The Crown and the Cross: The Life of Christ Read Online Free

cherish and protect her and her child, counting it an indication of the Lord’s trust and favor that so great a charge had been given him.
    Joseph and Mary both loved the hill country of Galilee, but they were both from the line of King David and so had to return to their ancestral family city in order to be registered for the census decreed by Caesar Augustus. Bethlehem, where Joseph was born, was the City of David, the greatest king in Israel’s history. A hallowed place, it was eminently suited to serve as a cradle for Him who, Mary had been assured, would one day reign over God’s own people. God had long ago revealed through the prophet Micah that His Son would be born in Bethlehem, saying, “But you, Bethlehem Ephratah, out of you shall He come forth the One who is to be the ruler of Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.” So it was that in Mary’s final days of pregnancy, they took the required journey to Bethlehem. Joseph took Mary and his few possessions with them, thinking to remain for a while at least to see how he might fare there in his trade.
    Engrossed in his thoughts, Joseph did not notice, until the sudden coolness of the approaching winter night penetrated his robe and made him shiver, that a cloud had obscured the face of the sun. As he went to get the mule and bring it to the rock where Mary sat, he glimpsed far to the eastward, through a valley that divided the hills, the metallic-looking surface of the Sea of Judgment, in whose waters which had swallowed up sinful Sodom and Gomorrah there was no life. And a little to the south, on the highest peak in the gradual descent of the hill country to the flat wastelands of the desert, where no man could live without carrying water, stood the great castle which Herod had built and furnished for himself.
    At once fortress, luxurious palace, and reminder that an alien instead of any son of David ruled there, the grim ramparts of the Herodeion, as the castle was called, were symbols of an authority based on murder, suspicion, and greed, exemplified in the wily Idumaean who was now king of the Jews. And yet of the child Mary was to bear, perhaps before the sun rose over the hills to the east again, the angel had said, “He shall be great and shall be called the Son of the Highest, and the Lord God shall give to Him the throne of His father David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of His kingdom there shall be no end.”

Chapter 2

    And she brought forth her firstborn Son, and wrapped Him in swaddling cloths, and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.
    Luke 2:7
    The yard of the inn at Bethlehem, where Elam and Jonas arrived with their pack animals just as darkness was falling, had already filled with travelers and their animals. Most of them were humble folk who had made the journey to Bethlehem only because the Emperor Augustus in Rome had decreed that every man must be listed by the census takers in the place of his birth—recorded for purposes of taxation by both his nomen and his cognomen —and now the period allotted for the census was nearly past.
    Naturally no one stood in the way of Elam as he strode importantly into the building and shouted for the proprietor. Jonas followed his master unobtrusively to learn what place in the stable would be assigned to him as quarters for the night.
    “I told you I have but one couch,” the innkeeper was saying when they entered. “The price is two shekels, nothing less.”
    Looking at the traveler who was dickering with the innkeeper, Jonas knew at once that the man was not accustomed to taking lodgings, let alone paying any such price as two shekels for them. His robe of rough homespun was almost as torn as was Jonas’s, and the strips of cloth wrapped about his ankles against the cold were stained with mud and torn by the horny bushes that lined the rough paths. Usually travelers such as he did not frequent inns but slept by the