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The people I write of flow out of my imagination but of none of them I would have said there was even a tenuous connection to a person living now or living then. Can that be true? I myself cannot believe that. For as I was telling their story I sensed a time reached when they would begin telling their own, and though I wanted one person to say one thing he would say another; and when I wanted another one to do this she would insist on doing that. So where they came from I cannot with certainty say, but they came alive in the writing; why else would I cry with them, laugh with them and fear with them?

But of one that cannot be truthfully said, the Galilean, so called outside his country, or perhaps Master or Rabbi as the case may be, depending on who would be the caller. He came to me from a deeper source. Beyond memory or imagination or experience, a transcendent place whose location can only be felt as a presence, his presence, and even this conjured up out of an ocean of silence. Who and what is this presence? It was a mystery then as it was ever a mystery and remains a mystery to this very day. But it is not a mystery to be solved, only to be known and in that knowing is its power.

He and they lived at the beginning of the first century although it could not have been known as such to them. The place was in that benighted though holy land, Jewish Palestine, blessed by God but cursed by men, which sat as a bridge between the rival empires of the East and West. Its fate was to be the trophy of the dominant military power of the day: Rome. In that ancient time they were part of a people even more ancient again by more than twice those years, Jews they were called although that was not their first appellation.

It was a tiny populace in the scheme of the world and one born out of the slave pits of Egypt. But through the love, guidance and promise of their God they were raised to a mighty nation and given the land on which they resided and from which they were fated to be cast out. Their God was just but demanding, perhaps patient even more than that, for over and over they remembered their covenant with Him and were raised up, and over and over they forgot it and were cast down; despite it all their God kept them a people, His people.

The lesson was clear but never learned -- not yet learned by any people it could be said -- when thrown into the mud and despair of the world they cry for deliverance and then, when in the lap of comfort and pleasure, they forget their Deliverer. So it was in this time of which we speak. The nation was burdened by a double oppressor, one home grown and of their own blood, and the alien other even more cruel, bred to conquest and brutality, and both stood astride a people desperately searching for salvation.

But it was a search that took many forms in that troubled time. Wandering teachers and philosophers from all climes and cultures, East and West, mystery schools from Greece and Egypt, with their gods of healing and magic and star gazing. Within this maelstrom, however, there remained always the core teaching of the Jews, the high moral and social Law given to Moses by their God and accepted in covenant by His people. And now in the generation of which we speak, after tens of suffering prior ones, a new prophet arose whose first task was to uncover and reveal anew from this holy teaching the way to deliverance, both personal and of the nation.

But, dear reader, I cannot tell you more of him than this only to commend to you the following pages in which to find him. In them you will find the people who knew him best, whose lives and fortunes were changed and elevated by his being. And may their stories enliven in you as you read of them, as they did in me as I wrote of them, their still living souls whose purpose is to guide us