Mar Saba

The Holy Lavra of Saint Sabbas,[Note 1] known in Arabic and Syriac as Mar Saba (Syriac: ܕܝܪܐ ܕܡܪܝ ܣܒܐ, Arabic: دير مار سابا; Hebrew: מנזר מר סבא; Greek: Ἱερὰ Λαύρα τοῦ Ὁσίου Σάββα τοῦ Ἡγιασμένου) and historically as the Great Laura of Saint Sabas,[1] is a Greek Orthodox monastery overlooking the Kidron Valley in the Bethlehem Governorate of Palestine, in the West Bank,[2] at a point halfway between Bethlehem and the Dead Sea.

[5] Sabbas' typikon, the set of rules applied at the Great Laura and recorded by the saint, eventually became the worldwide model of monastic life and liturgical order[5] known as the Byzantine Rite.

Born to a prominent Damascene political family, John worked as a high financial officer to the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan; he eventually felt a higher calling and migrated to the Judaean Desert, where he was tonsured and was ordained a hieromonk (monastic priest) at the Monastery of Mar Saba.

Whereas the Russian monk Zosimus estimated in 1420 the number of inhabitants at 30, the German traveler Felix Fabri recorded in the early 1480s only 6 who were living together with a group of nomadic Arabs.

[12] The Serbs' control of Mar Saba allowed them to play an important role in the politics of the Orthodox Church of Jerusalem, often siding with the Arabic laity and priests against the Greeks who dominated the episcopate.

[12] The monastery, considered among the oldest continuously inhabited in the Christian world, has been a place of learning and has exerted an important influence in doctrinal developments in the Byzantine Church.

The relics were seized by Latin crusaders in the 12th century and remained in Italy until Pope Paul VI returned them to the monastery in 1965 as a gesture of repentance and good will towards Orthodox Christians.

Mar Saba is where Morton Smith purportedly found a copy of a letter ascribed to Clement of Alexandria containing excerpts of a so-called Secret Gospel of Mark,[13] and was for several centuries home to the Archimedes Palimpsest.