From: msmorris@watsci.UWaterloo.ca (Mike Morris)
Subject: Re: Born in Bethlehem?
Organization: University of Waterloo
Date: Sun, 27 Dec 1992 05:23:29 GMT

                                    Saturday, the 26th of December, 1992

Joseph O'Rourke wrote:
  A. N. Wilson says in "Jesus: A Life" that it is extremely unlikely
  that Jesus was born in Bethlehem.  Even if one takes everything in
  the Bible as literally true, the birth in a stable remains pure
  myth.  It is not mentioned in any of the Gospels.

I replied:
  Huh? 
   ``And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in
     swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was
     no room for them in the inn.'' [Luke 2.7, King James Version]

  The word for ``manger'', or _phatne_, according to Liddell and Scott,
  comes probably from _pateomai_, ``to eat''. I.e., a feeding trough.

And Joseph responded:
  Wilson addresses this passage on p.80 of his book:
	"To Luke we owe the charming detail that when Jesus had
	been born, his mother laid him in a manger, though the
	idea that Jesus was born in a stable belongs to folk-tale
	rather than to the New Testament.  Luke says that Mary laid 
	her first-born son in a manger since there was no place
	(*topos*) in the *kataluma*.  This is a Greek word which more 
	often means 'room' than 'inn.'  Luke never states that
	Mary and Joseph were staying at an inn, still less an inn
	where there was no room for them, still less that they were
	therefore obliged to sleep that night in a stable.  He merely
	says that the particular room in which Jesus was born did
	not have a cradle in it.  One is presumably meant to 
	understand that someone improvised, bringing a feeding-box 
	for animals into the room, as a substitute for a cradle." 

Curiouser and curiouser, Joseph. I assumed from this that you
were probably right---or rather, Wilson was, and that one could make
of it what one wanted, but I wanted to have one last check with the Greek,
and here is what I found [Luke 2:7]:

   kai      eteken       ton      huion     autes  
  (and      she bore     the      son       of her)

   ton    prototokon     kai      esparganosen   auton
  (the    firstborn      and      she swathed    him)

   kai    aneklinen   auton        en       phatne,
  (and    laid        him          in       manger)

   dioti      ouk       en              autois      topos
  (because    not       there was       for them    place)

   en       to       katalumati.
  (in       the      inn.)

OK, that relies on my _NIV Interlinear Greek-English New Testament_
(literal English translation by Rev. Alfred Marshall, Zondervan Publishing,
Grand Rapids).  Liddell and Scott (*the* _Greek-English Lexicon_, as far
as I know, though no doubt when it comes to biblical Greek, there's a lot
more to be had---Dean Liddell was Lewis Carroll's Alice's dad, by the way)
as I said derive _phatne_ from _pateomai_, literally ``I
eat'', and they say _phatne_ is ``a manger, crib, feeding-trough''
and that the word is to be found in Homer, Herodotus, and in Attic
Greek. Anyway, I assume that, if crib were meant, it is a corn-crib,
because the angel says the swaddling clothes and the manger are supposed
to be a *sign* to the shepherds---i.e. they must be something unusual
for a baby to be found in. Anyway, Wilson seems to agree with that much.

But there's that dative of _kataluma_ in the last clause. I had looked
this up actually before I posted earlier, and had simply dismissed it
as uninteresting. Liddell and Scott say that _kataluma_ means ``an
inn, lodging'' and ascribe it to New Testament Greek. The etymology
points to the verb _kataluo_, which means either I. ``to put down,
to destroy'' or II. ``to take up one's quarters, to lodge'', i.e. clearly
meaning II. here. OK, so ``inn'' or ``room'' I confess I don't know.

But notice the word _autois_, ``for them''. I actually hadn't expected that
that would be there in the Greek, instead that we would be left dangling
not knowing whether there wasn't _topos_ for *him*, or for *them*. But,
surprisingly this is clearly a dative plural.
Singular would have been _auto_ (here the _o_ transcribes
an omega with an iota subscript, whereas _autois_ ends in omicron iota
sigma, so there is more than letter that would have to change for
there to have been a transcription error at the root of it---though
granted, that sounds easy enough).

Well, maybe, I thought, the passage was in dispute. So, I turned to
the slightly different gun of my _Greek New Testament_ (edited by
Kurt Aland, Matthew Black, Carlo M. Martini, Bruce M. Metzger, and
Allen Wikgren, in coop. with the Institute for New Testament Textual
Research, Munster/Westphalia, Third Edition, United Bible Societies).
This thing has a system whereby disputed passages are footnoted with a
rating, A through D, where A=nearly certainly the correct reading and
D=nearly certainly the incorrect reading, and then it'll list which
manuscripts support what variant reading. Luke 2:7, though,
has no footnote, indicating that there isn't any (or much) question
about it. Just for fun, I looked up in the lexicon in the back of this
book, and found for _kataluma_, ``room, guest room; inn''.

Taking either ``room'' or ``inn'', though, it still seems to say
there wasn't any place for *them* in it.  My conclusion from this is that
the idea of them spending the night in a stable or somesuch uncomfortable
place like it in which feeding troughs might be found counts as a pretty
reasonable inference from the text (though I well acknowledge that it
doesn't actually *say* they stayed in a stable).

                          Mike Morris
                  (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)


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