Mar Saba

Sabbas, a monk from Cappadocia who had trained in the monastic communities of the Judean Desert, founded the community that bears his name, Mar Saba, "Saint Sabbas" in Aramaic and Arabic, around 483 CE, building it as a laura, a monastic pattern distinct from fully communal cenobitic monasticism in which monks lived individually in caves and cells scattered across the cliff face during the week, gathering only for communal worship at a central church on weekends.

The site's steep terrain, overlooking the Kidron Valley on its way toward the Dead Sea, was already associated with earlier Judean Desert hermits before Sabbas arrived, and the monastery he founded became the most influential of the region's laurae, drawing recruits from across the Byzantine world and shaping desert monasticism as it spread further. Sabbas is credited with compiling a liturgical rule, the Sabaite Typikon, that came to govern the order of services across much of Byzantine and later Orthodox monasticism, making Mar Saba's influence considerably larger than its remote location and small resident population would suggest; elements of the Sabaite liturgical tradition remain in use in Orthodox churches today, well beyond the monastery's own walls.

Mar Saba maintains a restriction unusual even by the standards of Orthodox male monasticism: women have never been permitted to enter the monastery grounds at any point in its history, a rule tradition traces to Sabbas himself, who is said to have refused even his own mother entry, directing her instead to a tower built outside the walls where female visitors could stay without crossing into the enclosure; a version of that tower, known as the Women's Tower, still stands near the entrance.

The monastery is also at the center of one of modern biblical scholarship's more contested episodes: in 1958 the American scholar Morton Smith reported finding, in the monastery's library, a handwritten copy of a letter attributed to the second century church father Clement of Alexandria, quoting an otherwise unknown longer version of the Gospel of Mark and referring to it as a text kept secret from most Christians. Smith published his findings in 1973, and the text, generally called the Secret Gospel of Mark, has been debated ever since between scholars who accept it as a genuine ancient discovery and others who argue it is a modern forgery, quite possibly by Smith himself; the manuscript Smith photographed has since gone missing from the monastery, leaving the dispute unresolvable by direct re-examination and the matter formally unsettled among specialists.