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Toward the end of the third century, Chariton of Iconium (in Asia Minor) was tortured at the hands of the emperor Aurelian for being a Christian. After his release, Chariton pledged to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem as a way of thanking God for his survival. But as he was approaching the Holy City, bandits attacked him, robbed him of his possessions, and took him to a cave in the Judean desert. When his captors died, he decided to settle permanently in the Holy Land and established a monastic community near Jericho.

In the fifth century, Mary, a harlot from Alexandria, Egypt, traveled with some pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem "in the hope of seducing them." Out of curiosity, she followed them into the church of the Holy Sepulchre, where she was miraculously barred from entering. Her repentance provided the necessary key for entering the magnificent basilica—she was, in a sense, baptized by her own tears. After leaving the church, Mary withdrew to the nearby Judean desert.

Jerusalem and its surrounding lands have always been a unique and powerful place for religious transformation. Pilgrims traveled to Palestine in order to see and honor the places where Jesus Christ lived, taught, and died. But for some pilgrims, like Chariton and Mary, the experience led to a lifelong commitment to poverty, prayer, and self-renunciation.

The monastics who chose to stay in the Holy Land became objects of pilgrimage themselves. Later pilgrims traveling through Palestine during the Byzantine era came not only to honor the holy sites; they also sought the advice of "holy" men and women who had settled in the region. For such pilgrims, the monastic Christians living in the Holy Land represented a tangible link to the disciples of the apostolic church.

These monastics clearly recognized their debt to those who first inhabited this hallowed ground: the prophets of old who had professed the Messiah with their teaching, and the martyrs of more recent times who confessed Christ with their blood. The monks and nuns of Palestine saw themselves as protectors of a legacy—geographical, theological, and spiritual—that originated in the Old Testament, persisted through the New Testament, and survived in their own time. They were preserving, even promoting, a centuries-old heritage. In this land, so they were convinced, God once walked. The desert was not barren; in this land, God still lived.

The Lausiac History, a fourth-century travel account of Egyptian and Palestinian monasticism written by Palladius, describes the devil tempting a monk in the Judean desert about the virtue of his monastic life. "What are you doing here?" asked the devil. "Nothing," replied the monk, "I am simply keeping the walls."

Monasticism was "in the air" in the fourth and fifth centuries. Antony gave up his possessions to live a solitary life of prayer in the Egyptian desert, inspiring thousands. Pachomius brought monks together into a new kind of communal life. Cassian took Eastern monastic ideals to the West, where Benedict of Nursia created his own model of Christian community.

Palestine played an important role in this monastic explosion. Biblical precedents and personalities—Elijah, Elisha, John the Baptist, and Jesus himself— attracted faithful visitors and aspiring monastics. The austere cliffs and caves of the Judean desert stretching east of Jerusalem to the Dead Sea presented a double advantage: remoteness and accessibility. You could walk just an hour from the Holy City and find yourself in the wilderness.

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