Naples

• Naples

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.

130:8.4At last they reached Naples and felt they were not far from their des­ti­na­tion, Rome. Gonod had much busi­ness to trans­act in Naples, and aside from the time Je­sus was re­quired as in­ter­preter, he and Ga­nid spent their leisure vis­it­ing and ex­plor­ing the city. Ga­nid was be­com­ing adept at sight­ing those who ap­peared to be in need. They found much pov­erty in this city and dis­tributed many alms. But Ga­nid never un­der­stood the mean­ing of Je­sus’ words when, af­ter he had given a coin to a street beg­gar, he re­fused to pause and speak com­fort­ingly to the man. Said Je­sus: “Why waste words upon one who can­not per­ceive the mean­ing of what you say? The spirit of the Fa­ther can­not teach and save one who has no ca­pac­ity for son­ship.” What Je­sus meant was that the man was not of nor­mal mind; that he lacked the abil­ity to re­spond to spirit lead­ing.

130:8.1The first stop on the way to Italy was at the is­land of Malta. Here Je­sus had a long talk with a down­hearted and dis­cour­aged young man named Claudus. This fel­low had con­tem­plated tak­ing his life, but when he had fin­ished talk­ing with the scribe of Da­mas­cus, he said: “I will face life like a man; I am through play­ing the cow­ard. I will go back to my peo­ple and be­gin all over again.” Shortly he be­came an en­thu­si­as­tic preacher of the Cyn­ics, and still later on he joined hands with Pe­ter in pro­claim­ing Chris­tian­ity in Rome and Naples, and af­ter the death of Pe­ter he went on to Spain preach­ing the gospel. But he never knew that the man who in­spired him in Malta was the Je­sus whom he sub­se­quently pro­claimed the world’s De­liv­erer.

130:8.5There was no out­stand­ing ex­pe­ri­ence in Naples; Je­sus and the young man thor­oughly can­vassed the city and spread good cheer with many smiles upon hun­dreds of men, women, and chil­dren.