My name is Lachlan Goudie.
I'm an artist and the son of an artist
who was obsessed with painting the Crucifixion.
My father never came to the Holy Land
so I've come here for him, and for me.
I want to come face-to-face with the Easter story,
the events described as Christ's Passion.
As a boy, I learned all about the Bible story from art,
now I've come to see for myself.
This is my kind of Holy Land.
I've followed events from Palm Sunday to Good Friday -
the Crucifixion.
This rock is Golgotha.
I've seen biblical places and faces.
I'm giving you a very big nose.
My nose is like the beast in the view here. I know!
Now I want to find out what happened after the Crucifixion.
This is the tomb where Jesus was resurrected.
On Easter Sunday, Christ rose from the dead.
The story's inspired great art for centuries
and I've brought some examples with me.
Many pictures of the Easter story feature a character crucial
to the life of Jesus Christ, but who, for some reason,
hardly appears in the Gospels at all.
She was an ordinary human being
with a God-given mission impossible,
bearing his son, a child destined to save humankind.
The Madonna, the Virgin,
the Mother of God herself.
She's a shadowy figure in the Bible,
but artists have made her a global icon.
In this Holy Week I want to know,
who was Mary?
My father was a painter in love with France,
especially the coast of Brittany,
and with a God-fearing Breton woman - my mother.
Our family summers were spent down here and my father's art
gradually fell under the spell of Catholic symbolism and drama.
He was fascinated by the Easter story.
He often painted the Crucifixion but also images of Mary,
the Madonna, cradling the baby Jesus.
For my mum, like so many Catholics,
Mother Mary was central to Jesus's story, his life and death.
My mother's very large family used to come and worship
in this very small chapel and the whole community was devoted
to its wooden effigy of the Madonna.
Every year there was a procession which would end with it being
carried to the water's edge, and when I was little,
I used to come and watch this with my mum and dad,
so from a very young age, it seemed to me that the figure of Mary
was as revered, and possibly even as important, as Jesus.
So why is it that in the Gospels' telling of the Easter story,
Mary, Jesus's mother, is so often absent?
I grew up only knowing the Holy Land through art.
I had to see it through my own eyes.
In my Children's Illustrated Bible, the Easter story took place
in an epic land that looked like Hollywood.
I knew it wasn't real,
but then...
..I saw this.
A short drive south from Jerusalem in the Judaean Desert,
this is Mar Saba, one of the oldest monasteries on Earth.
This is my kind of a Holy Land -
a place that has the sort of grandeur that makes you feel like Charlton Heston.
But it's more than just kind of visual splendour.
I've been stuck in souks and grottoes and small churches
throughout this journey and here, finally,
I'm in God's open-air cathedral.
It really is...
..mind-boggling.
To me, it's Heaven on Earth.
No artist could look on Mar Saba unboggled.
This is a place that's been so parched by the sun
that the colours are bleached out.
So I've got to try and find every subtle...
..variation in form and shadow and colour.
It's not easy. We're going from...
..yellow ochre to burnt sienna,
to raw umber, to burnt umber to Van Dyke brown.
It does look like a set out of something like Star Wars.
You might just see one of the Sandmen or maybe Yoda wandering around.
I've come here because when Mar Saba was built in the year 483,
the Christian Church was still very young.
Around this time, the first images of the Virgin Mary were painted.
Although Mary wasn't a big character in the Bible,
and almost absent from the Easter story,
she was increasingly popular with early Christians.
In this monastery the monks believed images of Mary's face
would bring her closer to believers.
Mar Saba is a 1,500-year-old art gallery,
full of works by artists, ancient and unnamed.
These are icons, an early form of portrait.
Images like these give humanity to the most famous of all mothers.
More often than not we're used to looking at this kind of imagery
in an art gallery, where it's admired for its aesthetic quality,
for its pretty colours, but in a religious context,
these icons were about so much more than just the picture's surface.
They were about allowing Christians to look through the image
into another reality,
almost as if they're a kind of magnifying glass that made
the source of your own faith and your own personal commitment to Mary
all the more powerful.
And what's more, these icons were transportable.
You could carry the Mother of God with you,
so whether you were in the city or in the desert,
you could place this portable altar piece into an alcove in the wall
and turn a humble room into a holy space.
At Mar Saba, the painter in me finds beauty everywhere -
in the stone, in the light, in the landscape,
but most importantly, it's a place of worship
for monks of the Greek Orthodox Church.
I wish my mother had been able to come here because in her childhood,
she prayed in chapels in Brittany before a figure of the Madonna
the image of Mary is venerated and respected and prayed to
in a way that goes far beyond the experience she had as a child.
And it has been actually quite chastening to be here.
None of the monks are willing to speak on camera
but they have spoken to me about their relationship with icons,
iconography, and the figure of Mary in those images,
and they have made me realise that perhaps to some extent the way
that I approach making paintings is a little bit superficial.
It's all about the swishy colours on the surface,
whereas here, in this religious context,
these are images which transport you as you look at them
and look through them, that make you consider the importance
of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, and what she can do to you in your life,
and for your spiritual self.
One of the highlights of my pilgrimage to the Holy Land
has been seeing Jerusalem.
In the old city lies the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
It's built on the site of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.
Easter happened here.
Pilgrims come to see the shrine
built on the rock where the Cross stood,
where Christ died for us on Good Friday.
Nearby, others queue at the tomb where Jesus was laid,
only to rise from the dead on Easter Sunday.
Between the two, another shrine, dedicated to the Virgin,
the country girl who bore God's son,
gave birth to him in a manger and encouraged his preaching.
I've never been entirely sure about this but the Gospels were written
30-80 years after the death of Jesus, and by tradition,
the authors were early Christians, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,
who actually had contact supposedly with the disciples
and even with Mary, the Mother of Jesus.
So you'd have thought that with that kind of access,
they'd have accounted more fully for Mary's actions.
The mystery deepens.
We all know Mary cradled her dead son
when he was brought down from the Cross, but it's not in the Bible.
Artists imagined the scene, called the Pieta - the Pity.
From the 14th century, all the biggies got in on the action,
depicting the Pieta - there was Fra Angelico,
Botticelli, Michelangelo and this artist, Giovanni Bellini.
He depicts Mary as someone who really does appear to be withered
with a life of anxiety and worry.
The Pieta was an ideal example of compassion,
an example of the empathy and the sorrow that we should demonstrate
for the death of Jesus.
Mary's hold on her son seems to remind us of the way
that she held her infant child, Jesus.
This painting makes us think of the beginning,
and that's because, for Christians, Jesus's Crucifixion isn't an end,
it's a rebirth, it's the moment that will lead to his resurrection,
his greatest victory, his greatest glory.
Anyone who had a heart could look at these and know the artists
just want to honour Mary's place in the Easter tragedy.
In this case, my dad.
For me,
to bring my dad's drawings to this place is the fulfilment of a journey
he certainly never thought his images would make.
My father was not a hugely religious man,
but as an artist and as a human being,
he understood the passion of this story,
of a mother's tragic horror at the death of her son.
With the Pieta, artists have made Mary's grief,
unacknowledged in the Gospels, visible to all.
Mary's life wasn't always full of drama.
She was born in a rural community in the north of what is now Israel,
an area called Galilee.
This is Nazareth, where Mary and Joseph raised the Son of God.
In the south of the country I got used to painting
in bright sun, but up here, near the border with Syria,
the light is grey and the sky is full of rain.
In 1876, British painter William Holman Hunt came here
in search of the Virgin Mary's roots.
On this side of the hill, he painted one of my favourite pictures,
but he was drenched in sunlight.
It's kind of hard to imagine the extraordinary colours
that he evokes in his painting,
but the truth is, that when God hasn't put down a carpet of clouds,
those colours are actually here - I've seen them.
The light in Galilee is pink, purple and violet.
Hunt wasn't lying.
Although you might not believe it today.
He painted the heat and the sunshine.
Today the colours are subdued.
When I'm working out of doors, I take what I'm given.
When William Holman Hunt came here, he found this landscape to be
endlessly inspiring, because where I just see landscape,
he saw Armageddon, and although William Holman Hunt had never seen
Arnold Schwarzenegger in action, like many Victorians,
he was absolutely obsessed with epic doomsday scenarios
and religious conspiracy theories that were all meant to unfold here.
According to the Book of Revelations,
the great battle between good and evil will happen here,
the Valley of Jezreel.
But not today.
I find Hunt's obsession with the Scriptures just a little bit
neurotic, and it seems that he even travelled the length and breadth
of the country, following the dusty routes taken by Mary and Joseph
between Nazareth and Jerusalem.
Down from the hill, deep in Nazareth,
you can feel the hustle-bustle.
It's the biggest city in northern Israel, with the largest population
of Arab Israelis - some Christian, some Muslim.
To anyone who was paying attention in Sunday School,
Nazareth will always be Mary's town.
This town, Nazareth, is where Jesus grew up
and I remember my headmistress, Mrs Clark, planting an image
in my imagination of the humble home where Jesus lived,
and it was probably similar to the images
in my Children's Illustrated Bible.
It simply had one room for the family and then a neighbouring room,
a stable, for the animals.
The roof would have been flat and there Joseph and his family
would have eaten, prayed and, in the summer months, even slept.
Now, Nazareth at the time was just a small village,
home to about 100 families,
and most of those people would have been farmers.
Mrs Clark and Mr Holman Hunt wouldn't recognise Nazareth today,
but they'd both make a beeline for a landmark,
the place where Mary is supposed to have had a visit from an angel.
In Nazareth, the most important place was the well,
the basin of life-giving water where the community gathered together.
And by some traditions, this is where Mary was told that
she was going to bring divine life into the world,
that she would be the Mother of Jesus.
Today, well, it looks rather like a public convenience
rather than the place where God's master plan for humanity
was going to take place.
I think I'll give this a miss.
An artist grows a sixth sense for what makes a good picture.
This isn't it.
But it's why I came to the Holy Land,
to draw the actual places in the Easter story,
unlike hundreds of artists who stayed at home.
And this is what Nazareth looked like if you'd never left Rome.
Artemisia Gentileschi was that rare thing,
a female painter in the 17th century.
She was strong, independent and passionate
and so were the paintings that she created
and the women that she depicted,
so how was she going to represent the teenage Mother of Jesus?
In this image, she shows the Angel Gabriel kneeling with his message
whilst Mary seems to bow to the inevitable.
She steps into the light of the Holy Spirit.
She bows, she's respectful,
but I don't think she looks fragile,
because to bear the Son of God, Mary was going to have to be made
of tough stuff, and I think that's exactly how Artemisia depicts her.
Mary's well is one of several places in Nazareth thought to be built
on the spot where Gabriel gave Mary the good news,
an event called the Annunciation.
This is the Greek Orthodox Church Of The Annunciation,
the Catholic Basilica Of The Annunciation is built over a cave
where Mary is supposed to have lived,
but this church is built over a spring,
the real spring, supposedly, where the Annunciation took place
and where Jesus would have gone to draw water as a boy.
For more than 1,000 years,
pilgrims have come to churches that stood on this spot
to see the spring Jesus knew.
If anyone was in any doubt about the love that Mary inspires
in believers like my mother, they should come here.
In Nazareth, there are 17 Churches Of The Annunciation
and in all of them, she is the centre of attention.
There are images of Mary everywhere.
Not many of them look very convincing,
but then I'm used to that.
For many years, I got my idea of religious truth from this,
my Children's Bible In Colour,
and on the page that is devoted to the Annunciation,
there's an image that's inspired by centuries of medieval art,
where we've got Mary as fair-skinned,
blue-eyed and receiving the will of God so gracefully,
a bit like a Stepford Wife.
And then there's even the Angel Gabriel, handing her a lily,
the sign of humility and devotion.
For a believable picture of Mary,
I've brought along my favourite painting by American Henry O Tanner,
who put reality and magic in the same image.
He undertook two journeys to the Holy Land in the 1890s
to research the paintings he was going to create.
And one of my favourite ones is this one, The Annunciation,
in which he seems to paint a kind of conversation going on between
Mary and the Angel Gabriel.
"You're going to have a baby." "Huh?"
"And it's going to be the Son of God." "Huh?"
I mean, that's the painting that Tanner paints.
It's an image which has as its backdrop the average bedroom of
a Jewish teenager in the 1st century.
I mean, this looks like an episode out of a biblical Hollyoaks.
"Are you sure?" she seems to be saying to the angel.
"Have you got the right Mary?"
But the bit I like most is the flash of light, because
rather than representing the Angel Gabriel like some kind of winged
extraterrestrial, he's just a visual presence,
just a column of golden light.
That seems to underline for me the idea that is there in the Scriptures
that extraordinary things can happen to ordinary people.
The King of Kings grew up in humble surroundings.
Traces of the world Jesus knew still exist today.
And the faces I've been drawing, people like this shepherd,
can't have changed that much.
A sketchbook can help you time travel.
Mohammed? Would you like to see your drawing?
You like that one? It is better that one, isn't it?
Thank you very much, Mohammed. Very grateful.
Mohammed was a bit worried about the first drawing cos he said I made his ears too big.
But...he's better pleased with the second version.
Jesus was a man of the people,
but he had noble blood.
Even if he hadn't had God as part of his DNA,
Jesus would still have been a peasant princeling
with a rather posh ancestry, because his father, Joseph,
wasn't only the most famous carpenter in history,
he was also descended from the great King David.
And it wasn't only Joseph,
it was his whole extended family who seems to have been chosen by God,
because - and I wasn't aware of this -
but when Mary is pregnant with Jesus,
it turns out that her cousin is also expecting a child,
who's going to grow up to be a great prophet named John the Baptist.
And Elizabeth only fell pregnant after she too had been visited
by the Angel Gabriel. I mean, what are the odds?
This family were truly instrumental to God's purpose.
The birth of Jesus had been foretold,
as had the place - Bethlehem,
the city of King David.
That meant a three-day ride from Nazareth
for a heavily pregnant Mary.
Getting to Bethlehem wasn't easy, and it's challenging today
if you are coming from Israel.
The town is in the West Bank.
And since 2000, it's been behind a wall.
Are you coming over from the other side today? West Bank. West Bank.
You're coming here to work? Yes.
You have a wonderful face.
Where do you work when you come over?
In the city. In the city?
HE SPEAKS HIS OWN LANGUAGE
Oh, so you don't know if there's work when you come over.
You have to see what happens.
You like it?
Very good.
We're on the Israeli side of the barrier.
And Abu Kayed and his friend here have come over from Bethlehem,
to find work today
perhaps in Jerusalem.
As an artist, you often find yourself in difficult places
and blessed by beautiful light
and fantastic faces and people,
you find yourself inspired by an unlikely kind of beauty.
Joseph was from Bethlehem.
He had to bring his family here to be registered in a Roman census.
You get the impression here, sitting beneath watchtowers,
that there's a lot of surveillance going on.
And the fact is that for Mary and Joseph,
the reason they were going to Bethlehem was because they were in
a world of surveillance. They were being monitored and watched
and they needed to fill out the right paperwork in the right place.
On the Palestinian side,
the barrier has become a 300-mile-long art gallery.
In 2010, the Christian artist Ian Knowles painted this icon on the barrier,
and it represents Mary when she's pregnant,
as she would have been when she first arrived in Bethlehem.
She's a picture of motherly love,
but also of suffering.
In a place where Christians, Jews and Muslims have all felt pain,
it really is an unexpected place for a work of art -
a piece of pockmarked concrete.
But what I think it shows is that 1,500 years after
this kind of iconography was invented, wow, an image of Mary
can still be something that gives us a pause for thought.
Something that in her silence and in her solemnity
puts all of this into a very different kind of context.
With his paint brush, Ian Knowles made a statement about the Virgin.
She was designed in downtown Bethlehem,
at the only icon school in the Middle East.
Nicola Juha is a Greek Orthodox Christian.
He came here as a student, now he's the director.
This is an image which is similar to the image of Mary on the wall.
Now, why is that not an image of Jesus?
For sure, Jesus is our God.
He's the most important in all the churches.
But when we talk about Mary,
here Mary she has a special relationship with
each Christian in the Holy Land.
The birth of Jesus, the Annunciation,
the New Testament starts with Mary.
After Jesus Christ, she is the most important human being.
We just love to have her in our houses and our cities.
That's why you can find her everywhere.
Like all the students, Madalena is a Christian.
She draws the same subject all day long but her enthusiasm is undimmed.
When you are drawing or painting Mary,
are you just thinking about getting the features and the lines correct,
or are you thinking about who she is?
No, who she is first of all.
And what she's looking at and what she's pointing to.
Because you want her to come out...
..to meet you.
This represents an image of Mary, someone from thousands of years ago,
how relevant is this person to you today?
I feel she is like my mother.
She's like a teacher to me.
To be a good mother, I feel that she's near me
when I pray to her,
"Virgin Mary, help my children, help me, help my husband..."
And she's... She'll always be near to me.
The most important woman in the world.
This is a largely Muslim town with a small Christian community,
but you wouldn't know it in Manger Square.
Mary put the little town of Bethlehem on the map forever.
As a boy, I got a strong mental picture of the birth of Jesus
from my illustrated Bible, but there was another important book.
One of the things I always remember about Christmas as a child
was enjoying singing the carols.
And there was one carol in particular that I remember
because it was the first song I ever performed for my parents.
And my mother thought I'd done a pretty good job.
So, bear with me. Here we go.
# Away in a manger
# No crib for a bed
# The little Lord Jesus
# Laid down His sweet head
# The stars in the bright sky
# Looked down where He lay
# The little Lord Jesus
# Asleep in the hay
# The cattle are lowing
# The baby awakes
# The little Lord Jesus
# No crying... #
ISLAMIC CALL TO PRAYER CAR HORNS
Somehow, Sunday school didn't prepare me for all this.
I think that what is so wonderful about being here in Bethlehem
is that you realise that this is the kind of place
that Jesus would have experienced.
The Easter story, his resurrection, all of it happened,
amidst this kind of noise and interruptions and unexpected chaos.
And I think that that
allows you to relate to the story more honestly,
so that it's not just a fiction in scripture...
..it's real.
And although we are 2,000 years away from the moment
where all that happened, I still think that these sounds,
these sparkling electric colours, feed into
my genuine understanding
of what the Holy Land has always been about.
Noise and splendour.
It's all here.
When you are immersed in a location for, you know, an hour,
people gather around you and they kind of begin to accept you
as part of this theatrical space.
So, as you observe, you're not just a sort of alien intruder,
you're part of the story.
All the sounds, all the noise,
all the smells that are cascading around me,
I feel as if I'm part of it and I'm trying to put all that experience
into my paintings. So it's not just about what it looks like,
it's about ALL the senses and everyone who comes
to speak to me and exchanges a word with me,
motivates me, excites me,
tells me something about this place I didn't know.
Maybe just in their accent, maybe just in their attitude,
and I put all of that into this particular picture of the Holy Land.
Hotels are plenty today, but on the night Mary and Joseph pitched up,
Bethlehem was full.
The only accommodation available was distinctly one-star.
For most people, Jesus' big adventure starts in a stable
in a snowy Bethlehem at Christmas.
The miracle birth represents the first great surge of good news
in the Gospels. The joy of the Resurrection at Easter
is the other, and although plenty happens in between,
the beginning and the end are the blockbuster moments.
And although Mary is conspicuous by her absence in the closing chapter,
here in the draughty stable, she takes centre stage.
For artists in Renaissance Italy,
the landscape around Bethlehem appeared reassuringly...
..familiar.
This is an image of a painting called the Madonna of the Meadow,
by Giovanni Bellini,
and I think it's one of the most beautiful religious works of art
ever created. I mean, it's exquisite, isn't it?
It's a painting of symbols and signals.
And throughout the image, you find little signs,
for example, the buds of new growth in the branches of the trees
that are supposed to suggest that this is the season of spring,
a season of rebirth.
But the most important symbol in this entire painting
is the exchange that's going on between Mary and her child.
This definitely is the look of love, but there is a poignancy,
a sadness in there.
The way the baby is sitting in her lap, we seem to have a premonition.
If you remember, the painting that Bellini created
of Mary holding her dead son at the bottom of the crucifix,
well, this symbolises that that moment is still to come.
This image is a premonition of the future.
Within 300 years,
Mary's manger was buried under the Church Of The Nativity.
This is amongst the holiest sites in all Christendom.
For nearly 2,000 years,
pilgrims have crossed the world to see the place where it's said
the Virgin Mary delivered God's son.
It's nuts. All the chaos, the crowds, the iPhones flashing,
the tinfoil style glitter and decorations.
But...
..it still feels very real.
All these people, this river of humanity
is coming through here every day in their thousands.
Not because for them it's a fairy story,
but because it affects their everyday lives.
And I feel that.
I feel the intensity of their own relationship with this space.
THEY SING
It's not easy concentrating on a drawing when the action around you
is so exciting, but I'm not going to be able to get close to the site
of the manger for a verse or two.
In all the religious art I grew up with,
the place Jesus was born was a barn.
To see people pass through here, to be aware of them kneeling
and contemplating what for them is the birth of an extraordinary thing,
their faith, well, it's very humbling.
Over the centuries, artists have felt compelled to interpret
the scene of what is supposed to have happened here.
And eventually over time,
that humble stable evolved into a place that glistered with gold.
And I guess to some extent, maybe,
the gold and the theatrics takes a little bit away
from that sense of this being the humblest of settings
for the birth of the mightiest of kings.
My father painted his own versions of what happened here.
And I have brought this little sketchbook with me,
which shows his drawings of Mary and the baby Jesus,
and even a particular sketch where she's breast-feeding the baby.
And to have this little sketchbook here, well,
it's quite intense really because my father saw himself
as a part of the great story of our history
and all around me here are images by other artists from centuries ago
who have interpreted scenes from the life of Jesus and have honoured
this particular place with the images that they have created.
And my dad's part of that legacy.
And...
Well, I think he would have been
surprised and quite amazed
to think that this little sketchbook would have come to
a place that he himself never visited.
And if he's looking down, well, he might be grinning.
With a smile of delight, I think.
The birth was world changing...
..and very ordinary.
What Mary experienced has been shared by every mother since.
But that's where the similarities end.
If there's one thing we all know about the Mother of Jesus,
it's that, rather like the British,
she had a particular attitude towards carnal relations.
No sex, please, I'm the Virgin Mary.
But things do get rather more complicated
because Mary was supposed to have been a virgin all her life.
And this was news to me, but in the Gospels,
Jesus is described as having four named brothers,
and some anonymous sisters.
Every month, about 300 of the babies born in Bethlehem
are delivered here, at the Holy Family Hospital,
looked over by the Holy Mother.
She's everywhere.
Drawing is about observation,
staying slightly removed.
As a new dad myself, surrounded by these newborns,
that's absolutely impossible.
Oh, are you going to kick off too?
We've so recently been in a cow shed,
the kind of environment where Jesus was born.
A place full of livestock, a place full of unsightly mess.
But here, here we're in a place of cleanliness,
and a place full of clinicians ready to help. Well, Jesus had his mother.
Jesus had Mary and she was the nurse that helped him through
those early steps in the cow shed in Bethlehem.
When you come into a space like this and you hear these first breaths
of a child born into this world,
you realise that of all things, that love, that maternal care
and power is probably the most valuable we'll ever experience.
He's beautiful.
You've gone all quiet now.
Is that cos your mum's here?
There you go. First portrait.
I give it to you. Me? Yes, I give you the drawing.
There you go. Good luck.
Your baby's wonderful. Very best of luck.
About 10% of the babies born here need intensive care.
They've got the latest technology,
but according to Dr Micheline AlQassis,
in the darkest moments, they turn to the Virgin Mary.
For me, the Virgin Mary plays a big role in my life.
You need strength, it's not easy work.
It's full of stress, so when you see babies dying
and the only thing that you can do is to pray,
you need support, and I feel the strength and support
from the Virgin Mary, from my prayer, you know?
She is an example of the great mother.
I feel the Holy Family Hospital is like the Nativity, you know?
It's the cave that welcome everybody in need.
Regardless their religion, if they are rich or poor.
You know, it's for everybody.
Do you mind me asking? Are you a Christian? A Muslim? I'm Christian.
And a lot of the patients that you have here are not Christian,
they are Muslim. No, 99%, they are Muslims,
but they believe in the Virgin Mary.
When they come here and they see there, you know, we have here
an icon, some families they ask from the Virgin Mary to help.
So you see Muslim families before the icon of the Virgin Mary
asking for help. That's extraordinary, it really is.
Over the centuries, battling Christians and Muslims
have destroyed and rebuilt churches and mosques
built over this, the tomb of Mary in East Jerusalem.
By tradition, Mary was buried here, and this structure has never been
damaged because the Virgin is so sacred to both faiths.
The Virgin Mary's place in Muslim hearts was news to me.
This is my first time in a mosque.
You pray this way?
To get chapter and verse on her status in Islamic tradition,
I went to the city mosque of imam Sheikh Abd Al-Majid.
I wasn't aware I could even enter an Islamic house of worship.
It was a morning full of revelations.
They said, "Oh, Mary, you have certainly done a thing
"unprecedented." So by now she's given birth, I think.
They said, "How can we speak to one who is in the cradle, a child?"
And then the baby begins to speak.
Jesus said, "Indeed, I am the servant of Allah.
"He has given me the Scripture and made me a prophet."
Wow! So Jesus is an important figure in Islam.
Yes. If we don't believe in Jesus, we are not Muslims.
So...the role of Mary is as significant in the Koran
as it is for Christians in the Bible? Yeah, more.
There's a chapter and the name of the chapter is Mary.
The mother of Muhammad and the wives of Muhammad,
they didn't make it into the Koran.
Mary mentioned in Koran.
Mary is the only named woman in the Koran?
Yes. That's extraordinary.
We love Mary.
And we teach her story to our daughters.
And boys. Does that mean that you offer prayers to Mary in any sense?
We ask God to bless her, yes.
And God made her an example of purity.
Yeah? And he make her an example for the wives of Muhammad.
So she's an example to all women? To all women, yes.
Mary is a major star in the Koran,
with not much more than a walk-on part in the Bible.
Her most notable absence is on Easter Sunday
when Jesus rose from the dead.
Here, at the Church Of The Holy Sepulchre in Old Jerusalem,
stands what is said to be the tomb of Christ.
And tonight, I'm going to enter it.
My name is Adeeb Joudeh Al Husseini.
I am the keys custodian of the Holy Sepulchre church,
since 1187.
Sorry, your family has been the custodians of the keys
for this building for how long? For more than 850 years.
That's extraordinary.
Why has your family been blessed with this particular role?
The story it's beginning since Muslims' leader, the Khalifa,
want to protect the church for the forward.
Why would a Muslim sultan want to protect a Christian church?
Because we are believe also in Jesus.
Is your family a Muslim family? Yes.
And they gave the key of the church for our family.
This is one of the most important Christian sites in the world.
Yes. And the key-holder are a Muslim family.
A Muslim family, yes. And this is the key. And this is the key.
This key has been opening this door for 800 years. Yes, yes.
That's really holding one of the most magnificent sculptures
I've ever had in my hand. And so tonight...
KNOCKING
This is the alarm bell for everyone to leave.
Tonight you're going to lock me in the building.
Yes. So, you must trust me. Yes, I trust you. Yes.
The process of getting everyone out has probably gone on like this for centuries.
Even the priests are looking for a bit of entertainment.
I'm trying to draw you from the wrong angle.
I'm giving you a very big nose. Sorry about this.
Yes, I have a big nose because I am from Macedonia.
No, but I'm... I have the nose of Great Alexander.
You have a beautiful nose. I am somewhat exaggerating it.
Sorry. In the school, they learn you to make like this?
No. My dad, my father. He taught me better.
My nose is like the beast and the beauty.
I've given you a terrible nose. Yes. Where are you from?
From Greece. From Greece.
But now maybe you make me from Turkey.
Oh, no. This is a portrait of sadness.
THEY LAUGH
OK, goodnight, everybody.
Mr Husseini shuts us in and himself out,
and passes his ladder back inside.
As a kid, I dreamed of spending a night shut in a museum.
It felt like a huge adventure.
And so does this.
Right, it's a lock-in.
The most important church in Christendom is a hive of holy activity.
And then, silence falls.
Easter didn't end with the Crucifixion.
It began.
Jesus was taken down from the Cross and placed in a nearby tomb.
And this is it.
For many people,
the precise location of Jesus' tomb is beside the point.
It's the events that are associated with this place that matter,
the triumph of the Easter story.
So this is it.
This is the tomb where Jesus was laid,
and from where he was resurrected.
There is an atmosphere in here unlike anything
I've ever experienced
and this tiny little space,
which represents such an enormously potent idea
for the whole Christian world...
Wow!
It's like being inside an atom from which explodes out
a whole universe of faith and belief and hope.
From here, the Messiah was resurrected...
..and the Christian faith was born.
On Easter Sunday, women came to wash his body but Jesus was gone.
The Gospels say some of them were called Mary,
but mysteriously, there's no mention of Mary, the Mother of Jesus.
This Dutch masterpiece was possibly painted by two brothers,
the van Eycks. They tried to smuggle the Virgin into the Easter story.
It's almost as if the van Eyck brothers have lifted the lid
of the building behind me and revealed the tomb of Jesus.
We accompany the three Marys at the moment of their great astonishment,
when they realise the twist in the tale of the New Testament -
Jesus is alive.
Everything in this image has been carefully positioned,
designed and researched,
to give us a truthful rendition of what happened in the Gospels.
Everything except, I think,
perhaps this figure here dressed in cerulean blue.
Could this be Mary photo bombing the Resurrection,
an event at which she was never meant to be present?
As if the Easter story wasn't miraculous enough,
Christ now appears to several disciples who are astonished.
Apostle Thomas, though, only hears about it.
He doesn't believe in ghosts.
Then Jesus appears to him.
As a child, I always felt
a bit queasy, looking at Caravaggio's picture.
Caravaggio was not a dainty painter.
In fact, he was a bit of a rough diamond.
And he knew that the money shot in this whole story
was the point at which Thomas here touches the wounds of Jesus.
And in this painting, it's not just touching,
it's really sticking his finger inside the wound
and running it round the punctured flesh.
He wanted to create an image that was so physical, so visceral,
I just HAVE to believe in what I'm seeing.
And this makes me think about,
well, what did Thomas feel in this incident of eye-bulging realisation,
if I'm so convinced by a 400-year-old painting? And this too
As Jesus says, blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believed.
Now the curtain lifts on the final act of the Resurrection drama,
here in Galilee, where Jesus grew up
and where the Easter story began.
Some disciples have gone back to their old jobs as fishermen.
It's not going well.
Then a stranger on the shore tells them to cast their nets on
the other side of their boat and bingo, it's fish suppers all round.
They know Jesus has returned.
These fishermen of Galilee are used to changeable
weather conditions, and that's one thing I've got in common with them
because I'm used to painting in the open air on the West Coast
of Scotland, which surprisingly appears to have the same weather
as Galilee.
We've got blustery wind, we've got rain squalls and showers, and I've
got to try not to incorporate too many raindrops into my picture.
This trip has been an opportunity to do so much fast sketching
And it has actually been quite frustrating not to stop...
..be still, and paint one thing,
and that's the opportunity I have just now -
to take the time and really paint what I see.
There's no doubt that coming to the place where the Easter story is set
brings its own inspiration.
This isn't just for me a landscape or a seascape,
it's loaded with resonance from all the stories that I've read in the Bible
and thought about throughout my childhood and growing up.
So when I put the brush to paper,
although I'm trying to just reproduce what I can see,
at the back of my mind,
there is a lot more going on.
And I think it influences how I interpret this subject.
This isn't just any old fisherman,
it's the Sea of Galilee
and whether that's expressed in the painting,
it's certainly filtering through me
as I put every little pool of colour onto paper.
but Mary is the most important woman in her son's life.
Shouldn't she have been the first person Jesus appeared to?
She was instrumental to everything he'd done.
She sat beside him at the wedding feast here in Galilee
where Jesus performs his first miracle, turning water into wine.
In fact, it's Mary that urges him to do something miraculous.
"They have no wine," she says.
And Jesus replies, "What has this to do with me?
"My hour is not yet come."
But, as with most mothers, Mary knows better,
and she watches as Jesus transforms the water into wine.
Everybody around realises that her boy has special powers.
And then, that's it.
The lady vanishes.
She makes a brief appearance at the base of the Crucifix.
And then she's gone again from the dramatic events that follow.
40 days after the resurrection, the Easter drama ends.
Jesus makes his last appearance on the Mount Of Olives,
passing up to heaven in a blaze of light.
A miracle called the Ascension.
According to the Gospel of Luke, the disciples are all there,
but Mary misses out.
Jesus is gone.
But there's something about Mary, she's always there you need her.
Her time has come again.
In the vacuum left by the Ascension,
the disciples are all drawn towards Mary,
their last point of contact with the fleshy, physical reality of the Messiah.
Jesus had instructed his disciples to wait for a signal from God.
So for ten days, they cling together and Mary, the mother figure,
is the person that gives them all reassurance.
The event is celebrated by Christians 50 days after Easter
at a celebration called Pentecost.
El Greco paints the moment when the sign from God arrives.
The room is filled with a rushing
noise from heaven like a mighty gust of wind.
Everybody starts to talk excitedly in different languages.
They are delirious with joy.
And individually, they are suddenly blessed
with the Holy Spirit, in the form of a flame at the forehead.
In a room filled with men and a society governed by men,
in an early church that would take centuries to recognise anything
other than the authority of men, El Greco places a woman,
Mary, holding everything together.
Mary is, I think, the figure that is easiest to relate to in the Bible.
She's an ordinary person caught up in a world of miracles.
In the Gospels, she's left as a bit of a mystery, but that gap in turn
allows us to paint her picture the way we want her to be,
to make her what we need her to be.
That's what painting pictures of the Holy Land has been all about -
artists who dream dreams,
artists who see visions on our behalf,
artists who transform the words of Scripture into images
that help us to grasp the real meaning behind events like
the Crucifixion and the Resurrection of Jesus, the Easter story.
Those masterpieces gave me my first impressions of the Holy Land,
but I had to see it for myself.
These sketches are memories of my personal encounters with the Easter story.
places Jesus walked.
But the modern Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories
have helped give me a new understanding of Christ's passion.
I haven't tried to paint you a Crucifixion scene,
as my father would have done,
but because the Holy Land is a place that's still so alive
with the memory of biblical events,
because faith is still so important to the people that live there,
I do feel that by sketching the places and the faces
that I encountered, I have in some small way become
a painter of religious subjects,
just like my dad.
The thing that struck me most during my journey,
more than the buildings and the sacred sites and relics,
was the simple power of human faith.
Because I didn't meet many people who didn't believe in a God,
I didn't meet many people who didn't in some way believe
in the sanctity of Mary.
And standing beneath this effigy,
as my mother would have done so often during her childhood,
I still feel that I am in the Holy Land,
and that's because art makes that possible.
Art has the power to take us there.
You don't always have to travel thousands of miles.
Sometimes, you just need to open your eyes.