Holy Land as Homeland? Models for Constructing the Historic Landscapes of Jesus

The quest for the historical Jesus has invariably tried to make sense
of his world by constructing what it considers to be the historic
landscapes that he inhabited. These essays explore how we do not
create an actual past or rediscover an actual landscape with its towns
and villages but 'imaginary homelands' that allow us to inhabit and
possess the past.
The papers in this volume explore the ways in which constructions
of the Holy Land as homeland have been mediated through history
textbooks, geographies and maps, and continue to exert an influence
on contemporary scholarship. The complex interrelationships between
scholarship and its national settings is a constant thread throughout
the papers: the work of many of the iconic figures of nineteenthand
twentieth-century European biblical scholarship (Moxnes); the
roots of European constructions of homeland from the Enlightenment
onwards (Birch); American biblical scholarship in the twentieth century
(Long); cartography and the construction of homeland (Whitelam);
the constructions of a Galilaean homeland for Jesus (Baergen and
Vaage); a contemporary imagined homeland in British politics
(Crossley). The final essay takes up the themes of 'home', 'homeland'
and 'homelessness' to reflect on the methods and models that underpin
contemporary scholarship (Penner and Lopez).
These essays show how the scholarly task is a continuing questioning-
and self-questioning-of the models and methods with which we are
most at home.
The papers collected in this volume were presented in Oslo as
one of the events organized by the 'Jesus in Cultural Complexity:
Interpretation, Memory and Identification' project directed by Halvor
Moxnes at the University of Oslo and funded by the Norwegian
Research Council.