ABSTRACT
A remarkable feature of Palestinian hagiography is the way in which it unfolds before our eyes a long succession of holy monks, like the paintings in its churches, and presents the great monks of the Judean desert, Euthymius and Gerasimus, Theodosius and Sabas, as the successors of the Egyptian ascetics, Anthony and Arsenius. Euthymius, who arrived in the Holy Land around 403, was the distant inheritor of Arsenius' charismata; Sabas inherited the charismata of Euthymius, and died in 532. In this period, the specific history of hagiographic production in Palestine was in fact determined by the attitude, or rather by the successive attitudes, of monks in the patriarchate of Jerusalem in view of the Council of Chalcedon during the long crisis, the different phases of which have been described by L. Perrone. At the time of Justinian, the monks were obliged to establish an Orthodox past.
