Past Perfect: Reality Ruins Impression
John Lloyd Stephens was an American author, explorer and diplomat. Born November 28, 1805, in Shrewsbury, New Jersey, Stephens attended Columbia University when he was 13 years old and graduated in the top of his class. He traveled extensively throughout Europe, the Middle East and South America. In 1839 President Martin Van Buren appointed him special ambassador to Central America. While he was there, Stephens explored and discovered several ancient Mayan sites. In 1849 Stephens became vice-president of the Panama Railroad Company. He died October 13, 1852, at the age of 47.
Stephens is noted for being among the first to publish illustrations with accounts of his travels in the Middle East. Following is an excerpt from Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land (1838):
It is a happy thing for the traveler in the Holy Land, that in almost all the principal places there is a Christian convent, whose doors are always open to him; and one of the largest and finest of these is in Bethlehem. Riding through the whole extent of the little town, greeted by Christians, who, however, with their white turbans and fierce mustaches and beards, had in my eyes a most unchristian appearance, and stopping for a moment on the high plain in front, overlooking the valley, and the sides of the hill all cultivated in terraces we dismounted at the door of the convent.
Beginning my tour in the Holy Land at the birthplace of our Savior, and about to follow him in his wanderings through Judea, Samaria, and Galilee, over the ground consecrated by his preaching, his sufferings, and miracles, to his crucifixion on Cavalry, I must prepare my readers for a disappointment which I experienced myself. The immediate followers of our Savior, who personally knew the localities which are now guarded and reverenced as holy places, engrossed by the more important business of their Master’s mission, never marked these places for the knowledge of their descendants. Neglected for several centuries, many of them were probably entirely unknown when a new spirit arose in the East… The Empress Helena, the mother of Constantine, the first Christian empress, came as a crusader into the Holy Land, to search for and determine the then unknown localities. And the traveler is often astonished that, with so little to guide her, she was so successful; for she not only found all the holy places mentioned in the Bible, but many more; and the piety of Christians will never forget that it was through her indefatigable exertions the true cross was drawn from the bottom of a dark pit, and is now scattered in pieces all over the world, to gladden the hearts of believers. It may be that the earnest piety of the empress sometimes deceived her; but then she always covered a doubtful place with a handsomer monument, upon much the same principle that a jockey praises as a bad horse and says nothing of a good one because the bad one wants praising and the good one can speak for himself. Besides, the worthy empress seemed to think that a little marble could not hurt a holy place, and a good deal might help to make holy what was not so without it; and so think most of the Christian pilgrims, for I have observed that they always kiss with more devotion the polished marble than the rude stone.
But the Christian who goes animated by the fresh, I may almost say virgin, feeling, awakened by the perusal of his Bible, expecting to see in Bethlehem the stable in which our Savior was born and the manger in which he was cradled, or in Jerusalem the tomb hewn out of the rock wherein his crucified body was buried, will feel another added to the many grievous disappointments of a traveler when he finds these hallowed objects, or at least what are pointed out as these, covered and enclosed with part-colored marble, and bedecked with gaudy and inappropriate ornaments, as if intentionally and impiously to destroy all resemblance to the descriptions given in the sacred book.