Catholic peoples also held their own in this display of faith. About 1517 Francois Regnault published at Paris a compilation on Palestine enriched with woodcuts: in this the old Dead Sea legend of the "serpent Tyrus" reappears embellished, and with it various other new versions of old stories. Five years later Bartholomew de Salignac travels in the Holy Land, vouches for the continued existence of the Lot's wife statue, and gives new life to an old marvel by insisting that the sacred waters of the Jordan are not really poured into the infernal basin of the Dead Sea, but that they are miraculously absorbed by the earth.
These ideas were not confined to the people at large; we trace them among scholars.
In 1581, Bunting, a North German professor and theologian, published his Itinerary of Holy Scripture, and in this the Dead Sea and Lot legends continue to increase. He tells us that the water of the sea "changes three times every day"; that it "spits forth fire" that it throws up "on high" great foul masses which "burn like pitch" and "swim about like huge oxen"; that the statue of Lot's wife is still there, and that it shines like salt.
In 1590, Christian Adrichom, a Dutch theologian, published his famous work on sacred geography. He does not insist upon the Dead Sea legends generally, but declares that the statue of Lot's wife is still in existence, and on his map he gives a picture of her standing at Usdum.
Nor was it altogether safe to dissent from such beliefs. Just as, under the papal sway, men of science were severely punished for wrong views of the physical geography of the earth in general, so, when Calvin decided to burn Servetus, he included in his indictment for heresy a charge that Servetus, in his edition of Ptolemy, had made unorthodox statements regarding the physical geography of Palestine.(436)
(436) For biblical engravings showing Lot's wife transformed into a
salt statue, etc., see Luther's Bible, 1534, p. xi; also the pictorial
Electoral Bible; also Merian's Icones Biblicae of 1625; also the
frontpiece of the Luther Bible published at Nuremberg in 1708; also
Scheuchzer's Kupfer-Bibel, Augsburg, 1731, Tab. lxxx. For the account of
the Dead Sea serpent "Tyrus," etc., see La Grande Voyage de Hierusalem,
Paris (1517?), p. xxi. For De Salignac's assertion regarding the salt
pillar and suggestion regarding the absorption of the Jordan before
reaching the Dead Sea, see his Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae, Magdeburg,
1593, SS 34 and 35. For Bunting, see his Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae,
Magdeburg, 1589, pp. 78, 79. For Andrichom's picture of the salt statue,
see map, p. 38, and text, p. 205, of his Theatrum Terrae Sanctae, 1613.
For Calvin and Servetus, see Willis, Servetus and Calvin, pp. 96, 307;
also the Servetus edition of Ptolemy.
Protestants and Catholics vied with each other in the making of new myths. Thus, in his Most Devout Journey, published in 1608, Jean Zvallart, Mayor of Ath in Hainault, confesses himself troubled by conflicting stories about the salt statue, but declares himself sound in the faith that "some vestige of it still remains," and makes up for his bit of freethinking by adding a new mythical horror to the region—"crocodiles," which, with the serpents and the "foul odour of the sea," prevented his visit to the salt mountains.
In 1615 Father Jean Boucher publishes the first of many editions of his Sacred Bouquet of the Holy Land. He depicts the horrors of the Dead Sea in a number of striking antitheses, and among these is the statement that it is made of mud rather than of water, that it soils whatever is put into it, and so corrupts the land about it that not a blade of grass grows in all that region.
In the same spirit, thirteen years later, the Protestant Christopher Heidmann publishes his Palaestina, in which he speaks of a fluid resembling blood oozing from the rocks about the Dead Sea, and cites authorities to prove that the statue of Lot's wife still exists and gives signs of life.
Yet, as we near the end of the sixteenth century, some evidences of a healthful and fruitful scepticism begin to appear.