Chapter 1 introduces Jacobs' methodology. He summarizes the main critical approaches to Jerusalem as a Christian Holy Land in the fourth to the sixth centuries, and outlines the purpose and usefulness of postcolonial criticism as applied to the Christian writings and geography. The book is laid out thematically and at times in sequence, reflecting the central premise of the book, that “the colonizer and colonized cannot remain fixed binary subjects in the perpetually shifting contest of power and identity” (9).