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.

Abraham would be inherited by Christians when Christ returned and built a new Jerusalem. But according to Robert Louis Wilken, it was the monks living in the Judean desert who claimed this concept as a present, Christian reality. Sixth-century monastic leaders Theodosius and Sabas wrote to the Byzantine emperor calling themselves “the inhabitants of this Holy Land”—meaning not just a collection of pilgrimage sites but a region with spiritual privileges and a living church. Monasticism played a crucial

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