Episode 534 - Born In A Barn? - James F. McGrath’s The A to Z of the New Testament: Things Experts K

Welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I am your host Rick Lee James, and I guess we're back. I can't believe it has been over a month, well over a month since the last time that I was here giving a podcast to you, but I just finished up a very intense semester in my graduate courses, preparing for another extremely intense semester ahead, which I think is going to be probably my most difficult yet. So be praying for me. Um, in the last couple of weeks I've read 15 books. I have 2 more to go, and I will have all of the books read, all of the required texts read for my class. They've been very challenging books. Um, particularly pray for me in my upcoming Christian Ethics and Catholic Moral Theology class. I have read 6 out of the 7 books for that class so far, and I enjoyed one of them, and the rest of them I found to be very difficult. And this is my own fault, probably. I just felt like it was all gobbledygook. You know, page after page after page of, "What in the world is this author talking about? I have no idea." I rarely run across books like that, but I have heard that this class is the most intense and most difficult of all the classes at Loyola. In the religion department, and I am scared, full of anxiety. Those of you that know me know that I love to learn, but I do not function well when I am in school. I have great anxiety and I do not flourish, I do not thrive, and it all feels like cramming, and, and a lot of it feels like busywork. So while doing school full-time, two other jobs, plus songwriting and music and things I don't really get paid that much for. It's busy. So being a husband and a dad on top of that, it's just life is busy. I barely have time to sleep sometimes. So keep me in prayer. But today I'm back. I may not be back again till June. We see. The reason I'm here today is I have read, as I said, I think 15 out of the 17 required texts for my next semester, which just starts in a few brief weeks here. And the reason I'm not reading right now is because my last two books have not arrived yet. So, but I'm trying to get my head wrapped around what's ahead with great fear and trepidation. But today's podcast is about a book I love. Really am enjoying it. I haven't finished it yet, but it felt so appropriate to be able to share parts of it with you today. I reached out to the author, who's a man I really admire and respect. He's more of an acquaintance than a friend, but we're becoming friends as time goes on. James McGrath, a wonderful professor, and he has a book called The A to Z of the New Testament: Things Experts Know That Everyone Else Should Too. And I really recommend this book. It's by James F. McGrath. I think right now at the time of my recording this, it's available on Kindle, I think only for about $3.99, which if you're a person like me that does better with ebooks than paper books, that might be an option for you. But I asked James if I would be— if it would be all right with his permission and his publisher's permission if I could read an excerpt from his chapter titled Born in a Barn. And because the chapters are going from A to Z, this is really, I guess, the second chapter of the book with B. And the reason I wanted to read a portion of this chapter to you is a couple reasons. Because we're in the Advent season and There are some wonderful insights in this book that will help you, will help anyone. I think even if you have been a theologian and a Bible scholar, you're going to learn things from this book that you didn't know. And it's very accessible. It's very readable and takes its time with you. It's very much what— like what I feel James's classes probably are, where he takes you along on the journey and helps you along the way. To discover and learn things you didn't know before, rather than making it a mountain that you can't climb. He's sort of like the guide taking you there with him and helping you every step of the way, showing you where the slippery slopes are and where the boulders are you have to climb over. And so I really appreciate his approach. I think you will too. I hope that you will listen to this excerpt and be inspired to go buy this book. Maybe it would make a great gift for a loved one this holiday season, or maybe just for yourself. I would love to see churches do entire studies using this because I feel like it's that important to our helping our people understand and break away from a fundamentalist view of Scripture. It's really, really good, and I think we just, we need this kind of scholarship that is accessible to both scholars and laypeople alike. So here we go. Here is James F. McGrath from his book, The A to Z of the New Testament, and Things Experts Know That Everyone Else Should Too. So let's dive into Chapter B, Born in a Barn? When I was growing up as a city boy, I don't think I encountered the expression, were you born in a barn? The first time I heard it, I didn't immediately understand that the person was noticing I had left a door open. And telling me I should close it. The expression probably comes from a context in which people have enough contact with barns that they have a sense of what someone might behave like or neglect to pay attention to if they were born in one. I don't know how many readers of this book will be in the "I know barns" category and how many will be as clueless about them as I am, but many readers of this book will share one assumption about barns: namely, that Jesus was born in one. If you look closely at the New Testament stories about the birth of Jesus, you'll find the word barn doesn't appear in them. Although I can't say that I have checked every single English translation ever made, I am nonetheless confident about this. So why is it that people think they know that Jesus was born in a barn? The answer would likely come as a question: Where else would one find a manger? That, it turns out, is precisely the right question to ask. Mangers aren't familiar to city people either. So much so that you may hear someone refer to Jesus having been born in a manger. They clearly don't know what a manger is if they say that. No one who did would envisage, envisage Mary trying to awkwardly give birth to her son directly into a feeding trough for animals. A barn is uncomfortable enough, and childbirth is painful enough, no need to add to Mary's suffering. Let's leave that painful misunderstanding to one side and return to the question we raised. Where might one find a manger, if not in a barn or stable? And why should we even consider other possibilities? First, we should say that barns do get a mention in the New Testament. If modern English translations are anything to go by, Matthew 3:6, 13, Luke 3:12, 24, uh, sorry, 12:18, 24, it's not as though there was no such thing in the ancient world. The Greek word apotheke denotes a storehouse of any sort, whether for grain or other things. We are still not dealing with the modern barn that might be full of hay and an animal enclosure or stable, but it is not entirely different. Most readers of the Gospel of Luke don't envision, envisage Jesus having been born in a place that was exclusively or primarily a storehouse for grain or anything else, or even a barn that houses a stable. But if the creches and paintings are anything to go by, in a little lean-to in a back alley. However, Since the text doesn't mention a barn, or even a stable, the key question is not what one of these is like, but why modern readers insert one into their mental picture of the birth of Jesus when such words do not occur in the text. The answer is because we think it is obvious where a manger would be found. But what is obvious in one culture or one era may be completely alien and unknown in another. Likewise, what may have seemed obvious to an ancient author and their first readers, so obvious that it did not require mentioning, may never occur to us when reading today, unless we take the time and effort to learn about ancient ways of doing things. More than anything else, digging into the cultural background of the account of Jesus' birth story in the Gospel of Luke makes us aware of the huge economic gulf that separates us from the author and earliest readers of that story, and also from Jesus and his family. Barns may be unfamiliar to some readers, things seen only on television and in movies or on occasion drives through the countryside. Other readers will know them inside and out from firsthand experience. In both instances, however, we read the New Testament through a lens of economic privilege beyond the imagination of ordinary people in Jesus' time. Most people, whether they were agriculturalists or raised animals, did not have extensive properties with large structures to shelter grain or livestock. An ordinary individual in Jesus' time and context would have brought their few animals into their home at night throughout most of the year. If there was something that we might call a stable, it was within the structure of the home. Feeding troughs would be located within that structure as well. If Jesus was laid in a manger after he was born, the assumption most ancient Mediterranean readers would make is that it was located inside a home. Some readers are already objecting in their minds. Sure, animals in the home might be the norm, but in this case, we're dealing with an inn, and so surely, if it had a manger, it would have been in a stable, right? It does indeed seem likely that a commercial inn would have had a stable where animals ridden by guests could be tied up and kept safe during the night.— that still isn't what most people envision— envisage— sorry, I keep saying envision when I mean envisage. Excuse me, pardon me. That still isn't what most people envisage when the Christmas story is read. A place where travelers might be coming and going, and where there were mainly horses and donkeys. However, a more important point The point is that the story in the Gospel of Luke does not use the word that means a commercial inn. This may surprise you, but would not have surprised Luke's earliest readers. In the ancient Mediterranean world, inns were not where most people stayed when traveling. Think about the Apostle Paul in Acts, traveling around the Mediterranean world both by sea and by land, How many times does he check into a hotel? Not once. When we imagine ancient people doing so, we are reading cultures, we are reading cultures of the modern English-speaking world into the text. We envisage Joseph and Mary zooming down the ancient freeway on their donkey, passing neon sign after neon sign that flashes "No Vacancy." Well, that wasn't what happened in the ancient cultural context in which the story was set. Even today, in cultures with similar values to those of the New Testament context, if someone with connections of any sort were to arrive in town without sending advance word and check into a hotel, their local connections would be deeply offended. As we see Jesus doing, and later Paul and others, —people relied on hospitality. You stayed with someone you knew or someone who knew someone you knew. If necessary, if the connection was more distant, you brought a letter of introduction. The only case in which a commercial inn would be used was when one could not rely on any such network of connections. That was sometimes true of traders and of foreigners. It is thus unsurprising that the word for a commercial inn does appear at one point in the Gospel of Luke, in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The Samaritan is an outsider in Judea and not especially welcome, so he takes the man he rescued to an inn. The rescued man, becoming unconscious and naked, might belong to any people, and there was no way of knowing what local connections he had, if any. The very reason the story has the man's clothes stolen is not that this was typical, but that it robbed the man of anything that might have indicated that he belonged to the same people as the passerby. Passersby. The Samaritan helps him nevertheless. He doesn't know whether the man is a Jew or a Samaritan or something else. He has mercy on him as a fellow human being. The word that is translated as "in" in Luke's infancy story in most modern English translations occurs elsewhere in the Gospel when reference is made to the guest room where disciples are to prepare the Passover and where the Last Supper occurs in Luke 22:11, also Mark 14:14. This is an extra room in a home, one that might function normally as a guest room, but could provide a place for hosting a meal with guests. If we read the infancy story in Luke with this meaning in mind, we get a different impression than we will from typical modern retellings of the Christmas story. The home where Joseph and Mary have arrived is crowded. They are relying on hospitality from whomever showed it to them. They place Jesus in a feeding trough at the edge of the living space adjacent to where animals were brought into the home at night. Why are they not in a spare room or some better— other better accommodation? Luke doesn't tell the readers explicitly because the answer would have seemed obvious. It is because other people, who were deemed more important guests, were already occupying whatever guest room the home might have had. One point thus remains the same as in the modern Western idea of what happened: the family relies on hospitality and does not find a welcome on arrival. Indeed, if anything, that meaning is made clearer by shifting to a more culturally and historically plausible reconstruction of what occurred. In the modern world, hotels being full just means one is unlucky, Or there's a convention in town. The story as Luke's early readers would have understood it conveys something more than a lack of good fortune and available space. It conveys that Joseph and Mary were not the most important guests in the home of a relative in the birthplace of Joseph's illustrious ancestor David. They were shown the minimum of hospitality that was required by the culture and the sense of obligation felt by their hosts. Others were apparently deemed worthy of a better space, while Joseph, Mary, and eventually Jesus made do with what was left. Well, I'm gonna stop there for today. There is more in this chapter, but I don't want to read the whole thing to you. I hope that, uh, whetted your appetite just a little bit. The next section of the chapter, it's, uh, subtitled, "Will New Testament Study Ruin Your Christmas Pageant?" And then he goes into some more about the infancy narrative. I really appreciate this book. As I said, I haven't had a chance to finish it yet, but I have so been enjoying it, and every chapter just gets better so far. I'm looking forward to being able to finish it and hopefully have James on to talk about it together in the future. But this is all I had time for right now, but I wanted to share something with you that was appropriate to the holiday season but also hopefully a helpful tool to you. If the technology works the way it's supposed to, and it usually does, thank the Lord, you should be able, just even listening to this podcast, to go to the show notes and be able to click on to a link where you can buy a copy of this book by James F. McGrath. The book is called The A to Z of the New Testament: Things Experts Know That Everyone Else Should Too. I'm not getting paid anything to talk about this book or endorse it. I am just a fan, and I have been benefiting from it and I think you will too. I want to wish you a very Merry Advent, a very wonderful and Merry Christmas and Epiphany, and a Happy New Year, and all the things that go with it. As I said, life is tough and very busy right now, and it seems like it will be at least until June. So if I'm back with you again, I will do my best on Wednesdays to present new episodes you. If not, please be patient. I do plan on being back again. It's just I can't do everything, and I'm trying to set good boundaries for myself as needed. I also would remind you that we had a wonderful episode on my other podcast, Welcome to the Neighborhood, a Mr. Rogers tribute podcast, where I welcomed New York Times bestselling author Brad Meltzer, and we had a great conversation about Fred Rogers. And Brad is just a great guy and a new friend of mine. And I really have been enjoying his books for many years, not only his novels but his comics that he has written and his books for young people, especially the one, Who Was Mr. Rogers, the new one that just came out. So if you haven't had a chance to listen to that, maybe go over to my other podcast feed. That one also is very sporadic these days. Who knows though, the day is coming, hopefully less than 6 months from now, when I will be able to get back to some normalcy in this podcast releasing. In the meantime, thank you for your prayers. I wish you and yours all of the very best this holiday season. God bless, and thank you for listening to Voices in My Head. And by the way, if you want to find out more about what's going on in my life, anytime that I have news to share, I usually share it through rickleejames.com, or I put it on my Substack page, which is rickleejames.substack.com. You can also follow me on Twitter at Rick Lee James. You can follow my Mr. Rogers Twitter thread @MrRogersSay, and you can follow me on all of the social platforms if you just put Rick Lee James after everything. So facebook.com/RickLeeJames, instagram.com/RickLeeJames. You know how to do it. So go on, listen, be well. God bless you, and I hope you have a great end of the year.