Troublesome Topic: MY SPECULATIVE RECONSTRUCTION OF WHERE JESUS WAS BORN
Luke 2:7
Translation
And she brought forth her son, the firstborn,
Go to footnote numberand wrapped him in strips of cloth,
Go to footnote numberand laid Him in a manger because there was room for them in the guest room.
Paraphrase
And she gave birth to her son, the one with all the privileges and the most responsibility, and she wrapped him in long rags, and laid him in a feeding trough. She did this because there was no room for them in the guest room.
Joseph and Mary got to Bethlehem later than most other travelers. Joseph looked and asked, but he could find no relatives to take them in, and all other houses were full too, therefore he found an overhanging rock, a partial cave, close enough to the town of Bethlehem to still be called Bethlehem, and they found shelter in it until the baby was born. This partial cave was not attached to a house like those in town would have been but it was being used by animals at this time because all the extra people in town for the census had caused over-crowding. It had been set up long ago with feeding toughs and places to tie animals to keep them from running off. So the owner of this land made his “cave” available during the census and would send young boys to take animals there or retrieve animals from there. The owner of this land was one of the people that the shepherds shared with about the amazing birth and the appearance of the angels. The landowner probably gave Jesus a visit after the shepherds had left him.
In the days after the birth of Jesus, Joseph fixed the place up the best he could. He probably brought his tools with him. We can picture him putting his skills to good use to protect his little family from the elements. Maybe he put a face on this “cave” so that it no longer looked like a cave but more like a house built into the cliff. Maybe he just fixed things up inside so that once you were on the inside it did not look much like a cave. I picture the landowner letting them stay there after the census was taken and it was no longer needed to house animals. If he fixed it up as much as possible, and if they were allowed to stay there, Justin Martyr and other early church fathers were right to say the wise men visited Him in a cave, and Matthew was right to call it a house.
Once Joseph took his family to Egypt and then to Nazareth, the structure he had built fell into disrepair quite quickly and that is why no one knows where it is today (and it is good that we don’t).
Footnotes
1: “the firstborn”
The author did not have to tell the reader that Jesus was her firstborn child; that is obvious from the fact that she was a virgin. However, it is mentioned to indicate he would have responsibilities and privileges that were not held by all sons. There were societal expectations that he would be a leader, at least in his own family, and possibly beyond that.
2: “strips of cloth”
We are familiar with the term “swaddling clothes,” but what does that mean? It means nothing more than strips of cloth that have been torn from old, unusable garments. It comes from a Greek word that means, among other things, “to tear.” They did not let anything go to waste, so they kept old clothes and reused them as rags in general or for more specific purposes. Mary was prepared; she brought with her what she would need to wrap the baby up after he was born. From what I see in the commentaries, wrapping a newborn baby in strips of cloth was the norm. However, even though it was normal, it had profound significance in the case of Jesus. The use of such strips of cloth was seldom mentioned precisely because it was common. The fact that it was mentioned here called attention to it in a way that tells us there are lessons to be learned from it. 1) The King of the Universe was “clothed” for a time in leftover garments that had been torn into rags. 2) The same type of rags, when they had served their usefulness as rags, were used for one last thing—what the Bible calls “menstrual rags,” fulfilling the role filled in our culture by tampons and feminine pads. 3) What did they do to prepare a dead body for burial? They wrapped it in strips of cloth. Therefore, the statement that he was wrapped in strips of cloth is yet another way the story highlights the realities that the coming of Jesus was characterized by humility, was surrounded by filth and nastiness, and had one purpose—He was born so He could die. Some of these things are characteristic of all human life, but we usually don’t say those things about God. These are additional ways that prove that God fully became human in every way except for one, He did not sin.