PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE - - MARK ROTH - -12/20/95
All over Pittsburgh this Sunday, the Christmas story once again will be acted out in churches large and small, as children don shepherds' bathrobes and sprout cardboard angels' wings.
While there may be a few variations - infant girls playing the baby Jesus here, live animals there - the story itself will be as familiar and ecumenical as any Christian tradition.
Too bad it's not true.
Or, to put it in Dr. Kenneth E. Bailey's terms, too bad that the traditional Christmas story is filled with so many myths and misinterpretations.
Bailey is a research professor of Middle Eastern New Testament studies at Tantur Ecurnenical Institute in Jerusalem. A resident of Cyprus, he grew up in the Middle East and has spent his life studying the Bible and other religious texts in their original Hebrew, Greek Aramaic and SyIiac.
I encountered Ken Bailey's insights only recently, when I viewed a provocative series of his videotapes, "A Clear View of Jesus' Birth."
As a Presbyterian elder and the husband of a Presbyterian minister, I found his message especially meaningful at a time when much of the population hasn't seen the inside of a church for years, and the rest often don't seem to think they are reading the same Bible as the Christian next door.
His message, stripped to its essentials, is this: The stories in the Bible are true. Our interpretations often aren't. And the Christmas story that we know and love, Ken Bailey says, is not exactly the one told in the Bible.
Many people would swear that the Bible tells the story of a cruelly indifferent innkeeper turning Joseph and Mary away "because there was no place for them in the inn." Certainly many a Christmas pageant tonight will have a thespian innkeeper, imperiously banishing the holy family to the lowly stable.
In fact, however, only one of the four Gospels-Luke-even tells this story, and it doesn't say a word about an innkeeper. And while Luke does say there was "no room for them in the inn," Bailey has unusual interpretation of that phrase.
He notes that the Greek word used for "inn" in the birth story is not the word used elsewhere in the New Testament to refers to conventional inns, like the place where the Good Samaritan takes the bloodied traveler in Jesus' parable.
Based on his knowledge of Middle Eastern village life, Bailey contends that it would have been highly unlikely that Joseph and Mary would have traveled to Bethlehem, the home of Joseph's ancestors, and not been offered a place to stay by one of his relatives.
The story in Luke also says that "while they were [in Bethlehem], the time came for her to deliver her child."
Most Christmas pageants have Joseph and Mary pulling up to the door of the stable just in time for her water to break. But Bailey believes, based on that verse, that it's more likely the couple were in Bethlehem for days or weeks before her delivery, making it all the more plausible that they' would have stayed with relatives.
And what of the stable? Simple, says Bailey. It was in the house.
Most Middle Eastern peasant homes were designed so that the ground floor area just inside the door was used as a place to keep the family livestock at night.
The people in the house lived in an adjacent single room, built a few feet higher. This had two advantages. The people would keep it clean by sweeping everything down into the "stable," and the animals could be easily fed by cutting niches into the edge of the platform that constituted the people's living space.
These niches, filled with fodder, were the mangers of the Christmas story, Bailey believes.
And so, he says, here is what actually happened:
Mary and Joseph traveled to Bethlehem weeks or days before .Jesus' birth, stayed with relatives, and then, when Mary's labor pains began, they moved down into the stable portion of the house for the delivery, because the guest room (the "inn") was occupied, probably by still other relatives who had come for the Roman census described in Luke.
Poof goes the heartless innkeeper. Poof the ostracized young couple.
And Bailey doesn't stop there.
He suggests, for instance, that the angels revealed the birth of Jesus to shepherds, before anyone else, for the very reason that shepherds were a socially disreputable group, like those the grown-up Jesus would spend much of his time with.
And he says that Joseph probably took Mary with him to Bethlehem not because she needed to be physically present for the census, but because she could have been harmed or killed by fellow Nazarenes incensed by her premature pregnancy.
As Bailey speaks into the camera, without props or special effects, it's been fascinating to watch people's reactions. In one adult Sunday School class this year, it seemed half the listeners were stimulated and maybe even delighted. The other half appeared perplexed. A few were downright angry.
"It just seems like he's trying to nit-pick said one man. "He seems like he's running it down," complained a woman.
He hasn't set out to overturn Scripture, he tells his listeners. The problem over the and embellished the original stories without an understanding of the culture and language in which they were written.
Only when those gauzy eons of misapprehension are pulled away, he says, will the real Christmas story emerge-that God family that welcomed him, to outcasts who honored him.
Mark Roth is the Post-Gazette assistant managing editor for special projects. "A Clear View of Jesus' Birth," a set of four videotapes, can be purchased from Harvest Communications Inc. in Wichita, Kan. They also can be taken out on loan from the Pittsburgh Presbytery Resource Center.