O Little Town of Bethlehem...

As Jesus’ Birthplace, Do You Lie?

Dec 13, 2024

There are few things I love about Christmas as much as a good carol service. Candles, christingles and choirs of what – if I close my eyes – sound an awful lot like angels.

And yet my left-brain tends not to let me lose myself completely in the festive season: What about everything you’ve learnt about the biblical accounts? The disputed census, the retrojected prophecies, the pagan parallels which seem so much like the Gospels?

Over the years, I have slowly come to appreciate the meaning of the Mathean and Lukan infancy narratives – a meaning which rings true, whatever the history. I have almost acquired what literary theorists have called a second naiveté. Nevertheless, it is difficult to entirely switch off the critical-historian inside, or fail to notice the issues which have plagued modern interpreters of the Bible.

One of those historical issues concerns the birthplace of Jesus. Each year, we sing ‘O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie’ in reflection of the biblical tradition that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, a town eleven kilometres outside Jerusalem. And then arises a nagging doubt in the corner of my mind. According to most biblical scholars, the idea that Jesus was born in Bethlehem is completely spurious.

Bethlehem was the birthplace of David, the famed King of Israel’s past. And Micah 5:2 prophesies that a ruler would again emerge from the town. So, the argument goes, Jesus’ birth there was a theolougemon – a theological statement that Jesus was the promised Messiah. Yet it had no basis in historical fact. Jesus’ connection to Bethlehem was simply invented to convey the point that Jesus was the Christ.

This is broadly the view held by my doctoral supervisor, Helen Bond. It is also the view of a host of other prolific scholars, such as Maurice Casey, J.P.Meier and Raymond Brown.1 Naturally then, I too had assumed that Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem was a literary device, a plot-point motivated purely by theological reasoning.

But recently, I read an article which shook my assumption. It was written by Jonathan Rowlands, who teaches New Testament at St Mellitus College. (For those who would like to check it out, it is On Chickens, Eggs and the Birth Place of Jesus.) While Rowlands’ argument is too sophisticated to give it due diligence here, I would like to briefly draw attention to what I regard as its key points – and why it has challenged my view.

1) Bethlehem is Not a Messianic City

It is generally assumed that Matthew and Luke forge the connection between Jesus and Bethlehem because Bethlehem was known as the birthplace of the Messiah.

But is this actually the case? As Rowlands points out, no other Second Temple Jewish text outside of the Gospels identifies Bethlehem as the Messiah’s birthplace.2 And in any case, messianic expectations were diverse. There was no ‘checklist’ which any would-be Messiah had to tick. This makes it unlikely that an early Christian would need to invent the connection to fulfil Messianic prophecy. Already, the Messiah-Bethlehem connection is on shaky ground.

I can hear the riposte – but surely Micah identifies Bethlehem as the birthplace of the Messiah, and this suffices! Jews would know that this was messianic prophecy.

The problem with this assumption that there is no evidence that Micah was ever intended to be read as a Messianic prophecy. It predicts that a domestic ruler will emerge from Bethlehem, but this ruler was not a messianic conquerer.3 Rowlands thus supposes that it may have been read messianically after the fact – not because it was intrinsically messianic, but because Jesus the Messiah was born there.

2) Bethlehem is an Unnecessary Fabrication

Rowlands develops his argument with the observation that it was completely unnecessary for the evangelists to invent the Bethlehem-Messiah connection. If the evangelists wanted to show that Jesus was the Messiah, they had no need to rely on this fabrication. As I mentioned above, messianic expectations in Jesus’ time were diverse, and the birthplace of the messiah was not a trope in messianic literature.

It might be replied that if Jesus was of David’s seed – a claim already enshrined in Pauline tradition (e.g. Romans 1:3) – it was important to establish that Jesus shared David’s hometown (patris). But of course, one did not need to be born in Bethlehem to be of Davidic descendent. Indeed, David’s own sons and daughters were born in Hebron and Jerusalem.4 Thus, it was not necessary for Matthew and Luke to claim that Jesus born in exactly the same place as David – unless, of course, he was.

When it came to other would-be messiahs of Jesus’ time, it is noteworthy that none of them were linked to Bethlehem. Indeed, some figures were regarded as messianic without the arsenal of eschatological miracles which were attributed to Jesus. Given these facts, Rowlands argues that “a fabricated Bethlehem birth would not only have been unnecessary for establishing messianic credentials but would have offered nothing by way of messianic credence that Jesus’ alleged extraordinary deeds would not already have accomplished in a greater and more effective manner.”

3) Bethlehem may be implicit in John

A key objection to the idea that Jesus’ Bethlehem-birth is that John assumes that Jesus was known to come from Galilee, while the Messiah was to be born in Bethlehem:

‘When they heard these words, some in the crowd said, ‘This is really the prophet.’ Others said, ‘This is the Messiah.’ But some asked, ‘Surely the Messiah does not come from Galilee, does he? Has not the scripture said that the Messiah is descended from David and comes from Bethlehem, the village where David lived?’’ (John 7:40-42)

For some scholars, including the conservative Martin Hengel, “the contradiction between John and the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke seems obvious.”5

But as Rowlands points out, this may be one of many examples of Johannine irony.6 The crowd question whether he can be the Messiah, since he is from Galilee, but the reader may know that he is the Messiah for his birth from Bethlehem is assumed. Since John is often seen writing after Matthew and Luke, and an increasing body of scholars argue that John knew the earlier Gospels, this irony seems plausible.

To be sure, Rowlands is not arguing that we can prove that John is assuming Jesus’ Bethlehem-birth. This passage certainly could be read in tension with Matthew and Luke. Given the prevalence of Johannine irony, however, Rowlands follows the judgement of Raymond Brown, that “one cannot use [John] 7:40–42 to argue either for or against the fourth evangelist’s awareness of the tradition of birth at Bethlehem.”7

Some Lingering Problems

Rowland’s article successfully questions the supposition that the evangelists needed to invent Jesus’ Bethlehem birth to fulfil widespread messianic expectations. As Rowlands suggests, there is little evidence for such expectations.

And yet there remain for me some lingering doubts about Jesus’ Bethlehem birth. These reasons for doubt lie beyond the specific of Rowlands’ piece, and the more general concerns one might raise about the narratives as a whole. Following the magisterial work of Raymond Brown, I will mention just two of them here.8

First, Matthew and Luke do not appear to agree on the relationship of the holy family to Bethlehem. In Matthew, they already seem to have their residence in Bethlehem. There is no sense in which they are from Nazareth, and after their flight to Egypt, they head to Nazareth only once they have heard Jerusalem is under Antipas.

By contrast, Luke opens his narrative in Nazareth, where the holy family reside. And the reason they go to Bethlehem is a rather odd one – to register for a census. Yet upon a prima facie reading, the census referred to by Quirinus did not take place until 6 CE, almost ten years after the death of Herod. If this census is chronologically misplaced, it seems a rather contrived attempt to get Jesus down to Bethlehem.

Second, aside from the infancy narratives, there is no clear evidence that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. While Matthew and Luke call Nazareth Jesus’ patris - the town where he grew up – for Mark, the term patris may have originally functioned as Jesus’ birthplace. Notably, there is no hint among the townspeople of Nazareth that Jesus was born anywhere else. Far from knowing Jesus as the one born in David’s prestigious hometown, the people of Nazareth are baffled by his sense of authority.

In the end, however, these are debating points. As the father of liberal Protestant theology, Friedrich Schleiermacher, underscored long ago, one can appreciate what Bethlehem meant for the early Christians without needing Jesus to have been born there. I stand in agreement with him, that for “our faith it is in itself of no consequence whether Christ was born in Bethlehem or in Nazareth…”9

Behind the Gospels

Discussion about this post