My Idea of Jesus's Birth. The Stable and the Manger.

Here's an aspect to the Jesus birth story that I thought was interesting.

According to biblical scholars Jesus was indeed born in Bethlehem and that Mary and Joseph were there visiting. But rather than an inn, where observant Jews would not stay, they were likely housed in a private home, presumably with friends or relatives. But were they unceremoniously sent out to the barnyard? That's how we tend to interpret it in modern times, but actually the situation seems to be that since the house was crowded, probably from other visitors, they were put up in the lower level where some of the household animals were kept. To us it seems strange, but to a society which was 90% agrarian, and in which farm animals were very valuable, keeping them in the house was ordinary and routine.

It's not so strange to me either, and here's why. The house pictured on my home page is very special to me because it is the ages old stone house on a plot of farmland where my father told me he was born in Palazzo, a little town in the plain below the breathtakingly beautiful city of Assisi. He was brought to Scranton by his father in 1906 at age 18 months, and finally went back for a visit in the 1970's to see his cousin who was still living there. He visited the old house which was then occupied by a tenant farmer who evidently was still using oxen to plow the fields since he showed me pictures of the animals, sure enough on the ground floor, what the Italians call pianterreno. The family lived on the upstairs level. My dad told me there was no heat in the house, the climate being something like Northern California, but the animals gave off a lot of heat which rose upward in the cooler months.

I finally got to visit the house in the early 1990's. At that point it was unoccupied since it had been damaged in an earthquake, and I didn't try going upstairs but I did open the door, which was a little off kilter, to look around the pianterreno. It was empty, stone plastered walls, and sure enough, along one wall, the feeding trough, or if you'd like, the manger. So, in a pinch, to people of that time, being put up in a room downstairs, near the animals, wouldn't seem so strange.

So this place, now completely boarded up, which still chokes me up to visit, gives me a bit of an idea of what the scene might have been like in the countryside around Bethlehem, 2 millennia ago, when the one we celebrate today was born.

 

 

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