During my several trips to Palestine I have visited Bethlehem, where our Saviour was born, and have lived for days in Nazareth, where His boyhood was spent. I have gone over much of the road Joseph and Mary followed when they carried the child into Egypt, and have crossed the mountains of Samaria from Galilee to Jerusalem, where He went as a boy of twelve and was found teaching the doctrine in Solomon’s Temple.
I have even climbed the hills and gone into the wilderness where our Lord was tempted of the devil after those forty days of hunger and thirst. At Capernaum I saw the recently excavated marble synagogue where some of His first preaching was done. I have climbed to the top of the hill above the Sea of Galilee, where He delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and have picked flowers from the rolling green sward below, where the miracle of the loaves and fishes was performed. Not far from that place, on the opposite shore, may be seen a steep hill down which rushed the swine possessed of the devils our Saviour had cast out of the Gadarene man. I have been in Bethany, where lived Mary and Martha, and have sat under the trees in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Many of these places are about the same as they were when our Saviour was alive. Some have been covered with churches and convents, but the warring sects of Christians have not been able to change the bright sky. Nature is the same now as it was then. The same flowers bloom and the same birds sing. Besides, it is not so long, after all, since Jesus was born in Bethlehem. The average lifetime of a man is not much more than was that of our Saviour. He lived thirty-three years. It would take only fifty-eight such lifetimes to cover the period between now and the birth of Christ. Each of us has a relative who is, perhaps, sixty-five years old. The lives of thirty such men would, if joined together, reach back to the days of King Herod.
We shall take carriages for our trip from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. We start at the Jaffa Gate, next David’s Tower, on the top of Mount Zion, near where, it is claimed, the Crucifixion took place. The gate was widened by the breach in the wall made in honour of Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, so all sorts of vehicles can now go through it. As we leave the gate we pass coffee houses where people of a dozen different nationalities are drinking, go by the railroad station, where a puffing locomotive is just in from the Mediterranean, skirt the valley of Hinnom, in which is the Pool of Gihon, where David was anointed, and a little later on stop near the village where King Saul was crowned.
The road is excellent. It is of hard limestone walled on each side by limestone fences and backed by green fields now covered with the dust of the highway. The traffic is constant, so that the air is white with dust. It fills our eyes, mouths, and nostrils, and makes us look like millers. We cover our eyes with smoked glasses to keep out the glare. The road is dazzling white, the fences are white, a white dust covers the green of the fields. As we are going toward the south, the sun is full in our faces. It is hot, although a cold wind is blowing over these hills of Judea which whirls the dust around and sends columns of it into the air.
Soon after leaving Jerusalem we cross a depression carpeted with green, which is known as the Valley of Roses. Farther on are olive groves, and as we near Bethlehem there are great fields of green. At the left we can see the plain where the young widow Ruth garnered wheat for old Boaz and thus got food and a husband.
All the way from Jerusalem to Bethlehem crops are growing. There are signs of increased cultivation, and every bit of available land is being set out in orchards and gardens. I went over the same road twenty-odd years ago. Then the country was bare rocks with bits of grass here and there. To-day the land is divided into fields. The surface rocks have been gathered together and laid up in fences as high as my head. The cleared land is now planted in wheat, corn, and barley. New olive orchards are rising, while many of the old ones still stand. The trunks of the old trees are knotted and gnarled, but the leaves are of green dusted with silver, and I am told they still bear fruit. I photographed one tree not more than thirty feet high which had a trunk as thick as a hogshead and branches which shaded a large tract of ground. The soil of Palestine is as fertile to-day as it was when Joshua led the Israelites across it, and barring the fences, I doubt not the landscape is about the same now as it was when Christ was born.
Christmas is long drawn out at Bethlehem. First come the Latin ceremonies on December 25; fourteen days later the Greek Church celebrates; and thirteen days later comes the Armenian feast
