Early Palestinian Ascetic Monasticism

Hilarion came back to Gaza from Egypt in about 306, having spent time with Antony, and settled in the coastal scrub near the town he had been born in. What grew around him was recognisably Egyptian and recognisably not: monks living alone or in twos in a landscape of villages and roads rather than deep desert, close enough to the Christian and pagan populations of the coast to be constantly interrupted. In the Judean hills, Chariton founded a different arrangement at Pharan around the same decades - a laura, where solitaries lived apart through the week and came together on Sundays, which became the characteristic Palestinian form. Pilgrims passed through all of it constantly on the way to the holy places, and some of them stayed. Jerome, writing from Bethlehem, gave the movement its literature: a Life of Hilarion, and a Life of Malchus about a monk taken by Saracen raiders. Both are shaped to teach rather than to record, which leaves the period better known for its stories than for what it actually taught.