So exactly where was the manger"

Of course, there was no donkey.  Neither was Jesus born the very night Mary and Joseph arrived in Bethlehem.  And no cave, either.

We have the anonymous author of the Protevangelium of James to blame for this first recorded misinterpretation of the nativity of Jesus, the first of many. 

For the record James the brother of Jesus had nothing to do with it - the manuscript is dated to about 200 AD.  Moreover whoever wrote it was not a Jew and clearly lacked any  understanding of Palestinian geography. For example, the road between Jerusalem and Bethlehem is not a desert as he claimed, but rich farmland.

So Luke in his account gives no sense of rush as the cadence in Authorised Version makes clear:  “And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.” (Luke 2:6)

The point is that our popular understanding of the birth of Jesus is deeply flawed, reinforced each year by a myriad of nativity plays. How many of you, I wonder, have played the innkeeper or the innkeeper’s wife?  In some productions, Bethlehem seems to have had many inns as Blackpool!

There seems to be a deep-seated need to fill out the details from the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke. We want to know more than what their accounts give. 

And more, to experience them through our own Western culture. 

I’m currently reading the excellent Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes by Kenneth E Bailey, an American scholar whose childhood was in Egypt and with a long ministry in Beirut and Jerusalem, and his insights into the culture of the region turn many of our cherished understandings on their head!

He tells us, for example, that in the Middle East historical memories are long and the extended family with its connection to the village of origin is strong.  “In such a world a man like Joseph could have appeared in Bethlehem and told people ‘I am Joseph, son of Heli, son of Matthat, the son of Levi’ and most homes in town would be open to him.”

Even more so because  Joseph would have been known as ‘a royal’ from his lineage from King David, when Bethlehem was known locally as “the city of David.”  He would have been welcome anywhere in town. 

Moreover, “simple rural communities the world over always assist one of their own women in childbirth regardless of the circumstances.”  Bailey argues that to turn away a descendant of David in the city of David would be an unspeakable shame to the entire village.  Mary and Joseph would have been given all the support they needed. 

So why the manger?

For Luke this is an important detail – he mentions the manger no less than three times.  Bailey relates that for the Western mind the word manger invokes the word stable or barn, the animals are somewhere else than where we are. Obvious.  But not so in the Bethlehem of Mary and Joseph, where the animals would live in the same  two room house with their owners. 

It seems that one room was used exclusively for guests, either at the end of the house or on the roof, while the family cooked, ate, slept and lived in the main room, with a lower end, sloping away, where their cow, donkey and a few sheep would spend the night.  Here the manger would be situated, often hollowed out of stone. 

So where does the definitive phrase “No room in the inn” come in?  However, here we are relying on the wrong English translation for the Greek word katalyma.  There’s a perfectly good name for an inn, pandocheion, which Luke uses in the parable of the Good Samaritan, but not here. 

It is the katalyma  which is crowded?  But where is it?

We are given an important clue in that this is the word Luke uses when Jesus organises his last supper.  He tells his disciples to ask: “Where is the katalyma , where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?’  Here Jesus is referring to the guest room in a private house. 

“Mary wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.” (Luke 2:7 NIV version).  Luke tells his readers that Jesus was placed in a manger in the family room because the katalyma was already full, presumably because of the census. 

So enter the shepherds.

No one trusted shepherds, and you kept your distance should they make you ritually unclean and so be excluded from worshipping with God's people.  They were the classic outsiders, the underclass.  They may even have been, like David centuries earlier, older children, who would naturally run to the manger. 

So Luke concludes: “The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.” (Luke 2:20)

Bailey comments:  “The word all obviously included the quality of the hospitality.   that they witnessed on their arrival.  Clearly they found the holy family in perfectly adequate accommodation, not in a dirty stable.”  The whole honour of the village would depend on this. 

But the point is that the outcasts became honoured guests to an ordinary peasant home, an extraordinary birth in an ordinary situation with ordinary people.  That’s how God works in his world. For us.