History of Christmas

[Sullyute]

I listened to this podcast over the weekend and it was great. Here are some of the new things that I learned:

- Eastern Orthodox Church holds a tradition that there were 12 wise men
- The history of the Sol Invictus celebration on winter solstice.
- The twelve days of Christmas (or Christmastide) actually start after Christmas and go upto Epiphany (January 6).
- Christmas used to include ghost stories and is one reason why Dicken's "A Christmas Carol" has ghosts in it.
- King Henry VII of England banned Christmas.

I highly recommend you take a listen.

[Hanokh]

Response

I have more New Testament information to give about this, and will respond as UtahDan promised. I have been sick and now am scrambling to finish the semester's grading. I should get to a response tomorrow.

[Hanokh]

More information on "no room in the inn"

Sorry it took me so long to post this. I could have worded my response more precisely; what I meant is that we should not think of an inn in the medieval/modern sense. It was more like a caravansary or kahn, which is something between an inn and a campground. So, yes, “campground” isn’t the best translation, but neither is “inn”. There was a large central room, sometimes open, surrounded by stalls. The animals would be in the center and travelers would sleep on ledges a bit higher.

Here is some information by two of the premier scholars on these passages, Raymond Brown and Joseph Fitzmyer, as well as from the Oxford Bible Commentary:


“Jesus, cared for by his mother, is placed in a ‘manger’, which could be either a feeding trough or a cattle stall, because ‘there aws no room in the inn’. Luke uses the same word at 22:11 for the ‘guest chamter’ where the company is to eat the last supper. Jer 14:8 (LXX) uses the word when it laments that God is a stranger, like one who stays in a guest chamber for but a night. For Jesus, there is not room even in the guest-place; his birth points forward to the life of one who has nowhere to lay his head (9:58). No doubt the scene is infused with ideas taken from Isa. 1:3) (Oxford Bible Commentary)

Brown reviews different suggestions, including one similar to Moliere’s, but after pages of analysis concludes that we cannot tell whether Luke meant “a home, a room, or the inn” so he uses the vague “lodgings”. It is important to note that when he speaks of an “inn” he is referring to a caravansary. He does note that few scholars accept the idea of it happening in a home, and the definite article “the” would suggest it is not just “a room”. (Raymond Brown, Birth of the Messiah)

Notes from Fitzmyer:

“laid him in a manger. I.e. in a feeding trough for domesticated animals…It could have been in a barn or in some feeding place under the open sky, as the contrast with “lodge” in the rest of the verse would suggest…The verb aneklinen seems to call for the meaning , “manger.” No mention is made of animals in this text. Their presence in the Christmas cribs of later date is derived from Isa. 1:3. The tradition of Jesus’ birth in a “cave” is derived from the Prot. Jas. 18:1 [Proto-Gospel of James]…

“no room. The implication is that Mary and Joseph were not the only ones who have come to the town of David for the registration so that there was simply not space enough for all.

“in the lodge. In Luke 22:11 katalyma occurs again, to denote the “guestroom” where Jesus and his disciples eat the Last Supper. From the use there and here it is rather obvious that I does not mean an “inn”; furthermore, Luke uses the word pandocheion for that in 10:34. Actually, katalyma, a compound of kata + lyein, “loose,” denotes a place where one “lets down” one’s harness (or baggage) for the night…In 1 Sam 1:18 Elkanah and Hannah on their visit to the sanctuary of Shiloh stay in a katalyma (LXX), which may have influence Luke’s expression here. It should be understood as a public caravansary or kahn, where groups of travelers would spend the night under one roof.” (Joseph Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, 408)


We have to be careful when making arguments about plausibility in reference to Biblical materials. I am thinking of the argument that someone would not turn a pregnant woman away, or that a mother would not put her baby in a "dirty manger", etc. First, when discussing how people would act we need to remain acutely aware of the cultural attitudes at play, both ours and those of the time under discussion. We also need to understand the relationship of literature and history--at times writers strove for verisimilitude, but much more often they worried about that less and focused on their key literary points. Therefore we are better off seeking to understand what literary or theological points an author was making than how it happened in all its particulars.

Finally, UtahDan is right that we should keep in mind that the entire narratives are unlikely to be historical, simply because of the Bethlehem vs. Nazareth issue. In all likelihood, Jesus was born in the way babies were usually born back then, in Nazareth, with family members and perhaps a midwife present.

Yes, as Solon notes the tradition of Jesus at Bethlehem is earlier than the gospels, but because of the Micah prophecy Christians could have come up with that independently--the fact that Matthew and Luke both get Jesus to Bethlehem but *in different ways* is key here.

Not sure how much we want to get into this, but about "prophecies concerning Jesus", very few if any of those would have been applied during his life. What seems most probable is that when Jesus' earliest followers were stunned at his death, they searched the scriptures for understanding, and began applying biblical passages to him.

[UtahDan]

Hanokh, that was awesome. Thanks for taking the time to put that together.

[lambdacoug]

Sorry it took me so long to post this. I could have worded my response more precisely; what I meant is that we should not think of an inn in the medieval/modern sense. It was more like a caravansary or kahn, which is something between an inn and a campground. So, yes, “campground” isn’t the best translation, but neither is “inn”. There was a large central room, sometimes open, surrounded by stalls. The animals would be in the center and travelers would sleep on ledges a bit higher.

Here is some information by two of the premier scholars on these passages, Raymond Brown and Joseph Fitzmyer, as well as from the Oxford Bible Commentary:


“Jesus, cared for by his mother, is placed in a ‘manger’, which could be either a feeding trough or a cattle stall, because ‘there aws no room in the inn’. Luke uses the same word at 22:11 for the ‘guest chamter’ where the company is to eat the last supper. Jer 14:8 (LXX) uses the word when it laments that God is a stranger, like one who stays in a guest chamber for but a night. For Jesus, there is not room even in the guest-place; his birth points forward to the life of one who has nowhere to lay his head (9:58). No doubt the scene is infused with ideas taken from Isa. 1:3) (Oxford Bible Commentary)

Brown reviews different suggestions, including one similar to Moliere’s, but after pages of analysis concludes that we cannot tell whether Luke meant “a home, a room, or the inn” so he uses the vague “lodgings”. It is important to note that when he speaks of an “inn” he is referring to a caravansary. He does note that few scholars accept the idea of it happening in a home, and the definite article “the” would suggest it is not just “a room”. (Raymond Brown, Birth of the Messiah)

Notes from Fitzmyer:

“laid him in a manger. I.e. in a feeding trough for domesticated animals…It could have been in a barn or in some feeding place under the open sky, as the contrast with “lodge” in the rest of the verse would suggest…The verb aneklinen seems to call for the meaning , “manger.” No mention is made of animals in this text. Their presence in the Christmas cribs of later date is derived from Isa. 1:3. The tradition of Jesus’ birth in a “cave” is derived from the Prot. Jas. 18:1 [Proto-Gospel of James]…

“no room. The implication is that Mary and Joseph were not the only ones who have come to the town of David for the registration so that there was simply not space enough for all.

“in the lodge. In Luke 22:11 katalyma occurs again, to denote the “guestroom” where Jesus and his disciples eat the Last Supper. From the use there and here it is rather obvious that I does not mean an “inn”; furthermore, Luke uses the word pandocheion for that in 10:34. Actually, katalyma, a compound of kata + lyein, “loose,” denotes a place where one “lets down” one’s harness (or baggage) for the night…In 1 Sam 1:18 Elkanah and Hannah on their visit to the sanctuary of Shiloh stay in a katalyma (LXX), which may have influence Luke’s expression here. It should be understood as a public caravansary or kahn, where groups of travelers would spend the night under one roof.” (Joseph Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, 408)


We have to be careful when making arguments about plausibility in reference to Biblical materials. I am thinking of the argument that someone would not turn a pregnant woman away, or that a mother would not put her baby in a "dirty manger", etc. First, when discussing how people would act we need to remain acutely aware of the cultural attitudes at play, both ours and those of the time under discussion. We also need to understand the relationship of literature and history--at times writers strove for verisimilitude, but much more often they worried about that less and focused on their key literary points. Therefore we are better off seeking to understand what literary or theological points an author was making than how it happened in all its particulars.

Finally, UtahDan is right that we should keep in mind that the entire narratives are unlikely to be historical, simply because of the Bethlehem vs. Nazareth issue. In all likelihood, Jesus was born in the way babies were usually born back then, in Nazareth, with family members and perhaps a midwife present.

Yes, as Solon notes the tradition of Jesus at Bethlehem is earlier than the gospels, but because of the Micah prophecy Christians could have come up with that independently--the fact that Matthew and Luke both get Jesus to Bethlehem but *in different ways* is key here.

Not sure how much we want to get into this, but about "prophecies concerning Jesus", very few if any of those would have been applied during his life. What seems most probable is that when Jesus' earliest followers were stunned at his death, they searched the scriptures for understanding, and began applying biblical passages to him.

Thanks. That's quite a different story than we were fed by my dad on Christmas Eve. I nearly bit my bottom lip off to keep quiet and maintain the peace when he said that the Jesus birth story is "the most historically verified of all time".

[Moliere]

We have to be careful when making arguments about plausibility in reference to Biblical materials. I am thinking of the argument that someone would not turn a pregnant woman away, or that a mother would not put her baby in a "dirty manger", etc. First, when discussing how people would act we need to remain acutely aware of the cultural attitudes at play, both ours and those of the time under discussion. We also need to understand the relationship of literature and history--at times writers strove for verisimilitude, but much more often they worried about that less and focused on their key literary points. Therefore we are better off seeking to understand what literary or theological points an author was making than how it happened in all its particulars.

Thanks for the write up. I think this explains it all very well, which is to say there is no way to historically understand the passages so we have to understand them from a literary perspective, meaning we ask "what is the author trying to convey" by saying there wasn't room in the inn.

I still struggle with the notion that they were in a campsite or a temporary lodging given that Luke 2:6 seems to indicate they were in Bethlehem for at multiple days before the birth happened. But like I said, I guess it's impossible to divine exactly what happened and where.