The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought.

It is commonplace that Palestine is sacred territory for the three major West Asian religions. How it became sacred for Christians is the subject of Robert L. Wilken's valuable study.

The Land Called Holy encompasses two interwoven histories. One is about an idea: how Palestine became a holy land - the Holy Land - in the minds of Christians. The other is about piety, the rise of land-based devotion: daily worship at churches built on holy sites, solemn ceremonies of pilgrims, and religiously motivated immigration from many lands.

Wilken's first four chapters trace Jewish ideas of the Land of Israel, as well as early Christian writing about Jerusalem. The next five chapters are the heart of the book, treating the three centuries, ending with the Muslim conquest, when Christian Roman emperors ruled Palestine. Here Wilken describes Constantine's new churches in and around Jerusalem, the rise of Christian pilgrimage, the development of monastic communities, the growth of a prosperous Christian majority in the fifth and sixth centuries, and the flowering of the idea of Palestine as a Christian holy land.

The final three chapters show how Jewish hopes for the land continued in the shadow of triumphant Christianity, and then how Christians responded when their triumph collapsed under seventh-century invasions by Persians and Arabs. In an epilogue, we get glimpses of vigorous Christian life continuing under Islamic rule in the eighth century, including Arabic translations of the scriptures and a treatise on the holy places written in Arabic. New generations of Palestinian Christians were taking the language of their rulers as the medium of daily life and worship.

For early Christians, the idea of a sacred space came slowly and uncertainly. The potential was there, because of the geography of Jesus' life embedded in the New Testament, as well as the land-conscious stories of Jewish patriarchs, kings, and prophets in the Hebrew scriptures, which became the Christian Old Testament. In the second century, one strand of Christian thought encouraged this potential. In the third century, however, important Christian writers, partly to distance their faith from Judaism, played down the religious value of the land. They observed that God could not be more approachable in one place than in another, and they claimed that biblical words about the exaltation of Jerusalem referred to "heavenly Jerusalem," the unearthly destination of the faithful, the actual locale was a bare symbol for a higher reality.

Thus, in the early Fourth Century, the main thrust of Christian scholarship tended to make Palestine an ordinary land, not a holy one. Plain people, too, largely ignored the biblical land in their prayer and other pious activities.

As with much else relating to Christianity, the reign of Constantine was a turning point in Christians' regard for the biblical land. Confident that he was a Christian, the first Christian emperor, Constantine became master of Rome in 312. After 324 he was the sole ruler of an empire that stretched eastward through Syria and Palestine.

Piety and politics mingled in Constantine. Like preceding emperors he showed his power and largesse by planning buildings, but unlike them his building program "featured churches" (87). In his last decade, he directed his attention to Jerusalem. He built a magnificent Church of the Resurrection around what was identified as Christ's tomb, which first had to be dug out from under tons of dirt and rubble. An adjoining building encompassed the spot identified as Golgotha, the place of Jesus' execution. Churches were also built to mark his ascension into heaven from the Mount of Olives and his birth in nearby Bethlehem. Dozens of other biblical sites were identified both before and after Constantine's death in 337.

As the Christian character of the empire accelerated after Constantine's death, churches, monasteries, and pilgrims' hostels arose everywhere, from Galilee to the Sinai. The population expanded until Palestine became, in several senses, a "Christian land" in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries. Certainly economics and imperial politics had much to do with this development, especially after 380, when Theodosius I proclaimed Christianity as the empire's official religion. But even in symbiosis with a powerful government, religion had its own imperatives of action and thought, and those are where Wilken directs his readers' attention.

In the realm of Christian piety, pilgrimage stands out as a remarkable development. Early Christianity had no obligation or established custom of pilgrimage, and the notion of "heavenly Jerusalem" discouraged it. But Christians knew of Jewish pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and they lived in the midst of people whose classical traditions often led them on journeys to spirit-filled locations all around the Mediterranean. Then when the places of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection were identified and glorified with fine architecture, ordinary Christians came to value them as miraculous "signs' of his saving work. While worshipping at the holy places, one could know God's saving power to a degree not attainable elsewhere. Here Wilken speaks of the rise of "tactile piety" - the urge to touch and see - as both a cause and a result of the swelling traffic on the pilgrimage roads.

Along with changing religious experience came a shift of ideas. Writers said that it is indeed true that God does not change form one place to another; however, the believer may change significantly. God is not more approachable at, say, the tomb of Christ than somewhere else, but the pilgrim at the tomb is induced to approach God more earnestly and single-mindedly than before. Another new idea softened the denigrating distinction between earthly and heavenly Jerusalem. The "Jerusalem below" was now exalted as the shining, god-filled reflection of the one above. Finally, Wilken argues convincingly for a further intellectual development in which the perception of a series of holy places was transmuted into the idea of a holy territory, a Holy Land. Although holy power was concentrated in certain spots, it radiated beyond them into the very soil of the surrounding land, the "God-trodden land" (192).

The Land Called Holy is a fine work of intellectual history. Wilken accounts for the previous scholarship on various parts of his topic, as well as offering original readings of several important documents, for instance, of Eusebius's later writings. The counterpoint of social history illuminates his analysis of ideas with reports of the actions and feelings of ordinary Christians.

Readers will appreciate the quality of Wilken's writing, including biblical, rabbinical, and patristic texts presented with economy and clarity. Quotations are carefully selected and framed, so that they carry the argument forward rather than impeding or diverting it. The vitality of the ancient issues and events emerges to give this book an appeal well beyond the circle of academic specialists.

Lester B. Scherer is a professor of religion at Eastern Michigan University.