To Take Time: Dispensationalist Bible Maps and Charts in the Early Twentieth Century

Maps have appeared in Protestant Bibles since Protestants have been making Bibles – although historians must be willing to change what we think of as a “map” to recognize these as maps and understand the work they did in Protestant communities. This paper invites scholars to rethink the role of mapping in Protestantism by examining two very different kinds of Bible maps that circulated in very similar Protestant communities: a map of “The Holy Land” from the Scofield Reference Bible of 1909 and a chart of biblical history made by dispensationalist minister Clarence Larkin in 1920. Examining the materiality of these images and their functions in Protestant communities, this paper argues Bible maps made distinct claims about politics, the Bible’s relationship to physical geography, and the sacrality of time.

This panel takes inspiration from J.Z. Smith’s classic Map is Not Territory, but my thinking on Protestant maps draws from another of Smith’s classics: To Take Place. In his landmark study of ritual, Smith challenged then-prevailing theories by suggesting there was no inherent meaning in ritual and no universal qualities of sacredness to which religion responded. “Sacrality,” Smith argued, “is, above all, a category of emplacement” (1987, 104). The ritual was sacred because it happened in the temple; the temple became sacred because it’s where the ritual happened. Rituals focus human attention on specific places, Smith noted, and those places become sacred by virtue of what humans do to mark the space as different from other places. My paper argues early twentieth-century dispensationalist maps performed similar functions, but focused on the axis of time: they drew attention to particular places using maps to make claims about the Bible’s relationship to history and its relevance for contemporary politics. 

It is now uncontroversial to observe that images are crucial to the practice of Protestantism. Protestants do a lot of work with images, and images do a lot of work on and for Protestants. Recent scholarship has asked more pointed questions about the kinds of images Protestants have engaged in particular times or places, the distinct Protestant practices of seeing/displaying, and the kinds of religious work images perform in Protestant communities. This paper contributes to the study of Protestant visual culture by reimagining the forms and functions of Bible maps in relation to time. 

Recent work on Protestant visual culture overlaps significantly with scholarship on the history of cartography, which has questioned the “cartographic ideal” of maps. Map historian Matthew Edney (2019) describes this cartographic ideal as a set of beliefs that arose in the nineteenth century regarding the appearance, function, and ontology of maps. The cartographic ideal, Edney suggests, re-imagined mapmaking as a singular, universal, human endeavor of greater or lesser success: some maps were “accurate” while others were not. However, all maps were presumed to perform the same basic function of translating geographic reality into a useful visual form to guide human movement and show details of a landscape – in geometrical relation to each other. Maps needed to bear a specific type of correspondence to geographical and topographical features to qualify as true maps. Instead of blithely replicating this cartographic ideal, Edney has urged scholars to focus on the production, use, and circulation of maps to develop more robust understandings of these unusual images (2019, 52-55). In short: we should not assume an image needs to have an overhead visual perspective, bear a geometrical relationship to real landscapes, or facilitate human movement to qualify as a map. This critical perspective is especially important for studying Protestant maps, as their relationships to physical geographies are complicated, they are often as concerned with orienting humans in time as in place, and they perform functions that fall far outside the traditional uses of maps. The paper illustrates this by examining Larkin’s chart, which does not fit the cartographic ideal but nevertheless maps biblical history.

On the other hand, some early twentieth-century Bible maps fall squarely within the cartographic ideal, but for peculiar reasons. The Scofield Reference Bible contained a series of maps of biblical lands, including a particularly interesting one called “The Holy Land in the Time of Our Savior.” The map is drawn to scale, oriented precisely on latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates, and shaded carefully to show topographical features. By every metric, this map seems to depict the part of the world called “Palestine” in 1909 in accurate geographical detail, such that the map could in theory allow a human traveler to identify real topographical features and navigate through its real landscapes. 

However, this map’s subject is emphatically not Palestine as it existed in 1909. As the title suggests, the map depicts “the Holy Land in the Time of Our Savior.” In other words, this seemingly “accurate” map depicts a real landscape of the present whose physical geography is important because of what happened there in the past. While it seems precise and useful, modern travelers would have been disappointed to learn they could not get off a boat in Caesarea and follow the roads on the map from there to Capernaum, as both sites had long since fallen off the map. More importantly, this map depicts a particular vision of the past. In this map, the physical landscape of this part of the world is imbued with significance because it’s where Bible stories happened, and a specific understanding of the history and historicity of the Bible is given credibility by the detailed portrayal of this physical landscape. This map, in other words, is making some very bold assertions about the Bible’s relevance as a source of historical information, and it is also making some very subtle assertions about contemporary politics. This real place, the map suggests, is sacred because Bible stories happened there; and the Bible’s accounts of events are historically accurate, the map suggests, because they happened in real places that could be pinpointed on a detailed and accurate scale map. Temporal maps and charts, then, helped Protestants “see” the reality of their socio-material Protestant world – with a past, present, and future.