Interlude [Overdue]: *Which* Little Town of Bethlehem?

NOTE: This Interlude, previously sitting in my drafts, was intended to be posted to coincide with the holiday season. I apologize for its belatedness, and can assure you that this will not affect the release schedule outlined in "New Year, New Plans."

Oh, Christmastide. There are a lot of images that each of us associates with this magical time of the year. Mine are grounded in growing up in New England and what I would see during winter as I did: ice skating. Trees. Filthy snow. Cold wet feet. Shoppers. Lovers. Assholes.

Most Christians, be they fundamentalist or mainstream, naturally come with a Sunday school-appropriate image of the holiday's origins. Elizabeth Cunningham aptly summarizes it in the opening lines of her magnificent Daughter of the Shining Isles (sorry, Monkfish Book Publishing, this will always be the title of The Maeve Chronicles' first installment for me):

You have all heard of his birth in Bethlehem in a stable [...] You know the story of the attendant animals, the bedazzled shepherds, and the Magi who followed the long-tailed star.

And that's just the SparkNotes, leaving out common elements like "no room at the inn" which are familiar from many a Christmas pageant substituting bedsheets and tutus for peasant wear and exotic royal headgear. Pretty as a Hallmark card. 

At least until you pick at the stitching and the tapestry begins to unravel:

Matthew

• The passages in Matthew's telling of events never enumerate the number of magi, just recount three of the gifts they gave.
• Also, since Jesus is referred to as a child, there is no manger in sight, and Herod's equivalent of Order 66 gives ample headroom by mandating the execution of every boy two years old and younger, there's a better-than-good chance they were not sharing space with the shepherds and likely encountered a toddler instead of a newborn babe, meaning we can go in with Photoshop and take out the layer with Magi and a star.

Luke

• Moving on to Luke's version of the story, we have a little problem known as the Census of Quirinius. Luke's Gospel correlates Christ's birth with this census, which is a problem if you're agreeing with Matthew that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great because Herod had been dead for about five or six years by the time the census was active. Christian apologists have tried to find wiggle room, supposing two censuses and an unreported earlier reign for Quirinius; more critical scholars have acknowledged the most likely explanation -- that this is an attempt to reconcile two traditions, one which has Jesus born in Bethlehem and one where he is known to have come from Nazareth. Luke's story invents a reason for Mary and Joseph to have traveled from Nazareth to Bethlehem and vice versa, with a detour to Egypt for an indefinite period, in Matthew's case.
• Further, my pals at A Game for Good Christians (sort of like Cards Against Humanity for the Bible bunch, but confronting the Good Book's more difficult passages instead of hiding from them) make an excellent case that no inn was involved at all and that there is an Aesop hidden in the tale -- or Luke's variation, at least -- about carefully considering who we let in and who we shut out, be it from our lives, our churches, our schools, our cities, or our countries. (If you've been following my story of "who was the baby daddy of Mary's boy child," I don't have to tell you that, purely by coincidence, their theory dovetails nicely with the piece of creative writing I laid down in Part II. If Joseph's family was made aware of the whole Pantera situation, they might well have reacted as AGGC supposes they did.)

Well, I'm going to yank one more thread and see where it goes. I call this "location, location, location" and it's about the little town of Bethlehem.

As Matthew's Gospel reports, there was a well-known Jewish prophecy (to be specific, Micah 5:2) naming Bethlehem as the birthplace of a future important ruler of the children of Israel. When certain early Christians set about collecting Old Testament verses that they believed pointed to Jesus and tried to tick every box of the promised Messiah when proselytizing to fellow Jews, it was important for Jesus to be born in Bethlehem. Thus, Matthew had them living there, and Luke needed to invent a reason for them to be there, settling on using the Census of Quirinius to do so.

But, even if we weren't dealing with the census and Herod not co-existing, other things were standing in the way. Like how there was no single census of the entire Roman Empire under Augustus. Like how the Romans did not directly tax client kingdoms. And, most critical of all, like how no Roman census required that people travel from their own homes to those of their ancestors. Logistically speaking, the story doesn't hold up either. To point out one obvious example, it is unclear how likely it is that Mary, described by Luke as close to delivery, was capable of making a roughly week-long trip from Galilee to Judea in her condition.

Some would say they made the whole damn thing up. And I believe that is true insofar as the census and Herod go. However, you may be surprised to learn that I also think a trip to a Bethlehem is not out of the question. The question I ask, dear reader, is "Which Bethlehem do you mean?"

A Tale of Two Shtetls

You're already familiar, of course, with the most renowned Bethlehem, about six miles south of Jerusalem, the city best known for being the birthplace of David as well as where he was anointed as the third King of Israel. 

But there was another Bethlehem up north, known in the time of Jesus as "Bethlehem of Zebulun" to distinguish it from "Bethlehem of Judea." According to the Book of Judges (granted, as interpreted by the Cambridge Bible of Schools and Colleges), one of the so-called "Minor Judges" of early settlement Israel, Ibzan, came from this Bethlehem and was buried there. 

Moving up to the mid-and-post-New Testament era, archaeological findings from the early Roman Period show it was a prosperous city when a certain Nazarene walked the earth. Further, until the late 19th century, ruins of a church and a synagogue could be seen there, which suggests two things: a) the city was established enough to require a synagogue, and b) at some point Christians considered it a fine spot to plant a place of worship, which was rarely done in that area at that time without the site having some special significance to the faith.

Pivoting from one form of speculation rooted in historical context to another, let's say a return to one's hometown really was involved, just for the sake of argument. Approximately 700 years before Christ, Galilee's Israelite inhabitants were conquered by Assyria. Most of the Jews living there were relocated to Assyria, while non-Jewish immigrants moved into Galilee, hence the Bible referring to the region on at least two occasions as "Galilee of the Gentiles." Consequently, Judeans tended to look down on Galileans, viewing them as uneducated and of questionable ancestry, an echo of which exists in John's Gospel. This was a rivalry not unlike that of Northerners and Southerners in the U.S. if what I suspect is my primary audience needs a handy analogy. Knowing this, and all the regional pride involved, what self-respecting Judean would choose to live among the goyim? If there was a Joseph and he did come from Bethlehem, the one approximately six miles northwest of Nazareth makes way more sense.

My theory, in a nutshell, is this: it would have been far easier for a heavily pregnant woman to travel, whatever the reason, to the Bethlehem roughly six miles from Nazareth than the Bethlehem roughly six miles from Jerusalem. All that was needed for later mythmakers was to fudge the minor detail of which Bethlehem was "correct," the better to make the sale to their Jewish brethren.

But then again, and here comes the part of me which insistently believes despite everything that people are good at heart, maybe a kernel of the truth was still buried in tradition. After all, Christianity has deep Jewish roots (which I plan to write more about in this blog in the future), and one thing Jews are known for is the rabbinic habit of taking note of minority viewpoints, and divergent opinions. These were preserved because they might be valuable in a future reasoned debate. As Leon Zitzer points out in A Ghost in the Gospels, "The Mishnah gives this as one reason for recording minority views: A future majority might come to disagree with the present majority and it will need the old minority opinion for support."

I believe this can be seen in the Gospel of Matthew, for, at the same time as he labors to place Jesus' birth in the city of David, he also records a prophecy from Isaiah to justify his association with Galilee:

Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali, on the road by the sea, across the Jordan, Galilee of the gentiles -- the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned.

Now, "the land of Zebulun and Naphtali" was known to be another way of saying Galilee. But is it too large a leap to suggest it may also have been signaling "Bethlehem of Zebulun" to satisfy "those with ears to hear" who remembered? 

It's at least as likely as what's in the book, and it doesn't require absurd levels of justification.

Happy (belated) Holidays, folks!