manifestations of his power; and every time a sick man rose from his bed
Joseph thanked God for having allowed him to live in the days of the
Messiah. He saw sight restored to the blind, hearing to the deaf,
swiftness of foot to cripples, issues of blood that had endured ten
years stanched; the cleansing of the leper had become too common a
miracle; he looked forward to seeing demons taking flight from the
bodies of men and women, and accepted Peter's telling that the day could
not be delayed much longer when he would see some dead man rise up in
his cere-clothes from the tomb. He found no interest but in the
miraculous, and his one vexation of spirit was that Jesus forbade his
disciples (among whom Joseph now counted himself) to tell anybody that
he was the Messiah.

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