A Layman's Life of JesusByers, S. H. M. (Samuel Hawkins Marshall)
Religion
A Layman's Life of Jesus
Byers, S. H. M. (Samuel Hawkins Marshall)
Jesus Christ -- Biography
There is yet another brother of these two kings. His name is Philip,
and he lives in Rome. He has a very beautiful wife, who some day is to
bring great trouble on the world, for Antipater will yet desert his
Galilean queen and marry this Roman beauty.
It is all in the time of the great Augustus that we are talking of
now. In Rome it is called the Golden Age. It is not quite that in
Palestine. Yet the world's greatest era is just beginning there. In
how small a territory the world's greatest deeds are about to be
enacted! Palestine, taken all together, did not make much of a country
in area; many of the states in the American union have more square
miles, but all the nations in the world combined have no such history.
Palestine is a strip of territory reaching along the Mediterranean for
one hundred and fifty miles on one side, and along the Arabian desert
on the other. It is hardly over sixty miles across. It is
topographically of the most diversified character. It has some
beautiful valleys and purling streams; it has mountains, too, lofty
and desolate, and its principal lakes are almost a thousand feet below
the level of the sea. The whole land is cut in two lengthwise by the
Jordan river, the most peculiar, the most rapid, and the most historic
river on the face of the earth.
We are now in Galilee. In the midst of the wonderful beauty of the
scene at Nazareth any one would be attracted by the appearance of a
youth there who is just out of school. This Nazareth, though not His
birthplace, is His home; here all His brothers and sisters and cousins
live. In a village close by His mother Mary was born. The boy's own
birth was at a country inn up near Jerusalem, at a time when His
parents had gone there to pay taxes, and be counted as citizens of the
Roman empire.
The lovely little village where this youth is, happy among His kith
and kin, is not unlike many an Oriental village of to-day. Strange
little stone-paved streets run into the open square where the
fountain of the village is. And this is the fountain where, on summer
evenings, the village girls, among them the beautiful Mary herself,
came for water. The little square, and the streets, and possibly some
of the old houses, and the ruins of the fountain are there yet, in
this 1912, and clustering vines and roses are still there--and so too
are the clear skies, the starlit nights, the purple hills, and the
dark-eyed women, just as in the long ago.
CHAPTER II
A Boy of Babylon. The Founder of Judaism. Philo, the
Philosopher. An out-door Man. The Poet-Carpenter. Staying in
the Desert. The Silence of History. Where was Jesus in these
silent years?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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