5. Jesus Places

Issues involving the deep and plain kens arose in the construction of temples, between the need to create a structure in normal spacetime and the need to imbue that structure with symbolic resonance. This chapter shows how prominent temples such as the Church of the Nativity, the Mosque of the Cradle, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre drew meaningful connections with key points in Jesus's life. At the same time, pilgrims, real or would-be, became interested in the plain-ken specifics of the contemporary Holy Land. This plain-ken interest of the actual spatial dimensions of the Holy Sepulchre, for example, was balanced by a deep-ken interest in geometrical perfection. Attention on the tomb itself was part of a broader plain-ken attention to Jerusalem's metrics, which predated, but peaked in, our period. This plain-ken love for precise, if ugly, measurements existed in a deep-ken space where the original tomb consonated with scale copies re-created across Europe. Inscriptions played a particularly important role in Islamic architecture, including Jesus references encircling the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the Minaret of Jam near Kabul.