With the assistance of these publications a guide-book might be compiled which would enable the tourist to order his dragoman to take him straight to the places worth seeing, instead of—following on the track of exploded tradition—going with him like a sheep to those that are not. Much could be done to clear away existing confusion and prevent the perpetuation of error by a change in the received nomenclature, whereby things should be called by their right names so far as they are known, instead of by misleading appellations, derived from the records of early pilgrims or the later crusaders. I will take a few examples as illustrations. Not far from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre the guide shows the traveller an immense reservoir, now being filled up. This, he says, is the Pool of Bethesda, but it has only been thus designated since the fourteenth century. In the twelfth this pool was supposed to be a cistern near the Church of St. Anne, and in the fourth the site of Bethesda was shown at the twin pools, northwest of Antonia. The fact is that there are only two sites which may be regarded as possible for Bethesda, one being the spring of En-Rogel, which has an intermittent ebb and flow, and which is still frequented by the Jews, who bathe in it to cure various diseases. The other is the curious well immediately west of the Temple enclosure, now called Hamman Esh-Shefa, or the Healing Spring, a long reservoir reached by a shaft nearly one hundred feet deep. None of the pools which have at various times been selected by tradition have any supply of living water, and none can well be supposed to have any intermittent rise and fall, such as we understand by the moving of the waters.
Again, take the tombs of Absalom and St. James. There is nothing whatever to connect the first with Absalom. The singular style of its architecture shows that it cannot be the pillar “Absalom reared up for himself during his lifetime in the king's dale.” M. Clermont Ganneau has made excavations uncovering the bases and pedestals of the columns, all of which are purely Greek. Indeed, it is only since the twelfth century that it was called the tomb of Absalom at all. The author of the Jerusalem Itinerary calls it the tomb of Hezekiah, and Adamanus, in the seventh century, calls it the tomb of Jehoshaphat. It is possibly the monument of Alexander Jannæus spoken of by Josephus. So, too, the tomb of St. James has nothing to do with St. James; for there has lately been discovered on the façade an inscription in square Hebrew in so inaccessible a position as to have been only probably cut before the façade was completed, which mentions that the family of the Beni Hezir are buried there. This family of priests is mentioned in the Bible (1 Chron. xxiv. 15). The inscription seems to date from the first century before Christ.