From the Passion to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

In this informative study, Jordan J. Ryan analyzes a number of Christian sites in the Holy Land, paying special attention to how, with the construction of the early commemorative churches, the memory of Jesus was transformed into ‘a kind of experiential gospel’. A frequent visitor to the Holy Land and someone with a deep appreciation of these sites, the author writes from experience and puts his mastery of the relevant literary sources to good use. What could have easily ended up as a collage of personal experiences and disjointed observations is given a strong and coherent framework, with the author maintaining focus on the reception and interpretation of ‘key life-of-Jesus events’ [...] This monograph is a labor of love, written by someone with a deep investment in the subject. In the introductory chapter, Ryan sets out the principal agenda: to examine the commemorative churches ‘as instantiations of reception and memory’; to consider how these spaces ‘were experienced by worshippers and pilgrims’; and to pay attention to the roles they ‘played in Jewish-Christian relations and in the intersection of Jewish and Christian traditions and concerns’. All of these objectives, and much more, are accomplished in this remarkable book. * Olegs Andrejevs, Loyola University Chicago, USA, for John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. *