One of the real benefits of being a part of the Bible-scholar community is that really brilliant stuff just shows up on my Facebook feed. That happened this morning, and I wanted to share it with all of you, as a primer for any Christmas Eve services you might be planning to attend (or lead).
Several of my friends (including Jimmy Hoke, who writes the brilliant Queer Lectionary newsletter each week that I recommend you subscribe to) pointed out this morning that the newly-released NRSVUE (New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition) has a critical translation shift that impacts Luke’s telling of Jesus’ birth. The NRSVUE is available in a really lovely SBL Study Bible edition from HarperOne; it’s one of my new go-to Bibles, and I recommend that you pick it up if you haven’t done so already. The translation is substantially based on the NRSV, but it updates a few things where scholarship has changed our readings and perceptions of things since the NRSV was translated a generation ago. And it’s on sale right now!
One of those places where scholarship has shifted how we translate the Greek text is in Luke 2:7. Scholar Stephen C. Carlson has a short description of this in the SBL Study Bible. In view is the Greek word kataluma, which is the one that has traditionally been translated as “inn.” The translation of “inn” implies an economic model—that Joseph and Mary found themselves in a strange city, and that all the places where they could stay were already booked up. The lack of room in the “inn,” then, meant that they were out on the streets, making do with someone’s barn.
But the meaning of kataluma is not quite the same as the meaning of “inn.” A kataluma is now understood less as a hotel room or a room in an inn, and more as a spare room or guest room in someone’s house. This becomes obvious, Carlson writes, when you notice that Luke uses the same word in 22:11 for the room in which the Last Supper is held. They aren’t eating the Last Supper in a hotel room, they’re eating it in space borrowed in someone’s house. And, Carlson goes on to point out, when Luke wants to talk about an actual inn, as in the parable of the Good Samaritan in 10:34, he uses a word specific to the kind of place that rents out rooms to travelers.
What kind of space was Luke actually talking about here? Most likely, Mary and Joseph had landed at the crowded house of some relatives. Instead of having a private space (which would have been in short supply in most houses of that day), they are in the big common space of their relatives’ house. Where do the animals and their manger come from then? Likely it was a hybrid space, where people, stuff, and livestock mixed. (Livestock would frequently be kept indoors at least some of the time, especially in a town like Bethlehem). It might be best for people in the United States to think of a mud room in a modern home—a multi-purpose space where some outdoors things and some indoors things both happened, that could shift in purpose depending on needs. Carlson himself says that “Luke’s mention of the manger suggests that the birthplace was the large main room of the farmhouse that housed and fed the farm animals on one side and the family on the other.”
So what difference does this make? Quite a large one, potentially. First, it changes the tenor of the birth story. Joseph and Mary are not alone in a big city, trying to have a baby in a barn somewhere. It has become common for people on the religious left (like me!) to portray Joseph and Mary as refugees or homeless during the birth story—displaced and bereft of any safety or comfort. There are good theo-political reasons to draw that comparison, in my opinion, but it might not be a very accurate comparison historically. Rather, we should probably think of Mary and Joseph as travelers who were squeezing into the already crowded space of family or friends. They might have been uncomfortable, a long way from home and trying to have a baby in the middle of traveling, but they probably were not alone. The word kataluma almost demands that we think of them as being with people that would have cared for them.
The second difference is that interpretations of the “no room in the inn” narrative have often skewed in anti-Semitic directions. Several of my Facebook friends pointed this out as a major consequence of this translation shift. Among the many stereotypes that have been thrown at Jews over the years (and that have been enjoying a renaissance in the recent past) is the idea that Jews are greedy or avaricious. The “inn” translation of this story feeds into that. A narrative where a pregnant woman is traveling and cannot find a place to live suggests that everyone else in the story was more worried about their own comfort—or profit—than they were about Mary’s safety and health. The innkeeper might have been worried about making money, the interpretation goes, and nobody else was willing to give up their space to help someone in need. That is the kind of anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic interpretation that slides easily into Christian theology and Christian interpretations of texts, and this translation shift helps guard against that.
Moments like Christmas Eve services tend to be very conservative; people like to experience the sights and sounds that they are already familiar with. We want to sing familiar hymns and hear familiar words. But there’s a very good argument for updating one of the most iconic phrases in the Christian lexicon, “room in the inn,” to reflect new understandings of the story. “There was no place for them in the guest room,” the NRSVUE reads. Perhaps this year it’s worth challenging the traditional and familiar phrase that so many people know, pushing against the understanding of the story and the prejudices that the old wording has brought, and listening for what a new translation of the text might offer.
Thank you for this new perspective. I find it more appealing than the traditional "no room at the inn."