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Most Christians who visit the Holy Land go to see Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity. When they get there, some are surprised to be led not to a stable but to one of a series of basement grottoes where they are informed Christ was born. The Nativity Church may not be the best possible guide, since it was built well after the fact, circa 324, by Helena, mother of Constantine, the first Roman Emperor to become a Christian. Nonetheless, she was heeding strong oral traditions that seem to have prevailed in the region for many years, and the idea of a cave is not so exotic as it might seem. Then, as now, many West Bank houses were built onto natural caverns that function as rooms and basements and, yes, even mangers.
In keeping with his view of Joseph and Mary as year-round residents, Matthew has the Magi visit a "house." Luke introduces the manger as part of his view of them as involuntary short-timers. The English word manger, like the original Greek word phatne in Luke, is even more modest than our usual understanding of it. It means not a stable but simply a feeding trough or at best a stall. Either word would be consistent with the kind of rural poverty that has inspired poor people and their champions throughout the history of Christianity. Today's crèche scenes, even the more elaborate ones, actually descend from an attempt by the 13th century ascetic genius St. Francis of Assisi to recapture this humble ideal. Put off by the jewel-encrusted and gilt-covered re-creations in the noble courts of his time, he borrowed some real farm animals and real straw and convened his midnight Mass on Christmas Eve of 1223 around a back-to-basics pageant that, as he wrote, showed "how He suffered the lack for all those things needed by an infant."
Oh, yes, the animals. Luke did not include any. The ox and ass first appeared much later, in artistic renderings like a 4th century Roman sarcophagus that shows them peeking over the side of Jesus' crib. Cute as it was, the image served an interreligious enmity, employing for Christian purposes God's annoyed statement in the Old Testament Book of Isaiah that "the ox knows its owner, and the donkey knows its master's crib, but Israel has not known me." By contrast, the camels that pop up in many Nativities are relatively innocent. A passage from the medieval compendium of saints' lives called The Golden Legend tells how they solved a logistical problem for a perplexed church father: "Now it may be demanded how, in so little space of 13 days, [the Magi] might come from so far as from the East unto Jerusalem, which is a great space and a long way. S. Jerome saith, that they came upon dromedaries, which be beasts that may go in one day as an horse in three days."
THE ANGELS
"Glo-o-o-o-o-o-ria/In excelsis de-o"
--ANGELS WE HAVE HEARD ON HIGH
The actual birth announcement is in Luke 2: 11. An angel proclaims, "Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy ... for unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord." And "suddenly," Luke continues, "there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will to men."