Edmund Allenby's entry into Jerusalem via the Jaffa Gate in 1917.
They made their mark
The story of this unusual cemetery would not be complete without at least a brief mention of the two most famous people buried there: Conrad Schick, one of the 19th century's greatest explorers of Jerusalem, and Flinders Petrie, the father of archeology of the Land of Israel. In July 2012, a memorial service was held to mark 70 years since Petrie's death. The service -- an Antiquities Authority initiative -- included a tour of the Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion.
Petrie was born in Kent, England in 1853. He excavated extensively in Egypt and the Land of Israel and he was the first to show that, based on data recovered from the field, one could derive an objective chronological system using scientific-logical methods. Before Petrie, the dating of artifacts was based solely on assessments, historical speculation or biblical texts.
Petrie was also a very unusual and colorful individual. It has been said that he built the camera he used in his excavations with his own two hands out of a cookie tin. It was also said that when he worked at the ancient Giza pyramids he was habitually naked.
At the end of his days, he left instructions to submit his head to scientific study at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, and indeed, his body was buried headless at the Mount Zion cemetery.
Conrad Schick (1822-1901), was a German architect, cartographer, archeologist, explorer and Protestant missionary who operated in Jerusalem during the second half of the 19th century. Schick was one of the most prominent figures in Jerusalem during his time -- the end of the Ottoman Empire -- and is considered to be among the most important explorers of the Land of Israel and Jerusalem.
He worked for many years for the British Palestine Exploration Fund and the German Society for the Exploration of Palestine, and published hundreds of articles on the physical state of the city and the archeological work being done there. As an architect, he is considered one of the prominent builders of the city in the period after the expansion beyond the walls of the Old City. He planned community buildings, health facilities and housing serving the Jewish and Christian communities.
Barkai and Shiller note that Schick planned some half a dozen buildings in Jerusalem, and that some of the more intricate ones have certainly left their mark on the landscape of the city. He planned the Tabor House (Beit Tavor), the neighborhood of Mea Shearim, the Deutsche Diakonissen-Krankenhaus, today a part of Bikur Cholim Hospital, and more.
Schick lived in Jerusalem for 55 years, and when he died, his friend Abraham Moses Luncz gave a eulogy in which he described the death as "the greatest loss" for the literature on the Land of Israel, because "ever since he came to Jerusalem as a young man, Schick invested himself entirely in the exploration of the land, served for many years as the chief engineer of Jerusalem, and, in his youth, built models of the Temple Mount and the Temple."
The gravestones on the tombs of Schick and his wife are among the most prominent in the entire Mount Zion cemetery. Schick's gravestone bears a quote, in German, from Numbers 32:12: "Because they have wholly followed the Lord."
Benedict Cumberbatch-voiced film "Jerusalem" IMAX Movie
Benedict Cumberbatch-voiced film "Jerusalem" -
Inside the making of the IMAX movie
Check out this report on the new IMAX film about Jerusalem. Absolutely stunning visuals of the ancient and wondrous capital of Israel.
Click Share and show this clip of beautiful Jerusalem to your friends!
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Click here: Jerusalem Movie Clip
- Amanda Cochran
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(CBS News) "Jerusalem" - a new movie narrated by actor Benedict Cumberbatch - takes viewers inside the Holy City in IMAX 3D. But how did the National Geographic Entertainment team gain such unprecedented access to the city, which is perhaps the world's most politically and religiously delicate locale?
Taran Davies, co-producer of the movie, said the film - which took five years to make - was an effort that came together "over a million cups of tea."
He said, "Jerusalem, over its 4,000-year history, it's the most fought-over place on Earth. It's been subject to 118 conflicts. It's been conquered 44 times and destroyed completely twice. But, yet, to this day, it is sacred to over half the world's population."
He explained, "I don't think IMAX footage has ever been shot of the ancient city or of the Holy Land, so this is really a first. These images that you see have never been filmed before. In fact, when we had our script, which we showed to the experts, they sort of laughed at us and said, 'Well, you're never going to be able to get half of what it is that you're asking for.'
"Over the course of ... about three years, we met with every single authority that you can possibly imagine meeting, from the Israeli government, military, the air force, the governor of East Jerusalem, the Religious Affairs in Jordan to name just a few of the organizations we had to meet."
In the process of making the movie, Davies said, "every day was a new problem and one that you never knew that you would get over, but the wonder of the experience of making the film and the fact of bringing this giant-screen experience back to audiences here in the United States, the opportunity to visit the Holy Land, as we presented it here, is something that was worth fighting for every day for five years."
Speaking of Cumberbatch's narration, Davies said, "He's done such a good job, and do you know what he said? He turned to us during the recording, and he said, 'Why didn't anyone teach me about this stuff when I was at school?'"
For more with Davies on the Jerusalem film and the story of life in the city that it tells, watch his full interview above.
Recovering From Church Burns: Advice for the Wounded By Wendy Alsup
Recovering From Church Burns: Advice for the Wounded By Wendy Alsup
Here's my advice for those burned by the church. It's simple, yet profound. Here goes:
Trust the church.
I need to qualify that, right? How do you trust the same entity that wounded you deeply? It's fundamentally helpful to distinguish between the church local and the church global.
The global church is made up of local churches, some with organized denominational structures and some without. When you've been burned by a local congregation or even the larger denominational system with which they are affiliated, it's helpful to zoom out in your own head and remember that the "big C" church is way bigger than the particular group that hurt you.
The group that wounded you is really just a very small subset of the larger body of Christ. And the worst thing you can do after being burned by a local congregation is to allow your beliefs on the larger body to fall apart.
We Need Community and Shepherds
Here are my core convictions on the body of Christ, which I think are well supported by Scripture: We will never reach a point of Christian maturity in which we no longer need community. And we will never reach a point in Christian maturity in which we no longer need shepherds. Furthermore, you will probably never need a community with a shepherd quite as much as you need one after you've been burned by a previous community with a shepherd.
I was burned by a church years ago, but praise God He convinced me that I still needed the church. So I crawled in to a new church, wounded and weary. I had listened to their pastor's sermons on podcasts for months, and I knew that, at least according to the sermons, this church valued the Bible and grace.
For a long time, our family was the last one in to sit down and the first one out when the service was over. I observed, and I listened. And over time, I got the courage to reach out.
Five years later, I have never once regretted opening myself up to that body. Now, this is not to say they are perfect or the pastors never make a mistake. It's not to say that one day I won't be burned by this congregation (or that I won't hurt others). But the bottom line of the Christian life is that we need community, and we need pastors.
Though I may be hurt again by my community or my pastors, I still need them. The possibility of being hurt in the future is there, but it is only a possibility. However, my need for them is not a possibility. It is an actual, factual, present need.
The Good Shepherd
About a year into my time at my current church, my pastor preached this sermon from Philippians 2. He made two particularly important points. First, God's good under shepherds are recognized by their humility, not their giftedness. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, and He is the model for His under shepherds.
Beware the shepherd whose personal burdens and needs drive the church's agenda or eclipse the needs of the sheep. When the needs of the sheep must submit to the needs of the shepherd, this is not leadership like Christ (or Paul, Timothy or Epaphroditis).
Second, when God has brought the humble under shepherd into your life, like Paul's exhortation concerning Epaphroditus in Philippians 2, welcome them with joy and receive them with honor.
The imperfect but humble under shepherd still exists! God didn't abandon us to only poor leaders after Paul, Timothy and Epaphroditus passed on. It is to our benefit, not detriment, to receive them and honor them in the name of Christ.
My son pulled a hot curling iron down on his hand when he was 1 year old. I picked him up before he even started crying and ran to the sink to run cold water over his hand, followed by an ice pack I held periodically on the burned area. Later, in the emergency room, a nurse told me that was absolutely the best thing to do for his burned hand.
Sure, we got the heat away from his hand first, but then we needed to apply the opposite, a cold ice pack, to really undo the damage the heat - even removed from his hand - was still doing to his skin.
You Need a Pastor
I am growing a firm conviction that this is the remedy for those burned by the church. If you were wounded by a self-serving, proud, authoritarian pastor, the answer is not to never allow yourself to sit under another pastor. The answer is to find a humble, sacrificial pastor who is willing to lay down his interests for those of his sheep.
Sitting under humble leadership is the antidote to the sting of the burn from the proud. Like my son, you may still have a scar when it's all said and done, but the scar of distrusting all Christian community and leadership for all time is so much worse than the one you may have when you allow yourself to re-enter community and sit under Christ like leadership.
If you've been burned by a pastor, you need a pastor.
"So I exhort the elders among you, as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed: shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you; not for shameful gain, but eagerly; not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock.
And when the chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory. Likewise, you who are younger, be subject to the elders. Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for 'God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble'" (1 Pet. 5:1-5, ESV).
And when the chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory. Likewise, you who are younger, be subject to the elders. Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for 'God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble'" (1 Pet. 5:1-5, ESV).
Wendy Alsup
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Basic Truths of Christianity
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ISRAEL TODAY - "I like it so much I even put it on my blog." Steve Martin
Love For His People Editor's Note:
As I said in the header, I do like Israel Today, and Aviel Schneider. I have been to their office in Jerusalem and spent a short time with Aviel.
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Being Messianic Jews, they share a perspective that I like getting from Israel. I hope you will subscribe to either the printed or online editions. Or even get their daily e-mails, so you can keep up with the news from Israel. (I get it all.)
Steve Martin
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Love For His People, Inc.
P.S. Our work receives no renumeration for sharing the ISRAEL TODAY or their advertiser's product. We just like to bless, as we owe a debt to Israel and those of our Jewish roots, as Christian believers. You too can bless, and I encourage you to do so!
The Impossible People: Lynne Hybels | |
Perhaps unwittingly, mega-church pastor Lynne Hybels is carrying on Christianity’s awful anti-Semitic legacy more... | |
Israeli Christians Seek Official Christian School Curriculum | |
Local Christians say they don't want to learn Arab and Muslim history, ask Israeli government to change curriculum more... | |
Authentic Shofar (Ram's Horn) | |
The shofar is one of the earliest instruments used in Jewish music. The shofar would also be blown to call up the troops for battle, and the Scriptures tell us it will announce the coming of the Messiah! Get it now >> |
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ISRAEL TODAY: Israeli Christians Seek Official Christian School Curriculum
Israeli Christians Seek Official Christian School Curriculum
Thursday, October 31, 2013 | Israel Today Staff
The growing movement of local "Arab" Christians who identify with Israel are now asking the state to establish an official school curriculum.
The Israeli Christians Recruitment Forum, which encourages young local Christians to join the Israeli army, is behind the new petition.
"As many know, the Arab schools only teach the history of the Arabs and Islam," the group posted on its Facebook page. "We do not learn anything about the history of the Christian community."
The Forum has teamed up with the Israeli Zionist movement Im Tirzu to prepare a position paper to present to the Ministry of Education requesting the establishment of an official, state-backed Israeli Christian school curriculum.
Opponents of the move would argue that these local Christians are Arabs, so should be satisfied with learning Arab history in the region.
But, in a recent interview with Israeli media, Father Gabriel Nadaf, one of leaders of this new movement, said it was wrong to classify local Christians as Arabs, since the Christian community in the Holy Land far predates the Arab Muslim conquest.
Israel Today interviewed Shadi Haloul, director of the Israeli Christians Recruitment Forum, in our October 2013 issue. Don't miss future stories regarding this movement - SUBSCRIBE NOW >>
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