Chapter 19 Paradoxes of Mapping: On Geography and History in the Teaching of Christendom in Norway, c.1850–2000

This chapter deals with the relationship between physical geography and the geography of biblical history as subjects in Norwegian childrens ’ schools from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth century. Jerusalem itself plays no significant role in the teaching of secular geography, and so the comparison rests on the general geographies of the Holy Land on the one hand and Palestine, eventually Israel, on the other. My aim is to compare representations of a terrain and a territory that is both physical and metaphysical. At this level, the difference between city and land is primarily one of scale, not of substance. The Jerusalem “ code ” is here a historical entanglement; a knot which may or may not be in the process of being untied. The material here is maps in textbooks on two subjects: geography and biblical history. The history of the relationship between them is partly about separation, of subjects moving in different directions, but it is also a history of a paradoxical convergence: at the end of the twentieth century, contemporary textbook-maps of the Holy Land may have been unprecedently dissimilar to mainstream, geographical cartography, but their function is so traditional as to be almost archaic. – biblical book. readers 1 In-depth discussions of official norms for religious education age my scope now,