the Church in Palestine: Nineteen Centuries on Gaza Road

For nineteen centuries, a Christian community has lived on the road between Gaza and Jerusalem - through the apostolic mission of the first Jewish believers, the pilgrim centuries of the Byzantine Holy Land, the long adjustment under the Covenant of ʻUmar, Crusade and reconquest, the Ottoman centuries, the Mandate, the Nakba, and the war in Gaza today. The Church in Palestine tells that whole story for the first time in a single narrative, from the church of James in Jerusalem to the worshippers who took refuge inside St Porphyrius in the winter of 2023.Wilson Pruitt traces the community across thirty-three chapters and seven parts, drawing on the pilgrim narratives, patristic sources, Arabic Christian writers, Ottoman and Mandate-era records, and the reporting of the present war, with a full apparatus of endnotes and a bibliographical appendix pointing readers to further reading in each period.The book argues, without polemic, that the absence of this history has a cost: it is easier to treat Palestinian Christians as a people of recent and merely political interest when no one has told the story of how long they have actually been there. The Church in Palestine is written to close that gap.