In the previous century, Europeans had rediscovered the second-century Greco-Roman geographer Ptolemy, and with him the art of making accurate maps that used latitude and longitude (insofar as longitude could be estimated at that time – it greatly improved in later centuries). With the advent of printing, Ptolemy's Cosmographia had taken Europe by storm. His scientific treatise on geography was published and his maps of the ancient world reproduced.

Printers soon discovered, however, that purchasers desired contemporary maps. Soon new maps of France, Spain and Scandinavia were published. To our eyes these are truly modern. North is at the top of the page and the locations of cities, rivers and coastlines are presented highly accurately.

These maps rapidly replaced medieval mapping with its symbolic approach to the world, such as the famous Hereford mappa mundi of the known world circa 1300, where it was more about conveying cultural or religious meaning than geographical accuracy. Except, that is, in one case: Palestine.

The early modern printers of Ptolemy also gave their readers a“modern map of the Holy Land” that was nothing of the sort. It was a medieval map produced not by using latitude and longitude, but using a grid to measure distances between different locations.

It was orientated with the east at the top of the page and the west at the bottom. It portrayed the holy sites of Christianity and divided the land of Palestine into tribal territories.

Cranach's map blends these two types of maps. At its top and bottom edges it has lines of meridian, but the coastline is slanted so that the entire map is orientated with the north-east at the top of the page.

It is as though Cranach couldn't quite decide what type of map to create. Its portrayal is realistic and modern, but the map is full of symbolic geography: as your eye passes over, you journey with the Israelites from Egyptian bondage to the promised land, with all its resonant locations, such as Mount Carmel, Nazareth, the River Jordan and Jericho.

The map was characteristic of Europe's lack of interest in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman empire. What European book buyers cared for was the strange hybrid space that is the“Holy Land”: somewhere that was in our world, but also not part of it.

The towns the map portrayed were those that had flourished two millennia earlier, which for Christians were in some sense more real. They were part of the imaginative space described in their churches and scriptures.

That curious juxtaposition of ancient and modern was particularly consequential when it came to the mapping of Palestine into 12 tribal territories.

The 12 tribes that descended from Jacob symbolized Christianity's claim as true heir of Israel and its holy sites, and also what the holy sites represented: the inheritance of the heavenly Jerusalem. Lines on the map communicated the eternal promises of God.

But in the early modern period, lines began to be used to mark the borders between sovereign states. The maps of the Holy Land, neatly divided amongst the Israelite tribes, set the agenda for cartographers. As the 16th century went on, more and more maps in atlases divided the world among distinct nations with clearly defined borders.

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The fact that a map divided into territories appeared in the Bible gave apparently religious authorization for a world full of borders. Lines that had once symbolized the boundless divine promises now communicated the limits of political sovereignties.

Within Bibles themselves, maps had arrived for good. The following years saw printers experiment with various configurations, but eventually they were to settle on four maps: one of the wilderness wanderings of the Israelites, one of the territories of the 12 tribes, one of Palestine at the time of Jesus, and one of the apostle Paul's missionary journeys.

There is a pleasing symmetry: two maps for the Old Testament, two for the New Testament. But also, two maps of journeys and two maps of the Holy Land. Such symmetries communicated the connections between events: the Old Testament was fulfilled in the New Testament, and Judaism in Christianity.

The first map in a Bible is therefore a fascinating moment in history, but a troubling one. It transformed the Bible into something like a Renaissance atlas, but deeply embedded in assumptions about Christian superiority: the Holy Land of Christian imagination displacing contemporary Palestine, and Christianity superseding Judaism.

It was also one of the agents in creating the modern world of distinct nation states. In many ways, we've been living 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.

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