Five hundred years ago the first Bible to include a map was published. The anniversary passed largely uncelebrated, but that map transformed how Bibles were produced. It appeared in Christopher Froschauer’s 1525 Old Testament, published in Zürich and widely distributed in sixteenth-century central Europe.
The initial attempt, however, was far from perfect: the map is flipped along the north–south axis, so the Mediterranean appears east of Palestine rather than west. That mistake shows how little many Europeans knew about the Middle East, so little that a printer’s workshop let such an error pass.
The map had been drawn about a decade earlier by the celebrated Renaissance painter and printmaker Lucas Cranach the Elder of Wittenberg. Written in Latin, it shows Palestine with important holy sites such as Jerusalem and Bethlehem; at the bottom are the mountains of Sinai and the Israelites’ route out of Egypt. Look closely and you can see Israelites and tents and vignettes of events on their journey. The landscape, though, is more European than Middle Eastern: walled towns with trees, a more sinuous Jordan, and a more indented coastline — all reflecting the printmakers’ ignorance.
In the previous century Europeans had rediscovered the second-century geographer Ptolemy and the art of making maps using latitude and longitude (longitude estimates improved in later centuries). With printing, Ptolemy’s Cosmographia took Europe by storm: his treatise and ancient maps were reproduced. Printers soon found buyers wanted contemporary maps too, leading to new maps of France, Spain and Scandinavia. To modern eyes these maps look familiar: north at the top and city, river and coastline locations presented with high accuracy.
These modern maps rapidly replaced medieval mapping, which had been symbolic and cultural rather than strictly geographic — think of the Hereford mappa mundi around 1300. But Palestine was an exception. Early modern printers of Ptolemy produced a “modern map of the Holy Land” that really followed medieval conventions: a grid to measure distances, oriented with the east at the top, and showing holy Christian sites and the division of Palestine into tribal territories.
Cranach’s map blends both types. It carries meridian lines at top and bottom but slants the coastline so the map is oriented with the northeast at the top. It’s as if Cranach couldn’t decide between modern realism and symbolic medieval mapping: the portrayal mixes accurate features with symbolic geography that invites the viewer to journey with the Israelites from Egyptian bondage to the promised land, with resonant locations like Mount Carmel, Nazareth, the Jordan and Jericho.
The map reflects Europe’s lack of interest in contemporary Palestine, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire. What European buyers cared about was the hybrid “Holy Land”: part of the world yet set apart, the landscape of scripture and church imagination. The towns portrayed were those of two millennia earlier, which for Christians were in some sense more real.
That juxtaposition of ancient and modern became consequential in mapping Palestine into the twelve Israelite tribal territories. The twelve tribes symbolized Christianity’s claim as the true heir of Israel and its holy sites, and stood for what those sites represented: the inheritance of the heavenly Jerusalem. Lines on the map communicated the eternal promises of God.
Yet by the early modern period, lines on maps were increasingly used to mark borders between sovereign states. Maps of the Holy Land, neatly divided among Israelite tribes, set an agenda: as the sixteenth century progressed, more atlases divided the world into distinct nations with clearly defined borders. The fact that a map divided into territories appeared inside a Bible lent it apparent religious authorization: lines that had once symbolized boundless divine promise now suggested political limits and sovereignties.
Maps had arrived in Bibles to stay. Printers experimented with many configurations, but eventually settled on four standard maps: the Israelites’ wilderness wanderings, the territories of the twelve tribes, Palestine at the time of Jesus, and Paul’s missionary journeys. There is a symmetry — two Old Testament maps and two New Testament maps; two journey maps and two maps of the Holy Land — that reinforced theological connections: the Old Testament fulfilled in the New, Judaism fulfilled by Christianity.
The first map in a Bible is therefore a pivotal but troubling moment. It transformed the Bible into a kind of Renaissance atlas while embedding assumptions about Christian superiority: the Christian Holy Land of imagination displaced contemporary Palestine, and Christianity was presented as superseding Judaism. At the same time, these maps were among the agents that helped create the modern world of distinct nation-states. In many ways, we have lived with the consequences ever since.
Nathan MacDonald is professor of the interpretation of the Old Testament, University of Cambridge
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
