Early Christian Chiliasm, Jewish Messianism, and the Idea of the Holy Land

For most Christians Jerusalem is a heavenly city of solace and peace, a safe haven after the trials of life in this world. “Jerusalem whose towers touch the skies, I yearn to come to you. Your shining streets have drawn my longing eyes, my life long journey through …” It is a symbol of the soul's yearning to find rest in God. “Jerusalem my happy home, when shall I come to thee, when shall my sorrows have an end, thy joys when shall I see?” Yet Jerusalem is also an actual city set on a hill on the edge of a desert, a city where Christians live and have lived for centuries but whose population today is largely Muslim and Jewish. At one time, in the years prior to the Muslim invasion of Palestine in the seventh century, it was the chief city in a land ruled by Christians. More than five hundred churches and monasteries marked the landscape and thousands of monks inhabited the caves of the Judaean desert. Jerusalem's eloquent bishops and learned priests wielded power in the great capital of the Byzantine world, Constantinople on the Bosporus.