merchant of Damascus

128:3.3At Phil­a­del­phia Je­sus and Si­mon be­came ac­quainted with a mer­chant from Da­mas­cus who de­vel­oped such a great lik­ing for the Naz­a­reth cou­ple that he in­sisted they stop with him at his Je­ru­sa­lem head­quar­ters. While Si­mon gave at­ten­dance at the tem­ple, Je­sus spent much of his time talk­ing with this well-ed­u­cated and much-trav­eled man of world af­fairs. This mer­chant owned over four thou­sand car­a­van camels; he had in­ter­ests all over the Ro­man world and was now on his way to Rome. He pro­posed that Je­sus come to Da­mas­cus to en­ter his Ori­en­tal im­port busi­ness, but Je­sus ex­plained that he did not feel jus­ti­fied in go­ing so far away from his fam­ily just then. But on the way back home he thought much about these dis­tant cities and the even more re­mote coun­tries of the Far West and the Far East, coun­tries he had so fre­quently heard spo­ken of by the car­a­van pas­sen­gers and con­duc­tors.

128:4.1The last four months of this year Je­sus spent in Da­mas­cus as the guest of the mer­chant whom he first met at Phil­a­del­phia when on his way to Je­ru­sa­lem. A rep­re­sen­ta­tive of this mer­chant had sought out Je­sus when pass­ing through Naz­a­reth and es­corted him to Da­mas­cus. This part-Jew­ish mer­chant pro­posed to de­vote an ex­traor­di­nary sum of money to the es­tab­lish­ment of a school of re­li­gious phi­los­o­phy at Da­mas­cus. He planned to cre­ate a cen­ter of learn­ing which would out-ri­val Alexan­dria. And he pro­posed that Je­sus should im­me­di­ately be­gin a long tour of the world’s ed­u­ca­tional cen­ters prepara­tory to be­com­ing the head of this new project. This was one of the great­est temp­ta­tions that Je­sus ever faced in the course of his purely hu­man ca­reer.

128:4.2Pres­ently this mer­chant brought be­fore Je­sus a group of twelve mer­chants and bankers who agreed to sup­port this newly pro­jected school. Je­sus man­i­fested deep in­ter­est in the pro­posed school, helped them plan for its or­ga­ni­za­tion, but al­ways ex­pressed the fear that his other and un­stated but prior obli­ga­tions would pre­vent his ac­cept­ing the di­rec­tion of such a pre­ten­tious en­ter­prise. His would-be bene­fac­tor was per­sis­tent, and he prof­itably em­ployed Je­sus at his home do­ing some trans­lat­ing while he, his wife, and their sons and daugh­ters sought to pre­vail upon Je­sus to ac­cept the prof­fered honor. But he would not con­sent. He well knew that his mis­sion on earth was not to be sup­ported by in­sti­tu­tions of learn­ing; he knew that he must not ob­li­gate him­self in the least to be di­rected by the “coun­cils of men,” no mat­ter how well-in­ten­tioned.

128:4.3He who was re­jected by the Je­ru­sa­lem re­li­gious lead­ers, even af­ter he had demon­strated his lead­er­ship, was rec­og­nized and hailed as a mas­ter teacher by the busi­ness­men and bankers of Da­mas­cus, and all this when he was an ob­scure and un­known car­pen­ter of Naz­a­reth.

128:4.4He never spoke about this of­fer to his fam­ily, and the end of this year found him back in Naz­a­reth go­ing about his daily du­ties just as if he had never been tempted by the flat­ter­ing propo­si­tions of his Da­mas­cus friends. Nei­ther did these men of Da­mas­cus ever as­so­ciate the later cit­i­zen of Ca­per­naum who turned all Jewry up­side down with the for­mer car­pen­ter of Naz­a­reth who had dared to refuse the honor which their com­bined wealth might have pro­cured.

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.