A LAYMAN'S LIFE OF JESUS
[Illustration: logo]
A LAYMAN'S LIFE
OF JESUS
BY
MAJOR S. H. M. BYERS
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
[Illustration: Publisher's Mark]
NEW YORK
THE NEALE PUBLISHING COMPANY
1912
Copyright, 1912, by
THE NEALE PUBLISHING COMPANY
PREFACE
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.
H. S. M. B.
Des Moines, Sept. 3, 1912.
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I 7
Palestine two thousand years ago. The Little
Land of Galilee. An Oriental Village. The
Boy Carpenter.
CHAPTER II 12
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?
CHAPTER III 23
Christ still a Jew. Is the Child's escape at
Bethlehem still a secret? Performing wonders. A
strange age. Rome still in the thrall of Heathendom.
Augustus dead. Tiberius the Awful.
Palestine itself half Heathen. A Religious
Enthusiast. Jesus is ceasing to be a Jew. A
church tyranny. Subjects of Cæsar. Human
suffering counted for nothing with the Romans.
The Jews are longing for the New Time when
God might come and rule the world in Pity.
An age of Superstitions and Magic. Laws of
Science unknown. Nobody even knew that the
world was round.
CHAPTER IV 41
The Fairy Prince. His Home is everywhere.
John the Baptist is preaching down by Jericho.
The young Jesus hears of him and goes a hundred
miles on foot to see him. A stranger
steps down to the River to be baptized. Look
quick, it is the Lamb of God! John is put to
death in a palace by the Dead Sea. A
Woman's Revenge.
CHAPTER V 55
An Oriental Wedding, and the first miracle.
Jairus. "Little Maid, Arise." The Light of
the World. The Poet of the Lord. Do we know
what a Miracle is?
CHAPTER VI 67
A wandering Teacher. Lives in a borrowed house
at Capernaum. The Testament Books, fragments
written from memory. The whole Law of
Life boiled down to Seven Words. He visits
Tyre by the Ocean. Walking on the Sea. A
hard saying, and not understood. His friends
begin to leave Him. They demand Wonders,
Miracles. Raffael's great picture.
CHAPTER VII 82
Jesus goes alone and on foot to Jerusalem, to try
and prove Himself. In six months they will kill
Him. The rich Capital no place for Socialism.
"If thou be Christ, tell us, plainly." He is a
fugitive from a city mob. The Raising of
Lazarus. Again the people are following Him.
The great Sanhedrin is alarmed. "This Man
has everybody believing on Him. He will create
a Revolution yet." Jerusalem is in political
danger, anyway; so is the Roman Empire.
Everything seems going to pieces. "This
Man has too many Followers; we must kill
Him." Judas is hired to betray Him.
CHAPTER VIII 94
The last supper. Leonardo's great picture. Betrayal.
With a rope around his neck the Savior of mankind is
dragged before a Roman Judge. The scene at Pilate's
palace. Pilate's wife warns him. The awful murder and
the End.
A Layman's Life of Jesus
CHAPTER I
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.
Just now two sons of Herod the Great, oftener known as "the splendid
Arab," are ruling there. The one named Herod is at Jerusalem; his
brother Antipater, or Herod Antipas, is governing little Galilee in
the north end of Palestine. Like many another Oriental king he is an
idle, luxurious, dissipated, and corrupt ruler.
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.