Nativity Debunked

When I was a child, my mom had this little chintzy nativity scene that showed Joseph and  Mary beaming down on Jesus, who was beaming blissfully lying scantily draped with cloths in strategic places, on His back in a wooden manger.  The whole scene was bathed in the glow of a comet-like star, shining upon the inside of a wooden barn with a thatch roof.  It was replete with the requisite camel, donkey, cow and sheep, and adorned by richly clad shepherds and angels and wise men, oh my.

Bunk.  No halos.  No music. No glamour.

Historians paint a different picture of the "stable" in which Jesus was born, and the Bible leaves clues that fill in the rest of the story.

The stable was not in a barn.  It was in a cave.  People who had cows in that region often kept them in nearby caves away from any rain that might fall and where they would be easy to corner and milk in the morning.  

Jesus was wrapped in swaddling clothes.  These were strips of cloth that were tightly wrapped around the child's entire body with only his head sticking out. They did this to make sure his arms and legs grew straight; it was a common belief (probably fueled by the incidence of rickets).   The manger was not made of wood.  It was most likely a hollowed-out boulder.  When Jesus was wrapped in the swaddling bands and placed in that manger, it looked like He was prepared for burial... a mummy in a tomb.

The shepherds only looked after the sheep in the hills outside Bethlehem in the few months prior to Passover.  It was their job to watch over the Passover lambs, not only for the feast but also to watch for the one lamb that would be the sacrifice that year: perfect, with no blemishes.  Shepherds were considered the riff-raff of society.  They lived in the outdoors and would most certainly not have had clean clothes or smelled like a rose either.  Not likely anyone trusted them; after all, they were paid out of the temple treasury.  

Their arrival at the stable might have caused some concern to Joseph and Mary as they saw them approach.  As they heard the remarkable story of angels shouting the praises of God in the skies outside the town, and of the sign they were told to look for - their fears subsided.  

The wise men (and nowhere does it say there were only three; in fact, there were probably so many of them that their procession caused no small stir in Jerusalem when they arrived and asked to see the newborn King) did not show up that night.  In fact, it was over a year before they showed up.  The star that led them there had shown up in the far east - and they knew to go to Israel.  Naturally they assumed that it would be the capital where they would find the Child.  We know that they took over a year to get to Jerusalem because of Herod's reaction when he asked them what time the star appeared and then, when they didn't show up to report on Jesus' whereabouts, he had every child under the age of two years old killed.  

Talk about paranoid.  He was well known for being afraid of being knifed in his sleep or poisoned by members of his own family. He was very serious about any threat to his "throne".

No, by the time the sages gave their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, the little family was living in a house in Bethlehem, no longer in a stable (after all, the census was done and the population of Bethlehem had gone back to normal).  Scripture tells us that when the magi got to the house (not the stable) where He was staying, they gave their gifts.  

These lavish gifts would hold them in good stead in Egypt, for what good would the skills of a carpenter do in Egypt, where the only trade that paid anything at all was that of stone-mason?

Two or three years in Egypt.  And when the time came for them to return to Israel, they finally returned to Nazareth, with Jesus and probably at least one younger sibling in tow.  And Nazarene tongues which wagged six years previous started wagging all over again.  We might be tempted to think of the nativity and the early life of Jesus as somehow sheltered, protected, with angels "ahh-ing" all over the place.  But Jesus and His family knew poverty, pain, persecution, and peril from the word go.

God saw fit to allow it ... so that He could relate to our pain and rejection, our hardships, our feelings ... as one of us.