Making these ancient artefacts public in the Terra Sancta Museum archaeology wing, which opened in 2018 and will soon be further expanded, is part of a larger trend of increased public engagement among the Franciscans, who have also recently opened to the public their large library in Jerusalem’s St Saviour’s Monastery and created an online catalogue for it as part of an ongoing effort to renovate various holy sites around the region.
These changes are happening as Israel is experiencing a surge in tourism, with about four million people visiting in 2018, a record high, according to the tourism ministry.
In fact, it was during a previous surge of tourism and interest in the Holy Land in the 19th Century that the Franciscan order began to engage in archaeology.
In the Middle East, this emerging discipline began intensifying and drawing more attention to debates about Biblical history in the late 19th Century. Ultimately, the Franciscans, who had been charged by the Vatican since the 13th Century with guarding Church property and aiding Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land, decided to embrace archaeology and join the growing body of public scholarly discourse about it.
“History finds its safest support in archaeology,” wrote Reverend Prosper Viaud, one of the first Franciscans to participate in an excavation, having dug under the contemporary Shrine of the Annunciation church in Nazareth in 1889. The dig exposed an older structure, which illustrated a long history of devotion at the site. “I set out on this path not because I succumbed to an empty scientific thought, but because of a true will to meet the devotion of the pilgrims and make them know better the church of Nazareth.”
In the early 20th Century, the Franciscans began digging at and around many of their churches and monasteries, publishing books with their results and building a massive library of artefacts in Jerusalem. In 1901 they established their Studium Biblicanum Franciscanum, and since 1924, it has operated uninterrupted as one of a growing number of archaeological research institutions in Jerusalem, including the WF Albright Institute of Archaeological Research, the British School of Archaeology, the Institute of Archaeology at Hebrew University and the École Biblioteque et Archaeologique, established by the Roman Catholic Dominican Order.
The Franciscans’ excavations – from Mount Nebo, the Jordanian mountaintop revered as the place from which Moses first saw the biblical Promised Land; to Caperneum, a town on the Sea of Galilee that contains an ancient synagogue and churches – made important contributions to archaeology in the region. Today many local archaeologists feel indebted to the Franciscans.
“Their research is an important piece of the huge puzzle of archaeology in Israel,” said Dina Avshalom-Gorni, a district archaeologist at the Israel Antiquities Authority who has worked with Franciscan archaeologists at various digs. “Despite their religious beliefs, the research they produce is really pure archaeology. They give us facts and I can trust them.”