Oral tradition, ancient history and religious tourism knowledge

ABSTRACT

Religious tourism is one of the most longstanding forms of leisure related travel in the world with a history dating back to antiquity. However, there has been a hesitation amongst many tourism scholars to critically assess the role of ancient religious texts to understand the attitudes and behaviours of religious tourists and tourism destinations. With reference to literature on oral traditions, the aim of this exploratory paper is to critically consider the insights that can be derived from the Christian Bible for the management and scholarly understanding of contemporary religious tourism. This paper suggests that Christianity’s oral traditions and their ensuing written representation in the Bible provide an important means of understanding religion ‘as lived’ in the ancient world. Religious tourists are often driven by a pilgrim’s mentality to tread in the footsteps of the first apostles and other religious leaders. From a historical perspective, the oral formulation of the New Testament and its subsequent influence on the formation of the Bible as a religious text offers religious tourists an insight into such people and the places/ experiences that were important in the faith of the early church.

KEYWORDS:

• Oral tradition
• religious tourism
• the New Testament
• ancient history

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephen Schweinsberg

Stephen Schweinsberg is a Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Management at the UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney. His research, which focusses on tourism academic knowledge formation and sustainable tourism has been published in Tourism Management, Annals of Tourism Research and the Journal of Sustainable Tourism.

Richard Sharpley

Richard Sharpley is Professor of Tourism and Development at the University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK. His principal research interests fall under the broad areas of tourism, development and sustainability and the sociology of tourism; his books include Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues (2002; 2015, with David Telfer) and The Darker Side of Travel; The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism (2009, with Philip Stone. His most recent book is the Routledge Handbook of the Tourist Experience (2021).