A Life of Jesus

JERUSALEM is like most of the old cities in the Middle East where even today the streets running through the town are winding and narrow and sometimes come to a dead end. The walls that line both sides of a street appear to be stricken with a skin disease, splattered as they are by the slop tossed from inside the houses and by excrement from the sheep and the beasts of burden passing by. The streets through which they paraded Jesus bearing his cross were no doubt much like the streets of present-day Jerusalem—narrow, meandering, and filthy. The heat of Jerusalem near the hour of noon on a day in April is like the noontime heat of Japan during June and the early part of July. Jesus, deprived of sleep and staggering under the weight of the cross, fell to the ground several times, but each time he fell he was forced again to move along, if only at a snail's pace, by the noise of the brutal commands and the lashing whips of the Roman soldiers. Although not everything is detailed in the New

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