Christian History Magazine—Issue 97: The Holy Land (Biblia.com)

Christian History Magazine—Issue 97: The Holy Land is unavailable, but you can change that!

Sometimes we forget that Israel is more than a playground of biblical tourist attractions or a battleground between Jews and Muslims. In the Byzantine era, 300 years before the Muslim conquest, the birthplace of Christ bloomed into a center of Christian worship, pilgrimage, and monasticism. Those Christians preserved the Biblical sites and carried on the legacy of the early church.

Hadrian attacked Christianity when he raised a shrine to Aphrodite adjacent to his new temple at the site of Golgotha, where Christians had held liturgical observances until they fled the city in A.D. 66. But in trying to desecrate the site, he merely helped identify it for later generations. It is no surprise to learn from Aristo of Pella, an early Christian historian whose works are not extant, that the Jerusalem church after the Bar-Kokhba revolt was now composed almost entirely of Gentiles. In

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