And the stable narrative is more likely in a minor farming town than in a “bustling city.”
ICXC NIKA.
Thing is, Luke’s nativity story isn’t even a ‘stable narrative’ (if by ‘stable’ you mean a sort of European-style barn). It wasn’t until the Middle Ages, and only then in the West.
As was noted, Luke likely had in mind a house with a ‘(guest) room’ (
katalymati) and a ‘feeding trough’ / ‘manger’ (
phatnē). Early Christians (like Justin Martyr, the
Protoevangelium of James and Origen), meanwhile, had in mind a cave, due to an interpretation of the Greek text of Isaiah 33:16 (“He will dwell in a high cave of a strong rock”) as a Christological prophecy.* Later Western Christians defaulted to a shack or barn, because the Vulgate was translated from the Hebrew text of Isaiah where the wording of the passage in question is different (“his high places will be the stronghold of rocks”) and so there’s really no more prophecy to fulfill.
- The Church of the Nativity does assume the cave idea, but the traditional location does not quite jive in with what you find in Justin and the author of the Protoevangelium (and the works which are based on the Protoevangelium), who both assume that the cave was in a distance outside Bethlehem. (The traditional cave is however inside the ancient village, likely near its western border.)
Not to mention that both sources are a little suspect: the author of the
Protoevangelium was apparently a gentile Christian ignorant of Palestinian geography and Jewish customs, and while Justin was from Palestine, he was from a pagan family and was born in the Samaritan heartland (Nablus/Neapolis, biblical Shechem). So while Justin could have gotten the idea of a cave ‘correctly’ based on his observations of local custom, it still stands that he apparently does not know where the exact cave where Jesus would have supposedly been born was, since he describes it rather broadly as being near the village, but nevertheless
outside it. (That Justin may have thought that it was some distance from Bethlehem’s borders we can infer from his remark about the Tomb of Rachel, which was just outside the village: he said that Rachel’s tomb is “in” Bethlehem.)
As for Origen’s remarks (
Against Celsus 1.51): “What is shown there is famous in these parts even among people alien to the faith, because it was in these cave that the Jesus who is worshipped and admired by Christians was born.” The way this passage reads (it’s a little awkward in Greek), it seems that Origen was repeating what the pagans who by then were living in Bethlehem - this was well after the Jews became a minority in the Holy Land - were claiming: that Jesus was born in a cave in the area.
We do know from St. Jerome that the site where the Church of the Nativity now stands was originally a shrine to Tammuz-Adonis. At which case, the claim needs to be taken with a grain of salt: for all we know, Origen’s apparently pagan informants may have simply arrived at the idea because of syncretism rather than solid ancient tradition. They identified Jesus with Adonis-Tammuz, for whom they had a cave-sacred grove in the area: hey, the Christians were claiming that Jesus was born in Bethlehem after all, and this Jesus was a dying-and-rising God pretty much like Tammuz/Adonis. Not to mention that the Aramaic and Hebrew words for ‘my Lord’ (
'adoni) sounds just like ‘Adonis’.
