On the Way to Rome

130:0.1The tour of the Ro­man world con­sumed most of the twenty-eighth and the en­tire twenty-ninth year of Je­sus’ life on earth. Je­sus and the two na­tives from In­dia—Gonod and his son Ga­nid—left Je­ru­sa­lem on a Sun­day morn­ing, April 26, A.D. 22. They made their jour­ney ac­cord­ing to sched­ule, and Je­sus said good-bye to the fa­ther and son in the city of Charax on the Per­sian Gulf on the tenth day of De­cem­ber the fol­low­ing year, A.D. 23.

130:0.2From Je­ru­sa­lem they went to Cae­sarea by way of Joppa. At Cae­sarea they took a boat for Alexan­dria. From Alexan­dria they sailed for Lasea in Crete. From Crete they sailed for Carthage, touch­ing at Cyrene. At Carthage they took a boat for Naples, stop­ping at Malta, Syra­cuse, and Messina. From Naples they went to Ca­pua, whence they trav­eled by the Ap­pian Way to Rome.

130:0.3Af­ter their stay in Rome they went over­land to Tar­en­tum, where they set sail for Athens in Greece, stop­ping at Nicopo­lis and Corinth. From Athens they went to Eph­esus by way of Troas. From Eph­esus they sailed for Cyprus, putting in at Rhodes on the way. They spent con­sid­er­able time vis­it­ing and rest­ing on Cyprus and then sailed for An­ti­och in Syria. From An­ti­och they jour­neyed south to Sidon and then went over to Da­mas­cus. From there they trav­eled by car­a­van to Mes­o­po­ta­mia, pass­ing through Thap­sacus and Larissa. They spent some time in Baby­lon, vis­ited Ur and other places, and then went to Susa. From Susa they jour­neyed to Charax, from which place Gonod and Ga­nid em­barked for In­dia.

130:0.4It was while work­ing four months at Da­mas­cus that Je­sus had picked up the rudi­ments of the lan­guage spo­ken by Gonod and Ga­nid. While there he had la­bored much of the time on trans­la­tions from Greek into one of the lan­guages of In­dia, be­ing as­sisted by a na­tive of Gonod’s home dis­trict.

130:0.5On this Med­i­ter­ra­nean tour Je­sus spent about half of each day teach­ing Ga­nid and act­ing as in­ter­preter dur­ing Gonod’s busi­ness con­fer­ences and so­cial con­tacts. The re­main­der of each day, which was at his dis­posal, he de­voted to mak­ing those close per­sonal con­tacts with his fel­low men, those in­ti­mate as­so­ci­a­tions with the mor­tals of the realm, which so char­ac­ter­ized his ac­tiv­i­ties dur­ing these years that just pre­ceded his pub­lic min­istry.

130:0.6From first­hand ob­ser­va­tion and ac­tual con­tact Je­sus ac­quainted him­self with the higher ma­te­rial and in­tel­lec­tual civ­i­liza­tion of the Oc­ci­dent and the Lev­ant; from Gonod and his bril­liant son he learned a great deal about the civ­i­liza­tion and cul­ture of In­dia and China, for Gonod, him­self a cit­i­zen of In­dia, had made three ex­ten­sive trips to the em­pire of the yel­low race.

130:0.7Ga­nid, the young man, learned much from Je­sus dur­ing this long and in­ti­mate as­so­ci­a­tion. They de­vel­oped a great af­fec­tion for each other, and the lad’s fa­ther many times tried to per­suade Je­sus to re­turn with them to In­dia, but Je­sus al­ways de­clined, plead­ing the ne­ces­sity for re­turn­ing to his fam­ily in Pales­tine.