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Nativity in the eyes of its culture

Wednesday, December 25, 2002

By Ann Rodgers-Melnick, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Kenneth Bailey built the Nativity scene in his living room from first-century mosaic stones he collected while teaching biblical and Middle Eastern studies in Jerusalem. But its real distinction is that the baby Jesus lies in a manger hewn into the floor of a living room in a house, not in a dirty, drafty stable.

	Kenneth Bailey with the nativity scene he created. (Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette)

Bailey, 72, now retired and living in the heart of New Wilmington's Amish country, is almost single-handedly revising how readers of the New Testament envision the first Christmas. Matthew and Luke, the only gospels with birth stories, never mention the stable or hard-hearted innkeeper who figure so prominently in Christmas pageants. That, Bailey said, is because at night, animals stayed inside peasant homes, where the typical living room had several mangers.

While he ditches the inn and the stable, he keeps the angels, shepherds and wise men. He believes the gospels that tell their stories are far more accurate than the skeptical biblical scholarship of the past 100 years has given them credit for.

Seeing the gospels through Middle Eastern eyes is reading explanatory footnotes, he said. Envisioning Jesus in a living room rather than a stable only adds to the Christmas message, he said.

"It's not that he was shut out in Bethlehem and you, the reader, are asked if you are willing to find a place for Jesus in your heart. Rather, the story is that Bethlehem offered its best, and are you willing to offer your best?" Bailey said.

Raised in Egypt by missionary parents, he taught for 40 years at the Near East School of Theology in Beirut and the Ecumenical Institute for Theological Research in Jerusalem. He believes that first-century Judean language and customs are so embedded in the Gospels that they could not possibly be the work of later Greek writers, as many scholars believe they are.

Bailey argues that Middle Eastern communities controlled their stories so tightly that the early Jewish Christians would not have allowed anyone to invent stories about Jesus. The problems lie not with what the Bible says, but with what people read into it from their own cultures, he said.

The Bible "is the word that comes to us down through the centuries as a unique document that is, in some sense or another, inspired by God. But our interpretation of it is always flawed," he said.

Bailey's version of the first Christmas is slowly gaining influence. The Pittsburgh Creche at USX Plaza, a replica of the Vatican creche, is a house, not a stable, said the Rev. Ronald Lengwin, who oversees it. This year, however, he bowed to the traditional image and moved a few animals up into the living area.

"I can't speak to why the architect designed it that way. But perhaps we have a realistic depiction that we didn't even intend," he said.

Bailey has gained a large lay following through videotapes in which he explains Gospel stories much as a kindly grandfather might. He continues to record videos while serving as canon theologian of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh.

Born in Illinois, Bailey moved to Egypt at age 5 so his Harvard-educated father could help churches improve their schools. He was evacuated to the United States at age 12, when the Nazis invaded North Africa. A Presbyterian minister, he earned a degree from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary while his wife, Ethel, was a research assistant on Dr. Jonas Salk's polio vaccine.

In 1955, they returned to Egypt, where he helped start schools in villages so remote that the wheel was not in use. Village women taught him a lesson about biblical interpretation that changed his life.

He listened as they discussed Jesus' meeting with the Woman at the Well. Because they carried huge jugs to the well in the cool of dawn and twilight, they knew it was bizarre for a woman to be at the well at noon, alone as the Gospel said she was. She must be an outcast, a bad woman, they said.

"Now, Bailey is seated at the back, very proud of his sophisticated Western education. And suddenly I realize that I can't read this anywhere. No Western language will give me the story I just heard from these women," he said.

He resolved to spend his life discovering what ancient Middle Eastern culture would reveal about the gospels. After 45 years he is still making new discoveries, he said.

His insight into Jesus' birth began with a 1957 lecture by the Anglican theologian Eric F.F. Bishop, who believed Jesus must have been born in a house. A decade later, Bailey visited Lebanese villages that were unchanged from the bronze age. Animals were brought into the houses at night. The animals stayed at ground level, while the family walked up several steps to a raised terrace living area. Mangers were dug into the edge of the terrace.

The Gospel texts say nothing about a stable -- Luke mentions only a manger where Jesus slept. It dawned on Bailey that in first-century Palestine, everyone knew the manger was in the living room.

As for the "inn" with no vacancy, the Greek word is not what Luke used for the commercial inn that the Good Samaritan visited. It is the word Luke used for the guest room in a private house where the Last Supper took place. Luke meant the Holy Family stayed in the living room because the guest room was occupied, he said.

The traditional image "is beautiful and quaint, and we have songs that go with it. We have pageants for the kids that have dramatic tension with the mean old innkeeper. But it doesn't make sense," Bailey said.

In the Middle East it would have been a scandal for a traveler and his pregnant wife to be refused hospitality, especially if both had relatives in the area, as Luke indicates. Bailey draws an analogy to many of his own neighbors: "Think Amish!"

"An Amish family shows up, the lady is about to give birth. They knock at the door of an Amish home where they have relatives. Are they going to be told, 'We have no space for you, go to the barn'? It's unthinkable."

This explains the angel's words to the shepherds, who would have expected to be turned away from a rich person's home, Bailey said. When the angel said, "This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger," it meant that the child was in a humble home such as theirs, because it had a manger in the living room, Bailey said.

Matthew wrote of wise men "from the east" who visit Jesus in a house. In Judea "from the east" meant from east of the Jordan River, he said.

Bailey found an intriguing nugget in the works of Bishop, the scholar who first suggested that Jesus was born in a house. In Jordan, Bishop met members of a Bedouin tribe called the Kawkabani, which means "planeteers." When he asked these devout Muslims about their name, they replied that their ancestors had followed a planet to honor the birth of the great prophet Iesa, the Muslim name for Jesus.

Bailey believes such a tribe could have accurately preserved that story for 2,000 years. In those communities, everyone learns key stories. Storytellers have some freedom of style and interpretation. But if the facts are wrong, the storyteller is denounced in public, Bailey said.

Because the Book of Acts, which Luke also wrote, uses "we" for Paul's stay in Jerusalem from 56 to 58, Bailey believes Luke was there with Paul. He believes Luke had already written a first edition of his Gospel, without birth stories, when he was approached by the community of Jewish Christians in Jerusalem to record the stories of their last surviving witnesses.

Their own traditions required them to supervise Luke's adaptation of these stories, Bailey said.

"Only Jews who believe that Jesus is the Messiah could have written that material. It is different from the rest of the Gospel," he said.

He believes the witnesses would have had to review Luke's finished work for authenticity.

"If the vote of that crowd is negative, there would never be a second copy of the Gospel of Luke. But this factor is never considered by the radical reconstructionists," he said.

One of those scholars, John Dominic Crossan, argues that little in the gospels is historical fact.

"I disagree absolutely, both theoretically and practically," with Bailey's argument the Gospels present reliable history, Crossan said.

Scientific tests prove that memory is unreliable, which is why DNA evidence has freed many prisoners convicted by witnesses, Crossan said. While admitting he can't disprove Bailey's theory about how Luke got the birth stories, Crossan is not convinced that Luke was ever in Jerusalem.

Luke was not making up lies, but was reinterpreting his own understanding of Paul's beliefs for second-century gentile Christians, Crossan said.

"Luke has excellent sources, but he can't check them. This is like reading an historical novel," Crossan said.

The Rev. Douglas McGlynn finds Bailey convincing. The rector of the Episcopal Church of the Ascension in Oakland said Bailey had "given me a whole kind of new faith in the trustworthiness of the biblical text, without reverting to a fundamentalist stance."

McGlynn had been taught that the birth stories were pious myths concocted to give the reader a sense of Jesus' importance. Now, he said, he believes the only myth is the inn with no vacancy.

Nothing can prove that angels appeared or that Jesus was miraculously born of a virgin, Bailey said. But he believes the skeptical scholars are working as much out of their own faith as he is.

"History can help us to delve more deeply into what this story means. But the decision of faith to say that either God did enter history [as Jesus] or God did not enter history, neither of those can be proven. It's a decision of faith either way," he said.