Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

syria, palestine and mesopotamia 601
(martyred in 536) and Jacob Bar�Addai to begin the consecration of an
alternative Monophysite hierarchy, which set the seal on the schism. For
the rest of the century, the northern provinces of the patriarchate of
Antioch saw continuous strife between an officially supported urban hierarchy
and a rural populace which largely rejected it and sought their spiritual
leadership elsewhere.
The dispute took a very different turn in the patriarchate of Jerusalem.
The bishop at the time of Chalcedon, Juvenal, had gone to the council with
Monophysite convictions but seems to have been persuaded to change his
mind by the erection of his see into an independent patriarchate, something
previous bishops had tried but failed to achieve. On his return, he was
execrated as a traitor by the Monophysite populace and had to be guarded
by imperial troops, while the bishop of Scythopolis was murdered for his
Chalcedonian views; however, opinion gradually shifted in favour of
Chalcedon. This was partly a question of local ecclesiastical pride: to anathematize
Chalcedon, as the Monophysites demanded, would be to undermine
the patriarchal status of Jerusalem which had been agreed there. The
church in Palestine was also much more influenced by Constantinople and
the west because of the constant arrival of overseas pilgrims, some of
whom stayed and became monks. The monasteries of the Judaean desert,
the spiritual power-houses of the patriarchate of Jerusalem, were very
different from those in Syria. While Syrian monasteries recruited men of
local experience from the local areas, the Judaean monasteries attracted
recruits from all over the empire. The greatest of these, Euthymius (d. 473)
and Mar Saba (d. 532), founder of the famous, still surviving, monastery in
the Judaean desert which bears his name, were firm supporters of
Chalcedon. In this way, despite setbacks like the deposition of the
Chalcedonian patriarch Elias during the high noon of Monophysite power
in 516, Jerusalem remained as firmly and completely committed to
Chalcedon as the Egyptian church did to the Monophysite cause. 40
The disputes of Chalcedon gathered pace against a background of
expanding settlement and over-all economic (and probably demographic)
growth. The evidence for this can be found in the unique archaeological
record of the region, which is unrivalled in this period for its extent and
scope but is not always easy to interpret. There are a number of problems
in the use of archaeological evidence for the assessment of economic prosperity.
The most obvious of these is the chronology. Much of the dating of
sites rests on ceramic evidence which is not clear enough to make distinctions
between fifth, sixth and seventh century or even between Byzantine
40 See Patrich (1995); Binns (1994); and Honigmann (1950) 247–61. For the archaeology of the
Palestinian monasteries, Hirschfeld (1992).
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