The ‘Holy Land’ is of particular interest to Christians everywhere, an interest intensified whenever they read their Bibles. There God intervened in human history through his dealings with the Israelites, and in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus was crucified and raised in, and ascended from Jerusalem, and it was there also that the Holy Spirit descended on the Church.
There has been, of course, an unbroken Christian community in the land from the beginning, and it was those residing there who were the architects of a Christian ‘Holy Land’. But Christians outside also have their interests. Well before Constantine, Palestine was a place of pilgrimage. In the middle of the second century, Melito of Sardis went to establish accurately the books of the Old Testament’, and to examine the relevant places. Others went ‘for the sake of the holy places’, and ‘to trace the footsteps of Jesus’, and pray. Some stayed, living piously near the sites. Nevertheless, however important, the Holy Land never attracted more than a handful of (affluent) pilgrims from abroad, and the practice of pilgrimage was virtually moribund by the end of the eighteenth century. As we shall see, Western interests from then went beyond the religious.