A brand new Cambridge examine reveals how the primary Bible ever printed with a map, launched in 1525 with the Holy Land unintentionally reversed, ended up reworking excess of biblical illustration.
The primary Bible to incorporate a map of the Holy Land was printed in 1525, marking its five hundredth anniversary this 12 months. Though the map was printed the fallacious manner spherical – the Mediterranean was positioned to the East – its presence set a brand new customary that, in accordance with a current Cambridge examine, nonetheless influences how trendy borders are imagined.
“That is concurrently certainly one of publishing’s biggest failures and triumphs,” says Nathan MacDonald, Professor of the Interpretation of the Outdated Testomony on the College of Cambridge.
“They printed the map backwards so the Mediterranean seems to the east of Palestine. Folks in Europe knew so little about this a part of the world that nobody within the workshop appears to have realized. However this map remodeled the Bible endlessly, and immediately most Bibles include maps.”
In analysis printed in The Journal of Theological Research, Professor MacDonald explains that Lucas Cranach the Elder’s map, produced in Zürich, not solely turned the Bible into a piece aligned with the Renaissance but additionally influenced rising concepts about territorial group.
“It has been wrongly assumed that biblical maps adopted an early trendy intuition to create maps with clearly marked territorial divisions,” MacDonald says. “Truly, it was these maps of the Holy Land that led the revolution.
“As increasingly more individuals gained entry to Bibles from the seventeenth century, these maps unfold a way of how the world must be organised and what their place inside it was. This continues to be extraordinarily influential.”
The primary ‘Bible map’
Solely a handful of copies of Christopher Froschauer’s 1525 Outdated Testomony nonetheless exist in libraries worldwide. One in all these uncommon editions is preserved at Trinity School Cambridge’s Wren Library.
Inside this quantity, Cranach’s map illustrates each the important thing areas related to the wilderness wanderings and the division of the Promised Land into twelve tribal areas. These borders mirrored a particularly Christian curiosity in asserting a historic declare to the sacred websites related to the Outdated and New Testaments.
Cranach drew on earlier medieval mapping traditions that depicted Israel as a sequence of neatly separated land strips, a method influenced by the first century AD Jewish historian Josephus, who tried to harmonize the Bible’s usually inconsistent geographical accounts.
In response to MacDonald, “Joshua 13–19 doesn’t supply a wholly coherent, constant image of what land and cities have been occupied by the completely different tribes. There are a number of discrepancies. The map helped readers to make sense of issues even when it wasn’t geographically correct.”
A literal studying of the Bible was significantly central to the Swiss Reformation and so, MacDonald says: “It’s no shock that the primary Bible map was printed in Zürich.”
MacDonald, a Fellow of St John’s School Cambridge, argues that with a rising emphasis on the literal studying of the Bible, maps helped to exhibit that occasions came about in recognizable time and house.
In a Reformation world wherein sure photographs have been banned, maps of the Holy Land have been permitted and have become another supply of pious reverence.
“After they solid their eyes over Cranach’s map, pausing at Mount Carmel, Nazareth, the River Jordan and Jericho, individuals have been taken on a digital pilgrimage,” MacDonald says. “Of their thoughts’s eye, they travelled throughout the map, encountering the sacred story as they did so.”
The inclusion of Cranach’s map was, MacDonald argues, a pivotal second within the Bible’s transformation, and deserves higher recognition. Higher recognized adjustments embrace the transfer from scroll to codex, the creation of the primary moveable single-volume Bible (The Paris Bible) within the 13th Century; the addition of chapters and verses; the addition of recent prefaces within the Reformation; and the popularity of the prophetic utterances as Hebrew poetry within the 18th Century. “The Bible has by no means been an unchanging e-book,” MacDonald says. “It’s always reworking”.
A revolution within the which means of borders
In medieval maps, MacDonald argues, the division of the Holy Land into tribal territories had communicated non secular which means: the inheritance of all issues by Christians. However from the late fifteenth century, traces unfold from maps of the Holy Land to maps of the fashionable world, and started to symbolize one thing very completely different: political borders. On the identical time, these new concepts about political sovereignty have been learn again into biblical texts.
“Bible maps delineating the territories of the twelve tribes have been highly effective brokers within the growth and unfold of those concepts,” MacDonald says. “A textual content that’s not about political boundaries in a contemporary sense turned an occasion of God’s ordering of the world in accordance with nation-states.”
“Traces on maps began to represent the boundaries of political sovereignties reasonably than the boundless divine guarantees. This remodeled the best way that the Bible’s descriptions of geographical house have been understood.”
“Early trendy notions of the nation have been influenced by the Bible, however the interpretation of the sacred textual content was itself formed by new political theories that emerged within the early trendy interval. The Bible was each the agent of change, and its object.”
Relevance immediately
“For many individuals, the Bible stays an necessary information to their primary beliefs about nation states and borders,” MacDonald says. “They regard these concepts as biblically licensed and due to this fact true and proper in a basic manner.”
MacDonald factors to a current US Customs and Border Protection recruitment film wherein a border agent quotes Isaiah 6:8 – ‘Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I ship? And who will go for us?”’ – whereas flying above the US-Mexico border in a helicopter.
Professor MacDonald is anxious that so many individuals view borders as being straightforwardly biblical. “After I requested ChatGPT and Google Gemini whether or not borders are biblical, they each merely answered ‘sure’. The truth is extra advanced,” he says.
“We must be involved when any group claims that their manner of organizing society has a divine or non secular underpinning as a result of these usually simplify and misrepresent historical texts which are making completely different sorts of ideological claims in very completely different political contexts.”
Reference: “Historical Israel and the Fashionable Bounded State” by Nathan MacDonald, 29 November 2025, The Journal of Theological Research.
DOI: 10.1093/jts/flaf090
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