ABSTRACT
Early monastic Christians are largely inaccessible to us. The search for early monastic traces is hindered by the apologetics and polemics that have often distorted the study of early Christian monasticism. In the nineteenth century, monastic literature began to be subjected to the same critical analysis as the Bible, and scepticism about authorship and reliability of texts abounded. Christian monasticism has traditionally been viewed as an Egyptian phenomenon of the fourth century that soon spread to other regions. Its real origins, however, lay in ascetic tendencies and movements that existed from the time of the earliest Christian communities. Syriac Christianity in Mesopotamia was probably Jewish-Christian in origin. In western Syria, the fifth-century evidence of the History of the Monks of Syria by Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus (393-466), and other hagiographical texts depict an astonishing variety of monastic forms of life. Monasticism in Byzantine Palestine had several inter-related elements.
