More from Bethlehem

Harry Wendt Got It Right!!! (Of course.)
After visiting several schools where the Lutheran Church is doing some great work for the young people here, we did some of the standard touristy things, like buying up olive-wood carvings, and going to the Church of the Nativity.

But one of my big highlights was when we went UP THE HILL in Bethlehem (I never knew this place was hillier and steeper that San Francisco!) to the Lutheran Christmas Church. Interesting tidbit about this place: hundreds of developed countries around the world broadcast the Christmas Eve service from this church, with two exceptions...Israel and the USA. (????)

But that's not what I'm excited about. For those of you who know what I do for a living and who I work with, you'll know that my boss and mentor Dr. Harry Wendt wrote a book about the Christmas story that explains, via a look at Middle Eastern culture, that Jesus would NOT have been born in a barn or a stable, but in a HOUSE, which would have had an elevated living area where the family lived, with a lower area where the animals would have been kept at night, so as to benefit from their added body heat and to keep them from being stolen. And the animals nibbled food from out of eating troughs--or mangers--located at mouth level on the upper platform where the family stayed.

Nor would Mary & Joseph ever have been met with indifference or disdain in a community where hospitality is a primary virtue of the culture. What we translate as "because there was no room in the Inn" would better translate as "because there was no room in the guest room" (or "upper room")--so Jesus was born downstairs in the main room of a house, and laid in a manger.

Well...our guide took us down into a cave that archaeologists have verified to be an authentic 1st century Palestinian home.

And when you see the pictures I took, you'll understand why I got so excited. Three other people in our group are from my home church, and they listened to me when I did a three-week Christmas lecture series this past Advent wherein I (and I quote Dave Dynneson here) "RUINED CHRISTMAS" by discussing such things. (See picture above; my left foot is where the mangers would have been, my right foot where the animals would have eaten and slept.)

This group let me know that seeing this 1st century Palestinian cave completely vindicated me (not to mention Harry Wendt, from whom I got all this great stuff).

When I told our guide--a native Bethlehemite--that most Europeans and Americans (and Westerners in general) have believed for centuries that Jesus was born in a barn, her facial expression was priceless. (Arabic, Coptic, and Syriac bibles have ALWAYS said that Jesus was born downstairs in the house because there was no room upstairs in the guest room.) She looked utterly flummoxed. Then I mentioned that we also have believed that Joseph and Mary had nowhere to go, no relatives to stay with, etc. Another priceless look. She said, "Don't you know that no one would ever not be welcomed into our town?"

So we at Crossways International stand vindicated.