A remarkable phenomenon swept Christianity soon after it triumphed as the official religion of the Roman empire: Devout adherents by the thousands, rather than staying at home to enjoy the faith’s comfortable new status, moved to the forbidding Judean desert to live austere lives as monks. Motivated in good part by the personal sacrifice of martyrs of previous generations, these newcomers to the Holy Land transformed the wilderness near Jerusalem into a hub of well-organized monastic communities. In recent years, young Israeli scholars have thoroughly revised our understanding of these communities and of the people who lived in them. […]
