Note 223 — Chapter IX
Reading edition
One passage in this codex bears so strongly on a leading argument of this work that I cannot resist the temptation to give it with Mrs. Lewis' own comment:
"The piece of my work," she writes, In the Shadow of Sinai, p. 98 et seq., "which has given me the greatest satisfaction, consists in the decipherment of two words in John IV, 27. They were well worth all our visits to Sinai, for they illustrate an action of our Lord which seems to be recorded nowhere else, and which has some degree of inherent probability from what we know of His character. The passage is 'His disciples came and wondered that with the women he was standing and talking'....
"Why was our Lord standing? He had been sitting on the wall when the disciples left Him; and, we know that He was tired. Moreover, sitting is the proper attitude for an Easterner when engaged in teaching. And an ordinary Oriental would never rise of his own natural free will out of politeness to a woman. It may be that He rose in His enthusiasm for the great truths He was uttering; but, I like to think that His great heart, which embraced the lowest of humanity, lifted Him above the restrictions of His race and age, and made Him show that courtesy to our sex, even in the person of a degraded specimen, which is considered among all really progressive peoples to be a mark of true and noble manhood. To shed even a faint light upon that wondrous story of His tabernacling amongst us is an inestimable privilege and worthy of all the trouble we can possibly take."