For the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS), which was founded in London 1804 as a Christian publishing mission, the Middle East held special prestige as the “Holy Land” and the lands of the Bible. Thus the region became an important focus of the society’s work, beginning with efforts in Malta in 1817 that expanded into Anatolia, the Levant, and beyond. Drawing upon the archives of the BFBS, which are now stored at Cambridge University Library, this paper will consider how the BFBS transformed evangelical nostalgia for the “Bible lands” into the creation of a center for the modern global Bible trade. The society did so by making Port Said, in the Suez Canal Zone, a hub for worldwide distribution of its imprints. By 1926, for example, when the BFBS touted available Bible translations in “579 forms of human speech”, the “Bible Lands Agency” offices in Port Said were coordinating sales of Bibles from Zanzibar to Jerusalem, and were facilitating sales by associated agencies as far afield as Japan. Its local colporteurs in Port Said were also selling Bibles to sailors, tourists, refugees, and aspiring emigrants whose ships came into harbor. Annual figures for the Bible Lands Agency’s harbor sales in languages like Malagasy, Armenian, and Thai, as well as in Arabic, Hebrew, and Urdu, give some sense of the flow of world history that passed through the region. In short, this paper connects the study of the “Bible lands” in modern times with the overlapping histories of printing, literacy, and the book; British imperialism; maritime transport; and migration. At the same time, it places Egypt and the “Bible Lands” at the center of what some scholars are now calling “globalizing Christianity”.

Most of the research on the so-called "Orient" opened up for scholarly study following Napoleon's ill-fated 1798 expedition to Egypt has focused on the imperialist mentality of Orientalism as an academic discourse, most notably with the work of Edward Said. Absent from the discourse on Orientalist texts is the genre that was most widely read in 19th century Europe and America, specifically Holy Land travel texts that cited contemporary customs and manners of Arabs and other groups encountered as illustrations of Bible characters for popular consumption in Protestant churches. There is an extensive literature; Yehoshua Ben-Arieh has estimates that at least 2,000 individuals recorded their visits to Palestine alone between 1800 and 1870, before this area was under European control. While the majority of these authors reflected a Christian bias against the dominant religion of Islam in the Holy Land, most also viewed the current inhabitants as a kind of "ethnographic" window for Biblical interpretation, alongside the recent archaeological discoveries. This paper is concerned with the use of line drawings and lithographs as a visual framing for Bible custom illustrations. Specifically what customs were drawn, what geographical locations were most widely represented, and how do the captions and accompanying narrative text connote the relevance of the images for a Western Christian audience. Three major Protestant texts are examined in detail: William Thomson's "The Land and the Book" (first published in 1859), John Kitto’s "An Illustrated History of the Bible" (1871) and Henry J. Van-Lennep's "Bible Lands: Their Modern Customs and Manners Illustrative of Scripture" (1875). The goals of the paper are threefold. First, it is important to draw attention to a popular literary genre that has been virtually ignored in previous discussions of Orientalism, because the driving “Biblical” fascination in the Near East fueled reception of travel accounts in 19th century Protestant communities far more than limited circulation academic tomes. Second, illustrated texts of Biblical history and Natural History were best sellers in the 19th century, thus literally shaping the imagination of readers on the places and inhabitants of the region. Third, the “textual attitude” of many critics researching the intellectual history of Oriental and Biblical Studies has biased the record by sidelining the power inherent in visual images alongside narratives during the 19th century.

As the birthplace of the Abrahamic religions, the Eastern Mediterranean has long fascinated the Orthodox Christians of Ethiopia. Beyond its identification as the ancestral home of the region’s Solomonic kings, the Holy Land has also been the source of a scriptural tradition, a powerful symbolic landscape, and a canon of “translateable” scholarly works. But in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, imperial politics and sectarian tensions dramatically transformed these older ties between the Red Sea region and the Holy Land. This paper will chart Ethiopia’s changing imagination of Palestine, Israel, and Egypt through a range of Amharic and Ge’ez texts: after considering their place in manuscripts of classical church learning, we will juxtapose these with printed works from the 1920s that investigate the region as a contested political space and a diasporic national home. We will conclude by proposing some links between this Ethiopian imaginary and missionary representations of the Holy Land from the same period.

This research draws upon the disciplinary approaches of sociology to address the following question: how do different Christian pilgrimage groups in Jerusalem organize their activities on the trip to the Holy Land so that they feel able to experience the life of Christ, and through this, to confirm their belief? By extension, how does pilgrimage today fit within a long history of emplacement of the Bible in the Holy Land? The paper argues that the primary elements of this experiential organization are narrative (stories of Christ's life), place (where it all happened) and performance (formal ritual, prayer, and singing at sites). It is by conjoining the Christian narrative and the specific topography in that part of the world now called the Holy Land through performative practices of believers that these specific locales become the place where Christ lived his life. This research draws on two and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork in Jerusalem, conducted during several trips between 1997 and 2006. This relationship between narrative, place, and performance on Christian pilgrimage, however, is not new. It can be noticed already in the early pilgrimage accounts, beginning with the fourth-century “Pilgrimage of Egeria”. Egeria recorded her account just decades after Constantine built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, at a time when local clergy were developing liturgical narrative traditions connected to the holy sites, by applying local topography and customs to interpretations of Biblical text. Today it is professionally trained and licensed tour guides that lead contemporary pilgrims to sites associated with a conception of Biblical reality. The guides, in cooperation with the clergy, perform the Biblical text in much the same way that Egeria described. Their performance, and their sense of connection to a long history of enactment, suggests structural continuities in the way Christians have experienced faith within a context of Biblical topography.