A Layman's Life of Jesus

A LAYMAN'S LIFE OF JESUS
OF GENERAL SHERMAN'S STAFF Author of With Fire and Sword, Sherman's March to the Sea, Iowa in War Times, Twenty Years in Europe, and of other books
NEW YORK THE NEALE PUBLISHING COMPANY 1912
Copyright, 1912, by The Neale Publishing Company
Every book should have a purpose. The object of this little volume is to try and harmonize, in a sense, and bring nearer to us, the story of the Master. It is free from the fog of creed, and the simple picture of the Times and the Man may help to waken new interest, especially with the young in the greatest tale of the world.
S. H. M. B.
Des Moines, Sept. 3, 1912.
Palestine two thousand years ago. The Little Land of Galilee. An Oriental Village. The Boy Carpenter.
One of the beauty spots of the world, a couple of thousand years ago, was the little land of Galilee, in upper Palestine. That was a land for poets and painters.
Lonesome, deserted, and little inhabited as it seems now, there was a time when this little paradise of earth had many people and many handsome cities. In my time, says Josephus, there were not less than four hundred walled towns in Galilee. Nature, too, was lavish in its gifts to this little land. There were green valleys there, picturesque mountains, clear blue lakes, running brooks, and grassy fields. An Eastern sun shone on the province almost all the time. There was no winter there. Like a diamond in the very heart of this beautiful land sat the town of Nazareth, The Flower of Galilee. Close by the village were the hills that fenced in the upper end of the plain of beautiful Esdralon. Figs grew there at Nazareth, and oranges, and grapes luscious and bountiful as nowhere else. The flower-lined lanes stretched from the village clear down to the blue lake of Galilee, only a dozen miles or so away. It must have been a delight to live in a climate so delicious, in a land so lovely.
It all belonged to Rome then, as did the whole country known as Palestine. The Romans had divided the land into three provinces,—Galilee, Samaria, and Judea, with its splendid city of Jerusalem, then one of the noted capitals of the world. Governors or kings were appointed for these three provinces by the emperors at Rome; they were usually Orientals.