Turning the Holy Land Into Disneyland

Jesus was baptised in the river Jordan. That much we know. But what we don't know is exactly where, or more specifically, on which side. Did he step into the muddy waters from the east or from the west? I know, I know: who really cares? Well actually, it matters – not least to Israel's $3bn a year religious tourist industry and to those in Amman who also want a greater share of the pie. The Holy Land is big business. Last year, nearly half a million pilgrims visited the Castle of the Jews site on the Israeli side of the river. But when Pope Francis goes to the Jordan on Saturday, he will approach the river from the Jordanian side, to the lesser-visited Bethany-beyond-the-Jordan that was rediscovered in the 1990s. The first chapter of John's Gospel explicitly mentions this place as the centre of John the Baptist's operations: "This took place in Bethany across the Jordan where John was baptising." Jordanian archaeologists insist that the remains of a 4th century monastery, possibly commissioned as a part of the Emperor Constantine's great building spree, is the real clincher.

Of course, in conferring further legitimacy on the Jordanian site, the pope is making a political point. In this part of the world, piles of ancient stones are always more than that – they have contested ideological significance. It is not insignificant, for instance, that some of the most hawkish Israeli nationalists – from Moshe Dayan to Ariel Sharon – were obsessed with archaeology and (let's call it…) "collecting" the remains of biblical sites. As Edward Said argues in his work on Freud and the complexities of Jewish/Israeli identity, claiming the ideological ownership of historic sites was a way of establishing a sense of continuity between the modern state of Israel and ancient/biblical Israel.