Daniel Rops

"Little" Israel

"Christ, who was to change the face and heart of the world, lived out his human life in a very small country. The traveler to Palestine, accustomed subconsciously to magnify everything connected with Jesus, is astonished to find how short are the distances and how insignificant the towns. 

Capernaum and Nazareth are not more than a day's journey apart, the distance from Jericho to Jerusalem is barely thirty miles. A motor car can easily cross Palestine from north to south in a day's journey, an airplane can fly from east to west in a quarter of an hour. 

This small compartment of the world, whose renown eclipses the magnitude of continents, is barely the size of the province of Brittany in France."