Sources

The chronology gives the dates, the succession the office-holders and the atlas the places. These are the documents behind them, hosted whole rather than in extract, because an extract is a choice about what matters and these pages are not making one.

Every text here is in the public domain and says so, together with the edition it comes from and the reason it is free to copy. Where a better modern edition exists, the headnote names it: these are the texts that can be given away, which is not the same as the best texts, and the pages do not pretend otherwise.

• The First Apology of Justin

  Justin Martyr · written c. 155 · translated by Marcus Dods and George Reith, ANF, vol. 1 (1885)

  Some time in the 150s this petition reached the emperor Antoninus Pius from a man who held no office and spoke for no city. Justin begins by saying where he is from: the son of Priscus and grandson of Bacchius, natives of Flavia Neapolis in Palestine. He uses that name for the country about twenty years after Hadrian's administration had made it the official one, without comment and without apology. It was where he was from. The city had been laid out in Samaria around the year 72, on the flat ground below Mount Gerizim and a short walk from Shechem, and Justin's family were among its settlers. They were pagans. He had the Jewish scriptures explained to him as an adult by a stranger, and he never learned Hebrew.

• History of the Martyrs in Palestine

  Eusebius of Caesarea · written 303-311 · translated by William Cureton, Williams and Norgate, 1861

  Eusebius wrote two versions of this record. The shorter one is printed with his Church History, between its eighth and ninth books, and is hosted elsewhere on this site. This is the fuller version, which does not survive in Greek at all — only in a Syriac manuscript from the Nitrian desert, discovered in the collection of the British Museum and translated into English by William Cureton in 1861. The two versions overlap closely but are not identical, and a quotation from one should not be taken for the other.

• Martyrs of Palestine

  Eusebius of Caesarea · written 303-311 · translated by A. C. McGiffert, NPNF, 2nd series, vol. 1 (1890)

  Eusebius wrote this eyewitness record of the persecution under Diocletian and his successors at Caesarea, where he lived and where most of what it describes took place. His own title for it was About Those Who Suffered Martyrdom in Palestine. It survives in two forms: a shorter recension, printed with his Church History and given whole below, and a fuller one that survives in Syriac. They are not the same document, and a quotation from one should not be taken for the other.

• The Pilgrimage of Egeria

  Egeria · written 381-384 · translated by M. L. McClure and C. L. Feltoe, SPCK, 1919

  Egeria arrived in the Holy Land around 381 and stayed three years. Almost everything known about her is inference: she had money, she was received by bishops and escorted by soldiers along the desert roads, and she was writing home to a community of women she calls her reverend sisters. Her account survives in a single manuscript, found at Arezzo in 1884, that is missing both its beginning and its end.

• The Life of S. Hilarion

  Jerome · written c. 390 · translated by W. H. Fremantle, NPNF, 2nd series, vol. 6 (1893)

  Jerome wrote this life at Bethlehem in 390, about twenty years after Hilarion died, and he had never met him. Hilarion was born at Thabatha, a village five miles south of Gaza on the road down into Egypt, to parents who worshipped the old gods and sent him to Alexandria to be taught by a grammarian. There he heard about Antony, the most famous monk in Egypt, and went to look at him. He stayed two months and left, because the crowds struck him as absurd. At about fifteen he walked into the waste ground seven miles from Gaza's port, wearing a sackcloth shirt, a skin cloak Antony had given him, and a coarse blanket.

Translated here, published elsewhere

These we translated ourselves. They live at the address of the imprint that made them rather than being copied to a second one, so that there is only ever one text to correct.

• The Letter of Antiochus the Monk to Eustathius

  Antiochus of Mar Saba · written after 614 · at migne.app

  Our own English, and as far as we know the first. Antiochus was a monk of Mar Saba writing after the Persians took Jerusalem in 614. He is not Antiochus Strategos, whose account of the same sack survives in Georgian; some scholarship has identified the two, and they are not the same man.

• Letters to Various Correspondents

  Dorotheus of Gaza · written sixth century · at migne.app

  Our own English of the letters of the abbot whose monastery stood near Gaza. The instructions for which he is better known are a separate and much longer work, not yet done.

More will be added as they are checked. A text is not put up until we have collated it against a scan of the edition it claims to be, so the list grows slowly and in no particular hurry.