S. S. Times John 1:44-51 Now Philip was of Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter.… The whole of Galilee was a despised region in the eyes of the more polished Palestinians of the South. The Galileans were accused of being rude, illiterate, and devoid of culture. Their pronunciation was said to be so thick that it led constantly to mortifying blunders, as when one could not tell from the word used whether a Galilean peasant had come to the market for an ass (khamor), wine (khemer), sheepskin (immer), or wool ('immar). A Galilean woman, inviting her guest to table, said: "I am going to give you milk to eat." In her thick Galilean pronunciation it actually sounded: "May a lion eat you!" Other such ambiguities are mentioned as occurring in the rude speech of the Galileans. Worse than all, the Galileans were said to be loose on points of doe-trine, so that a bad odour of heterodoxy hung over the province. It was not to Galilee that the Judaean would naturally have looked for a great theological teacher. Nazareth shared, of course, in the reproach of the province to which it belonged. The town was simply a typical Galilean village, filled with a warm-hearted, and perhaps (as the Talmud suggests) a warm-tempered people, who had little sympathy with the learned casuistry of the Judaean rabbis, and were therefore looked down upon as ignorant rabble. There is little reason for charging special moral turpitude against the people of Nazareth. The Judaean simply looked down upon Nazareth as the urbane inhabitant of a great city is supposed to look down upon a backwoods settlement. The inhabitants of a college town in the East would hardly turn to the new settlement of Nosuchplace, in Blank Territory, for a teacher of culture. That was the way the Judsaean felt with regard to Nazareth. (S. S. Times.) Parallel Verses KJV: Now Philip was of Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter.WEB: Now Philip was from Bethsaida, of the city of Andrew and Peter. |
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