From Christianity Today
No Room in the What?
Mary and Joseph weren't trying to check into a hotel—they were staying with relatives.
Ben Witherington III | posted 12/19/2007 09:03AM
I am here to tamper with a masterpiece, or better said, to share with you a rather different reading of Luke 2:1-7, one solidly grounded in the facts, but nowhere represented in Christmas carols and pageants. I must tell you that I have heard endless sermons on how there was "no room in the inn" and how it was typical of a cold, fallen world to cast the holy family and Jesus out into the cold, and so on, often preached with great fervor but producing no ferment at all.
We've heard it countless times before. We've all been inoculated with a slight case of Christmas, preventing us from getting the real thing, or in this case, from reading these texts in a more historical way. The problem with the Christmas-pageant version is, this is not at all likely to be what Luke intends to tell us in this much beloved and belabored Christmas tale.
When it came time for Mary to deliver the baby, the Greek of Luke's text says, "she wrapped him in cloth and laid him in a corn crib, as there was no room in the guest room."
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I had heard that it was generally a polite thing on behalf of a town for people to accommodate travellers, and there weren't actually "inns" as such.
ReplyDeleteThere were inns. I think Bethlehem at that time was too small to require an inn. In any event since it was Joseph's ancestral home town, family members would have been honour-bound to take them in.
ReplyDelete