Zosimas of Palestine

Saint Zosimas of Palestine, also called Zosima, was a Christian monk of Byzantine Palestine whose memory is preserved almost entirely through the Greek Life of Saint Mary of Egypt. That narrative is traditionally ascribed to Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem in the seventh century, though it likely draws on earlier desert tradition of the sixth century. In the Life, Zosimas is presented as a man given to the monastic life from childhood. He spent decades in a monastery in Palestine, where he was known among the brethren for fasting, prolonged prayer, and knowledge of the Scriptures. The text states that in the fifty-third year of this first monastic life he was troubled by the thought that he had already reached spiritual perfection and that no monk remained who could teach him anything further. A divine voice then directed him to leave for another monastery, situated in the wilderness near the River Jordan.

The Jordan community observed a distinctive Lenten custom. After the liturgy on the first Sunday of Great Lent the monks received a blessing, took a little food, and dispersed individually into the desert beyond the Jordan, remaining in solitude until Palm Sunday and avoiding one another. Zosimas followed this practice. After some twenty days he saw a naked, sun-blackened figure with hair white like wool, who fled from him. He pursued, calling out and throwing his cloak so that the stranger might be covered. The person then revealed herself as a woman and, after asking his blessing as a priest, told him her history. She said her name was Mary, that she had lived as a prostitute in Alexandria, and that after a conversion before an icon of the Theotokos in Jerusalem she had crossed the Jordan and spent forty-seven years as a hermit, living on herbs and struggling with memories of her former life.

Mary asked Zosimas to return the next year on Holy Thursday with the reserved Eucharist and not to speak of her while she still lived. He did so. The following year he waited on the near bank of the Jordan; according to the Life she came to him walking upon the water, received Communion, and asked him to come again a year later. When he returned he found her dead body and an inscription in the sand giving her name and stating that she had died on the night of that Communion, which the tale places on 1 April. Unable to dig in the hard ground, Zosimas was, in the hagiographical account, aided by a lion that scraped out a grave. He buried her, went back to the monastery, and related everything to the abbot. The brethren wrote the story down, and it later circulated widely in Greek and in translation, becoming one of the principal edifying texts of Eastern Christianity, especially in Great Lent.

The Life concludes that Zosimas remained at the Jordan monastery until he died at nearly one hundred years of age. No contemporary record independent of this hagiographical tradition survives, and the exact years of his birth and death are not historically established. Later Orthodox synaxaria commonly place his death about the year 560 and treat him as a saint of the sixth century. He is commemorated on 4 April in the Eastern Orthodox calendar and is also recognized in the Roman Catholic tradition. His cult is inseparable from that of Mary of Egypt, whose feast is 1 April and whose Life, in which Zosimas is the witness and narrator, is appointed to be read on Thursday of the fifth week of Great Lent in the Byzantine rite. He is not attested as a bishop, patriarch, or pope, no writings of his own are known, and specific patronages of places, professions, or causes are not securely recorded in the major liturgical collections.