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 2:  According to Josephus (B.J., III. iii. 2), the smallest town of Galilee had more than five thousand inhabitants.  This is probably an exaggeration.]