Biblical Scholar Discounts Legend : ‘No Room at Inn’ Story of Jesus’ Birth Doubted

A Roman Catholic researcher doubts the New Testament account that Christ was born in a stable on a cold winter’s night because there was no room in the inn at Bethlehem.

The legend has little to do with what actually happened 2,000 years ago, said Father Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, a prominent Bible scholar.

For one thing, he said on a recent walking tour of Bethlehem, that he doubts St. Luke’s account that Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth and moved to Bethlehem, Joseph’s hometown, during the final stages of Mary’s pregnancy in order to be counted in a census.

Conflicting Facts

Luke had to reconcile two conflicting facts--that Jesus was born in Bethlehem but that the family home was in Nazareth, said Murphy-O’Connor, originally of Ireland and now a professor at the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise in Jerusalem. He also is the author of an archeological guide, “The Holy Land.”

Luke came up with the idea of the census, he added, but it is not a logical explanation because population counts conducted at the time asked people to stay put.

“I think the child was born in Bethlehem because that’s where they (Mary and Joseph) lived.”

He described the couple’s home as a one-room house “where you had the mattresses rolled up during the day, spread out at night, where you had the extended family and favorite animals.”

Moved to Adjacent Cave

When the time came for Mary to give birth, he said, the couple moved to an adjacent cave that served as a stable and storage space.

“There was no space for a birth (in the house),” he said. “Mary was a young woman, 15 at most, and to move . . . into a quiet area like a stable for a first birth was a very normal thing.”

Luke wrote of the event: “And she gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them at the inn.”

The latter phrase again implies that Mary and Joseph were travelers, but Murphy-O’Connor said the translation should read, “There was no space for them in the room.”

The site long venerated as the place of Jesus’ birth is a grotto underneath the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

Venerated Area

Bethlehem residents have venerated the cave area since Jesus’ birth, but pilgrims did not begin to arrive in larger numbers until after the Byzantine Queen Helena had the basilica built in 339 AD. Many elements of the old Christmas celebration have remained the same until this day.

“The patriarch of Jerusalem, just like today, would come in a procession (from Jerusalem),” Murphy-O’Connor said. “He would be received here the night before, officiate at the midnight liturgy and go back the next day.”

But mass tourism, which took off after Israel captured Bethlehem and the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War, has left its mark on the festivities, which have become more and more Westernized. A 30-foot fir tree next to the church is decked out with lights and ornaments at Christmas in the Western tradition and the midnight church services are televised live to millions of people around the world.

The influx of about 800,000 tourists a year also has sparked an economic boom in the city, four miles south of Jerusalem.