Saul of Tarsus: A Tale of the Early Christians

Marsyas sought through the Nazarene settlements in Joppa, Anthedon and Cæsarea, but the people could not tell him of fugitive Alexandrians, who had with them a maid with yellow-...

On the way two dark figures emerged from the shadows and halted to let the soldiers pass. Agrippa peered at them intently through the gloom, and raising his arm made a peculiar...

Lydia came upon Vasti, the bayadere, returning to the culina with a flaring taper in her hand. The brown woman's eyes were fixed on the flame and she whispered under her breath,...

The young Essene laid aside the prince's dress, with its embroidery of precious metal, and, getting into a simpler garment affected by the stewards to men of rank, went out into...

On a certain day in March of the year 36 A.D., a Levite, one of the Shoterim or Temple lictors, came down from Moriah, into the vale of Gihon, and entered the portal of the grea...

The sails of the freighter had fallen slack in the breathless shelter of the Alexandrian harbor. It was night, and only by daylight could the seamen pull the vessel by oar throu...

Agrippa crowded past the three that had preceded him into the black passage and, whispering a command to follow, led on. They kept track of him by the sound of his shoes on the...

Nothing but prescience could have inspired Alexander, the young Macedonian conqueror, to decide to plant a city on the sandy peninsula which lay hot, flat, low and unproductive...

Marsyas did not sleep the sleep of a man worn with exertion and excitement. Instead he lay far into the night with his wide eyes fixed on the soft gloom above him. He had many d...

There followed time for diverse and earnest meditation for Marsyas: He criticized himself sarcastically, for permitting himself to be so easily entrapped, and cast about him for...

They were in a single large chamber, rough, barren and barn-like. The gray drapery of cob-webs was sown with chaff; there was the fresh smell of grain with the mustiness of dust...

With the solid soil of the ancient Roman road beneath his horse's feet, Marsyas rode north, between the hills of Judea, with the head of Mt. Ephraim before him. The early mornin...

The imperial ruin drooped in the gilded lectica, now comatose, now animate. Under the purple robe the long, old, wasted limbs vibrated and the gems, quivering on the gnarled fin...

On the third day after his arrival in Jerusalem, Herod the king was in his privy cabinet arranging, with his own hands, the graven gems and articles of virtu, prizes brought fro...

Marsyas turned on the gilded couch, threw off the light covering and sat up. A Syrian slave thrust aside the heavy drapery over the cancelli, which had been drawn in the atrium...

Marsyas had assumed pagan dress, bound a scarlet ribbon for a fillet about his head, and flung a scarlet cloak over his tunic, and so, identified with the revelers, he safely en...

"Now this is what comes of the irregular barbarity in Judean executions," he ruminated. "In Rome this Nazarene would have been despatched in order and his body borne away to the...

Mid-March in Judea was the querulous age of the young year. It was a time of a tempered sun and intervals of long rains and chill winds. Under such persuasion, the rounded hills...

The summer waxed over Egypt. The Delta, back from the yellow plain which fronted the sea, was in full flower of the wheat. The happy fellahs lay under the shade of dom-palms and...

Lydia went up on the housetop into the shade of the pavilion with the writing her father had put into her hand, and drawing the hangings on the east side of the pavilion to shut...

Near sunset the following day the alabarch appeared in the porch of the proconsul's mansion,--an incident which would speedily have spread wildly over the Brucheum had not the s...

Agrippa emerged at sunset from his apartment and descended to the first floor of the alabarch's mansion. The hall was vacant and each of the chambers opening off it was silent,...

Cæsar left Capri and roved along the Italian coast in his splendid barges, or approached by land close to Rome, even to spend the night just without her walls, or in Tusculum, O...

After he had separated from Stephen, Marsyas went to the house of a resident Essene with whom he made his home, to be fed, to be washed, to offer supplication and to announce hi...

With the bayadere following he raced through the cloyed musk of the temple toward the square of lesser darkness at the rear, which showed the exit into the court. He flung himse...

"Away with this and that and that," she exclaimed pointing to the statue of a bacchante, that had not been visible in the chamber on the occasion of Marsyas' expected calls; a t...

The cluster of vagabonds hanging before the alabarch's mansion stayed no longer after the breezes brought the first sound of tumult which announced a rarer sport elsewhere. In a...

Marsyas passed up to his room to put his belongings together. The sound of his movements within reached Lydia in her refuge, and, when he came forth, she stood in the gloom of t...

By fair winds, Agrippa should reach Alexandria in so many days. Allowing time to begin and complete the negotiations for a loan, so many more days should elapse. Then the same n...

But Ananias was a favorite name among the Jews of Damascus. Weariness and the desire for slumber after inquiries which brought him twenty diverse directions, sent Marsyas to a k...

Marsyas left the promontory at once. He had hired one of the public passenger boats to cross from Baiæ to Misenum and the boatman had waited for the return of his fare.

The other came by a Roman courier, who had landed an hour before from one of the swift-going triremes which had left Ravenna three days later than the passenger boat that had br...

The Regio Judæorum lost its repose. Certain irrational of the inhabitants displayed carpeting and garlands in honor of the Jewish potentate, within their boundaries. But others,...

Marsyas came forth moodily convinced by Eleazar's words. No; it was not the method. Revenge would have to come through another medium than the Nazarenes. Stephen had told him be...

Flaccus Avillus, Proconsul of Egypt, held audience in his atrium. He received a commission of three from the Jews of Alexandria. One was Alexander Lysimachus, who came with a ci...

When Agrippa returned to his house that night, he found old Silas sitting in the vestibule, opposite the place of the atriensis, his hands on his knees, his dull face uncommonly...

The second night after the riot about the Synagogue, one of Flaccus' sentries, posted about the small cramped portion of the Regio Judæorum, into which the forty thousand Jews h...

The great stars were further withdrawn into the immeasurable arch of blue night; the winds had fled away into the ocean; the bay was angry with fire for leagues. The space befor...