We should avoid reading too deeply into the Bible

On Christmas Day, 2015, Rev Patrick Mbanga published an article in The Nation Newspaper which suggested that Jesus may not have been born in a stable. This, no doubt, will have shocked a number of enthusiasts who take it as absolutely obvious that Jesus was born in a stable. Some will have branded my good pastor as somebody wanting in spirituality.

The truth of the matter is that the Bible does not portray Jesus as having been born in a stable. Luke mentions that He was laid in a manger but does not mention a stable. A manger is a long trough from which cattle or horses are fed. Over the millennia people have filled in the missing gaps and have come up with the version that Jesus was born in a stable, his parents having been turned away from an inn. It makes a strong case for the humility of Jesus to have come down to earth and be born in a despicable place that a stable is for human birth.

I have, since my youth, not even questioned the tradition that has placed Jesus in a stable. I know of scores of songs that state that Jesus was born in a stable or pen. The Chichewa ones go so far as stating that He was bon “m’khola la ng’ombe” (in a cattle kraal). None of the gospel writers mentions a cattle kraal as Jesus’s birth place.

What Rev Mbanga is saying is that research has shown that the peasant homes of that time had mangers within their enclosures, where the family animals would be fed from, when they were brought in at night. In other words, mangers were not confined to stables or pens. It is erroneous to take it that Jesus was certainly born in a manger. Such an assertion is both unbiblical and, in the light of new research, unlikely.

Another common mistake is to say that three wise men travelled from the East to visit the baby Jesus. Matthew mentions that wise men came from the East and followed a star to Bethlehem to visit the infant king. He (Matthew) does not say there were three wise men. Whether there were three or a different number of visitors from the East is a matter of conjecture.

And yet tradition is replete with the mistaken information that three wise men visited Jesus. I know a song that goes “We three kings of Orient are; bearing gifts we travel afar. Field and fountain, moon and mountain, following yonder star”. And indeed each time I have watched the nativity play, I have seen three characters travelling from the East to pay their homage to the new born king.

The number of three is most likely derived from the gifts that were presented: gold, frankincense and myrrh. Somebody must have reasoned it out that each visitor presented one gift and since there were three gifts, there must have been three visitors, right? Wrong! The truth of the matter is that we do not know how many visitors travelled from the East because Matthew does not tell us.

Whether there were three visitors or a different number of visitors and whether Jesus was born in a living room or in a stable are matters we do not have concrete information on. Therefore, to attack anyone who questions these facts is to commit serious error.

In the 17th century, the church committed such an error by ex-communicating Galileo Galilei simply for suggesting the earth was not the centre of the universe and that it actually revolved around the Sun. This new idea was termed heliocentrism. The Roman Catholic Church instituted an inquisition, which in February of 1616 declared heliocentrism to be “foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture.” Scripture does not concern itself with the arrangement of heavenly bodies in the universe. Those that came to the conclusion stated above must have read too deeply into scripture. Today we know that Galileo was right and the church wrong.

As we search within scripture, let us not rush to make lofty conclusions on things that the Bible is silent about. Extremists will quickly demonise some people today for shedding light on some biblical phenomenon, if in so doing they will be tampering with deep-seated traditional ideas and imaginations, and will tomorrow discover that after all, the people they attacked were right. n