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Whether you are a devout Christian or a hard core atheist (or somewhere in between), there is no doubt that the Bible has influenced your life. Culturally, many Bible stories are widely known and used to convey meaning, even when the meaning is not religious.
Even our dates are based around the Bible. The modern calendar that is used was developed and endorsed by the Catholic Church to help eliminate the season creep from the inaccuracies of older calendars. Recently, many people have moved away from using the traditional BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini) when talking about years. They replaced it with BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era). Of course, everyone knows what happened right around the year zero that marked the end, or beginning, of the eras.
Those are just a few of the many ways that the Bible has an obvious impact on our lives today, but there are also many ways that aren’t nearly as well known. According to a new study published in the Journal of Theological Studies, mapmaking and political boundaries were not just advanced thanks to the Bible, but thanks to an oddly inaccurate map within the Bible.
Around 500 years ago a version of the Bible was published that included a map to give illustration to where some of the events from scripture took place. Now, to be clear, this map was an addition to the Bible and nobody (even then) would have considered the map to be divinely inspired.
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That’s a good thing too, because the map was accidently printed backwards. And this misprint had a significant impact throughout the next 500 years, which continues today. The study author, Nathan MacDonalds, is a Professor of the Interpretation of the Old Testament at the University of Cambridge. In a statement about the study, he explains:
“This is simultaneously one of publishing’s greatest failures and triumphs. They printed the map backwards, so the Mediterranean appears to the east of Palestine. People in Europe knew so little about this part of the world that no one in the workshop seems to have realized.”
This inaccurate map led to a number of shifts in the culture throughout much of the world. For one, adding the maps served as a very early way for Christians to virtually visit the Holy Land. The vast majority of people would never be able to travel to this region, so pinpointing the various stories in the Bible on a map helped them to imagine what it was like. MacDonald explains:
“Early in the movement’s history, Protestants showed an interest in maps and their potential to provide an alternative paratextual apparatus that emphasized the literal meaning of the text. When they cast their eyes over Cranach’s map, pausing at Mount Carmel, Nazareth, the River Jordan and Jericho, people were taken on a virtual pilgrimage.”
This, he argued, did many things. One of the most significant is that it made people start looking at national boarders as things that were, perhaps, divinely inspired rather than simple made up lines on the map. The influence of this type of thing can be easily seen today over the conflict in the Holy Land where people of multiple backgrounds claim that the land is theirs by divine right.
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Another change that this brought to the world is the love of mapmaking in general. MacDonald argues:
“It has been wrongly assumed that biblical maps followed an early modern instinct to create maps with clearly marked territorial divisions. Actually, it was these maps of the Holy Land that led the revolution. Early modern notions of the nation were influenced by the Bible, but the interpretation of the sacred text was itself shaped by new political theories that emerged in the early modern period. The Bible was both the agent of change, and its object.”
So, as with so many other things in the world, Christianity in general and the Bible specifically changed the way people lived their lives in such dramatic ways that it can still be seen today.
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