The seventh episode of the first season of the Retelling the Bible Podcast was posted on November 22, 2017. You can listen to the episode and subscribe to the podcast by following one of these links or by searching for the podcast on your favourite platform:

SHOW NOTES

This episode is based on Luke 2:1-6 in the New Testament of the Bible. (Click the references to read the original story). Any direct biblical quotations in the episode are taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

Here are a few of my thoughts on the episode.

The arrival in Bethlehem

Everybody thinks that they know what the arrival of Mary and Joseph looked like. Luke, in his gospel, describes it with only a few words, saying that there was no room for them in the inn, but we all think we know exactly what that means. We have all seen the movies and the plays and the Christmas pageants.

The picture that we conjure up is a large city bustling with many travelers, all of them in town for the census. The local inn is, of course, all filled up and poor Mary and Joseph have a conversation with an over-wrought but sympathetic innkeeper. All he can offer them is space in the stable out back.

It’s a lovely picture, but there are all kinds of problems with it. First of all, the archaeological evidence from the time indicates that Bethlehem was anything but an important town. At most, it seems to have been a rural village or even just a very sparsely inhabited rural area. There was no inn in Bethlehem — at least not the kind of inn that we would imagine. In such an area, there would have been no market for the kind of commercial establishment that we imagine.

At the same time, the idea of Bethlehem being crowded with travelers really doesn’t make much sense. Luke does not say in his account that everyone went to Bethlehem. He says that everyone went to their own towns. Bethlehem would have had no more travelers than any other place according to that description.

Fortunately, the way that we imagine it is not actually the way that Luke describes it. The word that he uses, the word that is translated as inn, does not mean what we think it

means. The word that he uses, in Greek, is the word katalyma and that word does not usually refer to a commercial establishment. It refers to any kind of space, usually in a private home, where travelers might be allowed to lay down their belongings while on a journey. The word refers to welcoming someone into your home with hospitality, not charging them for a room at a Motel 6.

So, while it seems very unlikely that Mary and Joseph would have been turned away from a bustling local Days Inn, it is quite conceivable that they could have been denied hospitality in a private home.

So where did the idea of an inn come from?

The one element that causes confusion in the Gospel and that may have made people imagine a commercial establishment, is Luke’s unexpected use of a definite article when speaking of the place. He writes, “there was no room for them in the katalyma.” Something like, “there was no place in any katalyma,” would seem to make more sense in the context.

The use of the definite article seems to imply that we, the readers, should know exactly which place the writer is referring to. This has led people to assume that there was some kind of famous inn in the town of Bethlehem that all of Luke’s early readers would have known about. But, as I said, we now know that that’s just not the case.

So, is there a reason why Luke would use the definite article other than to refer to some famous inn? Well, given my understanding that Luke is speaking specifically about Joseph returning to the house that had once belonged to his family, and that perhaps the family had owned that property within a few generations, it does make sense to assume that Mary and Joseph were seeking hospitality within a specific house, within the katalyma of the house that had once belonged to Joseph’s family. That understanding is what let me to the dialogue that I present in this episode.

Where were mangers to be found

There has been a great deal of speculation over the years about the manger in which Luke says Mary laid her baby. Christian tradition has tended to locate that manger in a stable or perhaps in a cave. This tradition is primarily based on agricultural practices within the societies that tell the story or create depictions of it. Of course Luke tells us absolutely nothing about where the manger was.

Archaeologists and historians of ancient Palestine have told us that rural homes at that period of time often included a space on the ground level that would have housed domesticated animals. The family would have lived and slept on an upper level and it would have also been on that upper level that you would find a space that could have accommodated guests: a katalyma. So it is quite possible that what Luke is saying is that, while Mary and Joseph were denied proper hospitality on the human level of the dwelling, they were at least accommodated on the animal level of the house.

That is certainly a good possible reading of the story but, for dramatic reasons and in order to fully illustrate the serious breach in hospitality that Luke is talking about in this passage, I have chosen not to locate the manger underneath the roof of the household where the couple is seeking shelter. The main point that Luke is trying to make, clearly, is that Mary and Joseph were not offered proper hospitality. This was a scandalous idea in that time and place. My feeling was that to locate the manger out of doors was the best way to illustrate the depth of scandal that Luke is portraying.

Media and acknowledgments

“AhDah” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

“Ascending the Vale” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ The text of this episode has also been published in my book, “Caesars Census, God’s Jubilee.” The book is an examination of the entire Nativity Story as told in the Gospel of Luke and as contrasted with the rather different Nativity Story that is told in the Gospel of Matthew. The book is available in paperback through Amazon and the e-book is available in many places where e-books are sold. See the links below: Amazon.ca link

Amazon.com link

Kobo link

Smashwords link And, finally, here is a video version of this story from an old Nativity pageant: