On Jesus’s birthplace

Last updated on: December 16, 2013 at 12:45 pm by Jane the Actuary

On Jesus’s birthplace 2013-12-16T12:45:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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It occurred to me this morning that having a blog means that I have a platform for my pet theory on Jesus’s birthplace.

Some years ago, reports on opinions about Jesus’s birthplace were all over the internet. The explanation is this: yes, it’s true that the Romans had censuses, but there’s no historical precedent for a census that required individuals to return to the village from which they traced their distant ancestry. Therefore, Joseph didn’t need to return to Bethlehem for a census, and the entire tale of being born in Bethlehem was just to work that city into the story due to Old Testament prophesies.

It seems to me that there’s an entirely plausible reason for Joseph to have gone to Bethlehem. It’s the same reason as my husband’s Berlin-born grandmother ended up in a small town in Bavaria. In that case, my husband’s father was a Bavarian carpenter who followed the practice at the time (pre-WWII), and after his carpentry apprenticeship, was not just a journeyman as a status in the skilled trades, but a literal journeyman, travelling to build up his experience to ultimately become a Master Carpenter. (Same thing was true on the other side of the family, a generation prior — his great-grandfather left Hungary, and spent time in Germany and Austria before settling in Poland — at a time when the borders were different than now, of course.) Anyway, his grandfather met his wife in Berlin and settled there, but when the bombing campaigns started, he moved his family back to Bavaria.

The same was true in the Middle Ages — a “journeyman” travelled.

If the same was true at the time of the Roman Empire, then it would have made sense for Joseph have been born in Bethlehem, but to have become engaged to Mary while working in Nazareth, and for the census to have spurred the family to have returned to Bethlehem. Rusty history here — but I remember that, much later, it mattered very much where one was from, and I can easily imagine the same being true at this point, especially since Nazareth was a part of Galilee and Bethlehem, of Judea. Hence, Joseph was not just “of the house and lineage of David” — that was just a poetic way of stating, “Joseph was originally from Bethlehem and thought it would be prudent to have the family officially registered there.”

Anyway, I’m no Bible scholar, but that’s my theory.

(Just for fun: there are multiple claims out there that would support my pet theory, such as this one from the Daily Mail, which makes further claims that I wouldn’t put any stock in.)

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