{"id":2145,"date":"2023-11-24T17:09:41","date_gmt":"2023-11-24T23:09:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/2023\/11\/27\/jesus-was-not-born-in-a-stable-and-it-really-matters-psephizo\/"},"modified":"2023-11-27T17:10:42","modified_gmt":"2023-11-27T23:10:42","slug":"jesus-was-not-born-in-a-stable-and-it-really-matters-psephizo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/2023\/11\/24\/jesus-was-not-born-in-a-stable-and-it-really-matters-psephizo\/","title":{"rendered":"Jesus was not born in a stable\u2014and it really matters! | Psephizo"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Interesting and perhaps accurate (without your leadership team researching further). \u00a0However, the main point is to get the main point which is the birth of Jesus is of great importance and meaning to those of us who follow Him. \u00a0Whether he was born in a house or in a stable we should focus on welcoming Him into this world and into our hearts as well as becoming more like Him!<\/p>\n

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\"JesusWhat do you find most irritating about this time of year? The drawing in of dark and cold nights? The hideous adoption of that consumerist import \u2018Black Friday\u2019? People putting up Christmas trees when we have only just started Advent? Being urged to spend more money by means of schmaltzy human interest mini-dramas? For me, it is the repeated but ill-founded claim that Jesus was born in a stable, alone and isolated, with his family ostracised by the community\u2014despite the complete lack of evidence for this reconstruction. It will be repeated in pulpits, real and virtual, up and down the land, so I do not apologise for reposting once more this annual feature. Besides, my reposting this article has now become part of our annual celebrations\u2026! Picture Jesus\u2019 nativity . Bethlehem town sits still beneath the moonlight, totally unaware that the son of God has been born in one of its poor and lowly\u00a0outbuildings. In an anonymous backstreet, tucked away out of sight, we find a draughty stable. Inside, warm with the heat of the animals, a family sits quietly. Lit by a warm glow, a donkey, cow and an ox lie serene at the side of the scene. The cow breathes out\u00a0a gentle moo and the baby in the straw filled manger stirs. Kneeling close by Mary, Joseph and a small lamb sit in silent adoration of the child. All is calm, all is not quite right. I am sorry to spoil the scene, but Jesus wasn\u2019t born in a stable, and, curiously, the New Testament hardly even hints that this might have been the case. This might shatter the Christmas card scenes and cut out a few characters from the children\u2019s nativity line-up, but it\u2019s worth paying attention to. This long-held idea demonstrates just how much we read Scripture through the lens of our own assumptions, culture, and traditions, and how hard it can be to read well-known texts carefully, attending to what they actually say. It also highlights the power of traditions, and how resistant they are to change. And, specifically, the belief that Jesus was lonely and dejected, cast out amongst the animals and side-lined at his birth, loses sight of the way in which Jesus and his birth are a powerfully disruptive force, bursting in on the middle of ordinary life and offering the possibility of its transformation. So where has the idea come from? I would track the source to three things: traditional elaboration; issues of grammar and meaning;and unfamiliarity with first-century Palestinian culture. The traditional \u00a0 elaboration \u00a0has come about from reading the story through a \u2018messianic\u2019 understanding of Is 1.3: The ox knows its master, the donkey its owner\u2019s manger, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand. The mention of a \u2018manger\u2019 in Luke\u2019s nativity story, suggesting animals, led mediaeval illustrators to depict the ox and the ass recognising the baby Jesus, so the natural setting was a stable\u2014after all, isn\u2019t that where animals are kept? (Answer: not necessarily!) The \u00a0issue of grammar and meaning , and perhaps the heart of the matter, is the translation of the Greek word\u00a0 kataluma\u00a0 in Luke 2.7. Older versions translate this as \u2018inn\u2019: And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn . (AV). There is\u00a0 some \u00a0reason for doing this; the word is used in the Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint, LXX) to translate a term for a public place of hospitality (eg in Ex 4.24 and 1 Samuel 9.22). And the etymology of the word is quite general. It comes from\u00a0 kataluo\u00a0 meaning to unloose or untie, that is, to unsaddle one\u2019s horses and untie one\u2019s pack. But some fairly decisive evidence in the opposite direction comes from its use elsewhere. It is the term for the private \u2018upper\u2019 room where Jesus and the disciples eat the \u2018last supper\u2019 (Mark 14.14 and Luke 22.11; Matthew does not mention the room). This is clearly a reception room in a private home. And when Luke does mention an \u2018inn\u2019, in the parable of the man who fell among thieves (Luke 10.34), he uses the more general term\u00a0 pandocheion , meaning a place in which all (travellers) are received, a caravanserai. The difference is made clear in this pair of definitions: Kataluma (Gr.) \u2013 \u201cthe spare or upper room in a private house or in a village [\u2026] where travelers received hospitality and where no payment was expected\u201d (ISBE 2004). A private lodging which is distinct from that in a public inn, i.e. caravanserai, or khan. Pandocheion , pandokeion , pandokian (Gr.) \u2013 (i) In 5th C. BC Greece an inn used for the shelter of strangers (pandokian=\u2019all receiving\u2019). The pandokeion had a common refectory and dormitory, with no separate rooms allotted to individual travelers (Firebaugh 1928). The\u00a0 third issue \u00a0relates to our understanding, or rather ignorance, of (you guessed it) the\u00a0historical and social context\u00a0of the story. In the first place, it would be unthinkable that Joseph, returning to his place of ancestral origins, would not have been received by family members, even if they were not close relatives. Kenneth Bailey, who is renowned for his studies of first-century Palestinian culture,\u00a0comments: Even if he has never been there before he can appear suddenly at the home of a distant cousin, recite his genealogy, and he is among friends. Joseph had only to say, \u201cI am Joseph, son of Jacob, son of Matthan, son of Eleazar, the son of Eliud,\u201d and the immediate response must have been, \u201cYou are welcome. What can we do for you?\u201d If Joseph did have some member of the extended family resident in the village, he was honor-bound to seek them out. Furthermore, if he did not have family or friends in the village, as a member of the famous house of David, for the \u201csake of David,\u201d he would still be welcomed into almost any village home. Moreover, the actual design of Palestinian homes (even to the present day) makes sense of the whole story. As Bailey explores in his\u00a0 Jesus Through Middle-Eastern Eyes , most families would live in a single-room house, with a lower compartment for animals to be brought in at night, and either a room at the back for visitors, or space on the roof. The family living area would usually have hollows in the ground, filled with hay, in the living area, where the animals would feed. This kind of one-room living with animals in the house at night is evident in a couple of places in the gospels. In Matt 5.15, Jesus comments: Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. This makes no sense unless everyone lives in the one room! And in Luke\u2019s account of Jesus healing a woman on the sabbath (Luke 13.10\u201317), Jesus comments: Doesn\u2019t each of you on the Sabbath untie your ox or donkey from the manger [same word as Luke 2.7] and lead it out to give it water? Interestingly, none of Jesus\u2019 critics respond, \u2018No I don\u2019t touch animals on the Sabbath\u2019 because they all would have had to lead their animals from the house. In fact, one late manuscript variant reads \u2018lead it out\u00a0 from the house\u00a0 and give it water.\u2019 What, then, does it mean for the\u00a0 kataluma \u00a0to have \u2018no space\u2019? It means that many, like Joseph and Mary, have travelled to Bethlehem, and the family guest room is already full, probably with other relatives who arrived earlier. So Joseph and Mary must stay with the family itself, in the main room of the house, and there Mary gives birth. The most natural place to lay the baby is in the hay-filled depressions at the lower end of the house where the animals are fed. The idea that they were in a stable, away from others, alone and outcast, is grammatically and culturally implausible. In fact, it is hard to be alone at all in such contexts. Bailey amusingly cites an early researcher: Anyone who has lodged with Palestinian peasants knows that notwithstanding their hospitality the lack of privacy is unspeakably painful. One cannot have a room to oneself, and one is never alone by day or by night. I myself often fled into the open country simply in order to be able to think In the Christmas story, Jesus is not sad and lonely, some distance away in the stable, needing our sympathy. Rather, he is in the midst of the family, and all the visiting relations, right in the thick of it and demanding our attention. This should fundamentally change our approach to enacting and preaching on the nativity. But one last question remains. This, informed and persuasive, understanding of the story has been around, even in Western scholarship, for a long, long time. Bailey cites William Thomson, a Presbyterian missionary to Lebanon, Syria and Palestine, who wrote in 1857: It is my impression that the birth actually took place in an ordinary house of some common peasant, and that the baby was laid in one of the mangers, such as are still found in the dwellings of farmers in this region. And Bailey notes that Alfred Plummer, in his influential ICC commentary, originally published in the late nineteenth century, agreed with this. So why has the wrong, traditional interpretation persisted for so long? I think there are two main causes. In the first place, we find it very difficult to read the story in its own cultural terms, and constantly impose our own assumptions about life. Where do you keep animals? Well, if you live in the West, especially in an urban context, away from the family of course! So that is where Jesus must have been\u2014despite the experience of many who live in rural settings. I remembering noticing the place for cattle underneath the family home in houses in Switzerland. Secondly, it is easy to underestimate how powerful a hold tradition has on our reading of Scripture. Dick France explores this issue alongside other aspects of preaching on the infancy narratives in in his excellent chapter in\u00a0 We Proclaim the Word of Life.\u00a0 He\u00a0relates his own experience of the effect of this: [T]o advocate this understanding is to pull the rug from under not only many familiar carols (\u2018a lowly cattle shed\u2019; \u2018a draughty stable with an open door\u2019) but also a favourite theme of Christmas preachers: the ostracism of the Son of God from human society, Jesus the refugee. This is subversive stuff. When I first started advocating Bailey\u2019s interpretation, it was picked up by a Sunday newspaper and then reported in various radio programmes as a typical example of theological wrecking, on a par with that then notorious debunking of the actuality of the resurrection by the Bishop of Durham! So is it worth challenging people\u2019s assumptions? Yes, it is, if you think that what people need to hear is the actual story of Scripture, rather than the tradition of a children\u2019s play. France continues: The problem with the stable is that it distances Jesus from the rest of us. It puts even his birth in a unique setting, in some ways as remote from life as if he had been born in Caesar\u2019s Palace. But the message of the incarnation is that Jesus is one of us. He came to be what we are, and it fits well with that theology that his birth in fact took place in a normal, crowded, warm, welcoming Palestinian home, just like many another Jewish boy of his time. And who knows? People might even start asking questions about how we read the Bible and understand it for ourselves! If you would like to see how it might be possible to re-write the Christmas story for all ages in a way which is faithful to this, see this excellent example from Stephen Kuhrt. I preached on this theme at a Carol Service, and you can read my sermon here. Additional note I am grateful to Mark Goodacre for drawing my attention to an excellent paper on this by Stephen Carlson, then one of his colleagues at Duke. The paper was published in NTS in 2010, but is available on Carlson\u2019s blog for free. Carlson presses the argument even further by arguing three points: 1. He looks widely at the use of\u00a0 kataluma \u00a0and in particular notes that in the Septuagint (LXX, the Greek translation of the OT from Hebrew in the second century BC) it translates a wide variety of Hebrew terms for \u2018places to stay.\u2019 He thus goes further than Bailey, agreeing that it does not mean inn, but instead that it refers to any place that was used as lodgings. 2. He looks in detail at the phrase often translated \u2018there was no room for them in the\u00a0 kataluma \u2018 and argues that the Greek phrase\u00a0 ouch en\u00a0autois topos \u00a0does not mean \u2018there was no room\u00a0 for \u00a0them\u2019 but \u2018they had no room.\u2019 In other words, he thinks that they\u00a0 did \u00a0stay in the\u00a0 kataluma , but that it was not big enough for Mary to give birth to Jesus in, so she moved to the main room for the birth, assisted by relatives. 3. He believes that Bethlehem was not Joseph\u2019s ancestral home, but his actual family home, for two reasons. Firstly, we have no record of any Roman census requiring people return to their\u00a0 ancestral \u00a0home. Secondly, he argues that the phrase in Luke 2.39 \u2018to a town of their own, Nazareth\u2019 doesn\u2019t imply that they were returning to their home town, but that they then made this their home. We already know this is Mary\u2019s home town, and it would be usual for the woman to travel to the man\u2019s home town (Joseph\u2019s Bethlehem) to complete the betrothal ceremonies. After Jesus is born, they then return together to set up home near Mary\u2019s family. The\u00a0 kataluma \u00a0was therefore in all likelihood the extra accommodation, possibly just a single room, perhaps built on the roof of Joseph\u2019s family\u2019s home for the new couple. Having read this, I realised that I had stayed in just such a roof-room, jerry-built on the roof of a hotel in the Old City of Jerusalem, in the lee of the Jaffa Gate, in 1981. It was small, and there was certainly no room to give birth in it! (You can stay there too, by booking here. The site includes the view we had from the roof!)<\/p>\n

This content was originally published here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Interesting and perhaps accurate (without your leadership team researching further). \u00a0However, the main point is to get the main point which is the birth of Jesus is of great importance and meaning to those of us who follow Him. \u00a0Whether he was born in a house or in a stable we should focus on welcoming […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2147,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kHU7-yB","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/thelight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/Jesus-was-not-born-in-a-stable%E2%80%94and-it-really-matters-Psephizo.jpeg?fit=1200%2C812","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2145"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2148,"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2145\/revisions\/2148"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}