ABSTRACT
For the religious spirit of the Byzantine world in the period between Justinian and the Arab conquest of Syria and Egypt few documents are so instructive and illuminating as the 'Spiritual Meadow' or 'New Paradise' of John Moschus. Written in the second or third decade of the seventh century, it records anecdotes from the monasteries of Palestine and Egypt related to John Moschus as he travelled about with his friend Sophronius in search of edification and the unusual. The prologue dates Sophronius' arrival in Jerusalem with Moschus' coffin at the beginning of the eighth indiction. Opinion has been divided which year to choose, and the uncertainties were multiplied as long as it remained unclear whether Sophronius the sophist is really to be identified with Sophronius the patriarch of Jerusalem, 634–8. The issue was carefully set out by Simeon Vailhe in 1902–3, who concluded that the arguments were nearly evenly divided but on balance favoured the identification.
