Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I The Social Outlook Of Jesus Jesus's teachings gain vividness and reality when we consider them in the light of what we know of the life of his day and the circumstances of his history. He seems to have been an oldest son in a large family, and, if tradition be correct, the support of a widowed mother.1 The whole world of Jesus's day was desperately poor. The glory of Rome and Athens was only comparative, and the few lived in what we would scarcely call comfort and the many hovered half-fed on the borderland of starvation. War, famine, disease, neglected motherhood and impoverished infancy kept down population, and in general only sound physique could withstand the strain. Taxation was shortsighted and inequitable, justice was roughly administered and cruel, the tyranny of the strong was held in check only by traditional restraint and by fear of secret violence. 1 The supposition of Cheyne (Ency. Bib., art. "Joseph") that we know nothing of Joseph is surely overdrawn criticism. Apart from the mention of Joseph in the narratives of the infancy, we have the reference in Luke 4. 22 and the two references in John 1. 45 and 6. 42, and in Matt. 13. 55 Jesus was called "the son of the builder" (4 rod T(ktovo( vl6f). At the same time he plays little part, and had died before the crucifixion (John 19. 25-27). Jesus came from the poorer fishing peasants of northern Palestine. His reputed father Joseph was a peasant housebuilder,1 who seems, if our supposition is correct, to have died early and left, perhaps, the support of the family upon the young shoulders of the eldest boy. Hence ideal fatherhood had a meaning for Jesus which was born of his experience, and he thought constantly of God in terms of that fatherhood whose protecting earthly care he had so early lost. Th...