Between the 720s to the 750s, Saint John Damascene (also called Saint John of Damascus) wrote three treatises on divine images in response to two iconoclastic edicts— that is, edicts denouncing the veneration of icons. He wrote the first in Umayyad Palestine, where he lived as a Christian maintaining Byzantine Orthodoxy, and the second in the neighboring Byzantine Empire. John wrote at a time when images were being debated by the three Abrahamic faiths— Christianity, Islam, and Judaism— at a time when those faith groups were experiencing instability following the changes brought by the Arab conquests and the early development of Islam as a religious tradition and ruling community. John’s treatises defend the place of icons in the Christian Church.