In every town they were welcomed by the Gentiles as well as by the Jews, which was surprising, and set Joseph’s wits to work; and these being well trained, he soon began to apprehend that the Jews accepted the miracles as testimony that Jesus was really the Messiah and that his teaching was true; whereas the Gentiles admired the miracles for their own sake, failing, however, and completely, to see that because he cured the blind, the palsied, the scrofulous and the halt, they should no longer visit their temples and sacred groves, and admire no more Pan’s huge sexuality and hang garlands upon it, nor carve images of Diana and Apollo.  Such abstinence they could not comprehend, and deemed it enough that they were ready to proclaim him a god on the occasion of every great miracle, a readiness that gave great scandal and caused many Jews to turn away from Jesus.  It was not enough that he should repudiate this godhead; and the hardness of heart and narrowness of soul that he encountered among his own people afflicted Jesus as much as did the incontinency of the Gentiles, whom he sometimes met, bearing images in procession, going towards some shrine—­the very same who had listened to his teaching in the evening.  Joseph once dared throw himself in front of one of these processions, and he begged the processionists to Pan to throw aside the garlands and wreaths they had woven.  This they would not do, but out of respect to the distinguished strangers that had come to their town they listened for some minutes to his relation that on the last day the dead would be roused by the trumpets of angels to attend the judgment and that the man Jesus before them—­the Messiah announced hundreds of years ago in many a prophetic book—­would return to earth in a chariot of fire by his Father’s side, the Judgment Book in his hands.  May we now proceed on our way? they asked, but Joseph besought them to listen to him for another few minutes, and thinking he had perhaps explained the resurrection badly, and forthwith calling to mind the philosophy of Egypt and Mathias, he asked them to apprehend that it would not be the corruptible body that would rise from the dead but the spiritual body, whereby he only succeeded in perplexing still further the minds of the worthy pagans of Caesarea Philippi, and provoking stirs and quarrels among his own people.

The processionists took advantage of this diversion of opinion among the Jews to pass on and dispose of their wreaths and votive offerings as it pleased them to do.  But on their way back they begged Jesus to perform some more miracles, which he refused to do, and to their great amazement he left them for the Tyrians and Sidonians.  But the same difficulties occurred in Tyre and Sidon, the Gentiles accepting the miracles with delight but paying little heed to the doctrine.  They begged him to remain with them and offered gifts for his services as healer, but he refused these and returned to Galilee, having performed miracles of all sorts, without, however,