[Footnote 7: It is known that the calculation which serves as basis of the common era was made in the sixth century by Dionysius the Less. This calculation implies certain purely hypothetical data.]
The name of Jesus, which was given him, is an alteration from Joshua. It was a very common name; but afterward mysteries, and an allusion to his character of Saviour, were naturally sought for in it.[1] Perhaps he, like all mystics, exalted himself in this respect. It is thus that more than one great vocation in history has been caused by a name given to a child without premeditation. Ardent natures never bring themselves to see aught of chance in what concerns them. God has regulated everything for them, and they see a sign of the supreme will in the most insignificant circumstances.
[Footnote 1: Matt. i. 21; Luke i. 31.]
The population of Galilee was very mixed, as the very name of the country[1] indicated. This province counted amongst its inhabitants, in the time of Jesus, many who were not Jews (Phoenicians, Syrians, Arabs, and even Greeks).[2] The conversions to Judaism were not rare in these mixed countries. It is therefore impossible to raise here any question of race, and to seek to ascertain what blood flowed in the veins of him who has contributed most to efface the distinction of blood in humanity.
[Footnote 1: Gelil haggoyim, "Circle of the Gentiles."]
[Footnote 2: Strabo, XVI. ii. 35; Jos., Vita, 12.]
He proceeded from the ranks of the people.[1] His father, Joseph, and his mother, Mary, were people in humble circumstances, artisans living by their labor,[2] in the state so common in the East, which is neither ease nor poverty. The extreme simplicity of life in such countries, by dispensing with the need of comfort, renders the privileges of wealth almost useless, and makes every one voluntarily poor. On the other hand, the total want of taste for art, and for that which contributes to the elegance of material life, gives a naked aspect to the house of him who otherwise wants for nothing. Apart from something sordid and repulsive which Islamism bears everywhere with it, the town of Nazareth, in the time of Jesus, did not perhaps much differ from what it is to-day.[3] We see the streets where he played when a child, in the stony paths or little crossways which separate the dwellings. The house of Joseph doubtless much resembled those poor shops, lighted by the door, serving at once for shop, kitchen, and bedroom, having for furniture a mat, some cushions on the ground, one or two clay pots, and a painted chest.
[Footnote 1: We shall explain later (Chap. XIV.) the origin of the genealogies intended to connect him with the race of David. The Ebionites suppressed them (Epiph., Adv. Hær., XXX. 14).]
[Footnote 2: Matt. xiii. 55; Mark vi. 3; John vi. 42.]
[Footnote 3: The rough aspect of the ruins which cover Palestine proves that the towns which were not constructed in the Roman manner were very badly built. As to the form of the houses, it is, in Syria, so simple and so imperiously regulated by the climate, that it can scarcely ever have changed.]
The family, whether it proceeded from one or many marriages, was rather numerous. Jesus had brothers and sisters,[1] of whom he seems to have been the eldest.[2] All have remained obscure, for it appears that the four personages who were named as his brothers, and among whom one, at least—James—had acquired great importance in the earliest years of the development of Christianity, were his cousins-german. Mary, in fact, had a sister also named Mary,[3] who married a certain Alpheus or Cleophas (these two names appear to designate the same person[4]), and was the mother of several sons who played a considerable part among the first disciples of Jesus. These cousins-german who adhered to the young Master, while his own brothers opposed him,[5] took the title of "brothers of the Lord."[6] The real brothers of Jesus, like their mother, became important only after his death.[7] Even then they do not appear to have equaled in importance their cousins, whose conversion had been more spontaneous, and whose character seems to have had more originality. Their names were so little known, that when the evangelist put in the mouth of the men of Nazareth the enumeration of the brothers according to natural relationship, the names of the sons of Cleophas first presented themselves to him.
[Footnote 1: Matt. xii. 46, and following, xiii. 55, and following; Mark iii. 31, and following, vi. 3; Luke viii. 19, and following; John ii. 12, vii. 3, 5, 10; Acts i. 14.]
[Footnote 2: Matt. i. 25.]
[Footnote 3: That these two sisters should bear the same name is a singular fact. There is probably some error arising from the habit of giving the name of Mary indiscriminately to Galilean women.]
[Footnote 4: They are not etymologically identical. [Greek: Alphaios] is the transcription of the Syro-Chaldean name Halphaï; [Greek: Klôpas] or [Greek: Kleopas] is a shortened form of [Greek: Kleopatros]. But there might have been an artificial substitution of one for the other, just as Joseph was called "Hegissippus," the Eliakim "Alcimus," &c.]
[Footnote 5: John vii. 3, and following.]
[Footnote 6: In fact, the four personages who are named (Matt. xiii. 55, Mark vi. 3) as sons of Mary, mother of Jesus, Jacob, Joseph or Joses, Simon, and Jude, are found again a little later as sons of Mary and Cleophas. (Matt. xxvii. 56; Mark xv. 40; Gal. i. 19; Epist. James i. 1; Epist. Jude 1; Euseb., Chron. ad ann. R. DCCCX.; Hist. Eccl., iii. 11, 32; Constit. Apost., vii. 46.) The hypothesis we offer alone removes the immense difficulty which is found in supposing two sisters having each three or four sons bearing the same names, and in admitting that James and Simon, the first two bishops of Jerusalem, designated as brothers of the Lord, may have been real brothers of Jesus, who had begun by being hostile to him and then were converted. The evangelist, hearing these four sons of Cleophas called "brothers of the Lord," has placed by mistake their names in the passage Matt. xiii. 5 = Mark vi. 3, instead of the names of the real brothers, which have always remained obscure. In this matter we may explain how the character of the personages called "brothers of the Lord," of James, for instance, is so different from that of the real brothers of Jesus as they are seen delineated in John vii. 2, and following. The expression "brother of the Lord" evidently constituted, in the primitive Church, a kind of order similar to that of the apostles. See especially 1 Cor. ix. 5.]
[Footnote 7: Acts i. 14.]
His sisters were married at Nazareth,[1] and he spent the first years of his youth there. Nazareth was a small town in a hollow, opening broadly at the summit of the group of mountains which close the plain of Esdraelon on the north. The population is now from three to four thousand, and it can never have varied much.[2] The cold there is sharp in winter, and the climate very healthy. The town, like all the small Jewish towns at this period, was a heap of huts built without style, and would exhibit that harsh and poor aspect which villages in Semitic countries now present. The houses, it seems, did not differ much from those cubes of stone, without exterior or interior elegance, which still cover the richest parts of the Lebanon, and which, surrounded with vines and fig-trees, are still very agreeable. The environs, moreover, are charming; and no place in the world was so well adapted for dreams of perfect happiness. Even in our times Nazareth is still a delightful abode, the only place, perhaps, in Palestine in which the mind feels itself relieved from the burden which oppresses it in this unequaled desolation. The people are amiable and cheerful; the gardens fresh and green. Anthony the Martyr, at the end of the sixth century, drew an enchanting picture of the fertility of the environs, which he compared to paradise.[3] Some valleys on the western side fully justify his description. The fountain, where formerly the life and gaiety of the little town were concentrated, is destroyed; its broken channels contain now only a muddy stream. But the beauty of the women who meet there in the evening—that beauty which was remarked even in the sixth century, and which was looked upon as a gift of the Virgin Mary[4]—is still most strikingly preserved. It is the Syrian type in all its languid grace. No doubt Mary was there almost every day, and took her place with her jar on her shoulder in the file of her companions who have remained unknown. Anthony the Martyr remarks that the Jewish women, generally disdainful to Christians, were here full of affability. Even now religious animosity is weaker at Nazareth than elsewhere.
[Footnote 1: Mark vi. 3.]
[Footnote