WHEN GENERAL GORDON WENT to Jerusalem in 1883, the city offended his evangelical sensibilities. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, filled with incense and superstition, simply would not do: Christ must have died elsewhere. Jerusalem, he thought, possessed the shape of a woman’s body (as ever with Chinese Gordon, one can go wild with Freudian theorising), all of which apparently suggested that another site, just north of the Damascus Gate, was the real Golgotha.
Jerusalem, for Gordon and many like him, was a place between heaven and earth, a place where every shrub and every rock held a deeper meaning and revealed something divine.
There are, of course, plenty who visit the traditional holy sites of Jerusalem and find them exhilarating: busloads of Christian pilgrims, down from Galilee for the…
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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, August/September 2024