Blackberries & Basements:

The Historical Jesus Makes Landfall

I was in Israel a little over a decade ago when we went to see the place they surmise Jesus was born, in Bethlehem, about six miles outside Jerusalem.

Archaeologists and historians do not know with complete certainty where many of the locations that mark the highpoints in Jesus’ life and ministry were located. Instead, they have close approximations. How our tour guide referred to those sites was ‘traditional’, which word in this context seemed to mean alternately ‘in the vicinity of’ or ‘what’s been agreed upon’.

By contrast, the site where I was that day, the Church of the Nativity, that one they’ve pretty much got. That’s partly because the earliest Christians had been worshipping there since Jesus’ death and it was venerated only two hundred years later. Constantine’s mother, Helena, who was a convert, built the cathedral there in 326 A.D. and by some stroke of luck, over the centuries, the site remained safe from political upheaval and depopulation. Additionally, unlike other sites from Jesus’ life where competing views muddy the water, no outside group, entity or individual has ever claimed a rival view about this one. It’s almost certainly where Jesus arrived on earth.

I’m just now finishing a year-long Bible reading plan that took me through the whole of the Old and New Testaments, the entire Bible, chronologically. The books of the Bible are not arranged that way and so the ancient history can get muddled or confusing if you read the books as they appear rather than moving through them historically. The plan also included historical analysis and biblical commentary, so it was a sizable undertaking for me and a serious commitment of time and energy.

So I thought as I send out my final letter for the year here at Coming to the Nuisance, I would celebrate what feels to me like a mammoth personal achievement by sharing a few of the details I’ve learned about Jesus’ birth.

Let’s start with Joseph and Mary and the trip to Bethlehem: they were almost certainly not traveling alone --- they would have been traveling in a large group of extended family as everyone had to be registered in that census and the trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem was a week-long, ninety-mile journey along a somewhat dangerous route.

There was no camel, by the way. I know they look cool on the cover of books, but they couldn’t have afforded one. Joseph worked construction. He’s a laborer which is what Jesus would later become. Neither one was a carpenter or a fine craftsman. When the King James Bible was first published, they had trouble translating the Aramaic word for what they did into English and the English word carpenter came closest. But Joseph and Mary were poor, working-class people. They may have been traveling with a donkey, but we can disappear the camel.

Also, the whole narrative about there being ‘no room at the inn’ is inaccurate. There was no Inn, no barn and no stable. They would have planned to stay with relatives and friends in Bethlehem but it’s likely that due to Mary’s being so pregnant, the two of them were at the tail end of this long family caravan.

As they finally rolled into town late that night, all the extra little nooks and rooms in the homes of their family and friends were likely already taken. That’s almost surely why they ended up essentially in someone’s basement.

Residential dwellings back then in that part of Israel would have been stone structures which were often placed right over caves that functioned like cellars basically ---- used for extra storage and at night, they tended to house the family’s animals.

So, this would be much like visiting faraway friends and family and you arrive last from the airport because your luggage got lost. So instead of staying in your uncle’s guest room or office, you’re in your second cousin’s neighbor’s basement on a blow-up. Just transfer that whole concept to ancient times and you get the picture.

Keep in mind too, that although Mary’s very pregnant, these two are also very young – Mary’s somewhere between thirteen and sixteen (this was ancient Jewish marital custom). Joseph is older but probably between eighteen and twenty-five. Many historians have speculated that Joseph might have been a widower. But so very little is known about him. Anyway, they’re just kids. That would be another reason they got the ‘basement-blow-up’.

Not incidentally, the census would almost certainly have been conducted in the warmer months when travel was much easier and roads predictably passable. Shepherds, too, would not have been ‘abiding in the fields’ at night in the winter. Again, that would be spring or summer.

So, most historians agree that Jesus of Nazareth was born between April and October and most likely between June and August. His December birthday, which we might refer to again as ‘traditional’, was picked centuries later, as it was thought to align better with the liturgical calendar and more poetically I think with the winter solstice.

So, this Christmas, to tip my hat to the real Jesus, for dessert I’ll be making a blackberry-raspberry cobbler. (I’ll pop the recipe in Tips.)

I can feel myself becoming a real geek about this biblical history stuff. I think the drive to steep myself in it might in part be a reaction to having to endure the years of what I would characterize as a complete Jesus-Freeze-Out at my kids’ New York City high school. Not a mention of the guy that I can remember. (Then again, teenage boys are not known for their forthcoming nature!)

I did recently come across some of their old high school history notes in a cabinet I was clearing out which related to the Renaissance and I saw that Christianity got a mention. But of the man, nothing —- who he said he was and what people claimed he did.

Just for fun, before I sat down to write this letter, I asked AI who were the three most influential people ever to walk the face of the earth —- I used the words change-makers and disruptors as qualifiers. And Jesus was in the top three, along with Muhammad and Newton. And Jesus came in first.

You can’t white him out. That’s just silly.

At the college level, of course, they know this so what they tend to do is a bit trickier --- they offer classes about the Bible or Christianity or Judaism but most often taught by scholars (secular). This is what they did even when I was at NYU many moons ago.

The problem with that is that the Bible is not an academic book about the biblical characters and their mostly disastrous, messy lives. It’s about God and divinely by God and relays the story of Him and his reckless, miraculous love for all He’s made.

I promise you, if you tried to take the protagonist out of any other story – Lear out of King Lear, Jane out of Jane Eyre — they too would scarcely make sense.

We’ll do a deeper dive on all this later this Spring. For now, let’s get back to that day a decade ago when I was in Israel with my family.

So, there I am. I have the three boys circling around, who’d just told us the day before that they were officially “churched-out”. See, in the Holy Land, over the centuries they’ve built a church or cathedral at every single ‘traditional’ site where Jesus did his amazing stuff --- water into wine, sermon on the mount, fed the five thousand. So, a Holy Land tour for us was actually a week-long journey through crowded cathedrals where huge tour buses idled in parking lots.

You might have guessed that we didn’t have a clear beat on this going into the trip. If you pictured that I pictured that my boys would be running on mountain tops (where Elijah and Moses appeared) or exploring sparse desert landscapes (where Jesus might have fasted for forty days) or sprinting barefoot on beaches (where Jesus told the ocean to calm down), you would have pictured right. Instead, we’re a churched-out crew in a crowded church.

And let’s add a little more color here on me: first, I’ll tell you that I love, love, love Middle Eastern cuisine so my foodie-self was out in spades. And back then I drank too – especially on vacations --- because my little governor liked to take a break then too. The joie de vivre of the holiday was the perfect excuse to have a few glasses of wine with dinner (let’s round up to 3). And I may or may not have also had a negroni straight-up please at cocktail hour because….well, what else does one do at cocktail hour?

This naughty habit would have wrecked all my sleep. Keep in mind, at that point in the trip we were staying in East Jerusalem which meant I was awakened an hour and a half before sunrise by the Muslim call to prayer (on a few occasions it was so beautiful it made me cry and I couldn’t get back to sleep because I groggily wondered if this might mean I was a tiny bit Muslim…).

So, here I am at the grotto-cathedral-place keeping one puffy-eye on the three boys who need some clear attending ‘cause they’re just about as restless at this point as a Texas two-step, I’m tired and let’s just call the balls and strikes --- hungover.

And we start descending into this cave structure which is directly under the church and seems at first like just a too-narrow staircase I could have found anywhere in New England but then quickly morphs into cold storage, like an ancient cellar, which is exactly what it is, which I only remember now as being very dark and smelling like dirt. I also remember being annoyed by an unhelpfully loud group of holy enthusiasts from Ohio.

We turn a corner, all of us walking in a dark line, and then I forget about the three boys, I forget I have three boys, because I see it, the place, this kind of hole really, around a corner I turn and see it, the place they say he was born and laid in a feed trough which is unbelievably unremarkable. Except what I feel right then which I can only describe as like the whole world taking a massive galactic breath, an enormous, cosmic inhaling gasp. I almost thought I heard it.

Not even three seconds later, I have another sensation like the corners and frames holding the world together just break away and fly off, toward infinity, I guess.

I can only compare this second experience to a dream I once had where I saw the sky lift away from the earth and disappear, revealing to me the real universe and its infinite nature, which had no sky, just endless, endless non-sky space, from which I awakened absolutely exhilarated, wonder-struck and terrified, my heart beating out of my chest.

So, my sweet, sweet friends and readers, in honor of Fake Christmastime (cause the real one happened closer to Fourth of July…) and all our totally inaccurate nativity scenes and creches set in shivery barns that are like three-dimensional misnomers and also in honor of that wild, fleeting sensory unraveling I once had alongside the Ohioans that I can only dimly, dimly capture in words, I thought this month I’d pull an emerald-cut diamond from my files, a wondrous passage indeed, as good as your favorite carol at least.

Here is the inimitable and singular Annie Dillard on frames and what happens when they break away:

You have seen photographs of the sun taken during a total eclipse. The corona fills the print. All of those photographs were taken through telescopes. The lenses of telescopes and cameras can no more cover the breadth and scale of the visual array than language can cover the breadth and simultaneity of internal experience. Lenses enlarge the sight, omit its context, and make of it a pretty and sensible picture, like something on a Christmas card. I can assure you, if you send any shepherds a Christmas card on which is printed a three by five photograph of the angel of the Lord, the glory of the Lord, and a multitude of the heavenly host, they will not be sore afraid.

“Total Eclipse”, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

Happy Holidays and New Year, my loves! I’ll see you guys in 2026 with more stories, more questions and the art that echoes them both.

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Truth – Christianity, when properly understood, is not technically another religion. I believe Jesus came to dismantle religion. It’s the only faith in which the known gap between man and the divine is God Himself. He actually builds the bridge to man, not the other way around. And then He crosses it! He just comes to get us —- like bails us out, whisks us off the sinking ship and puts a crown on our heads. It’s insane.

The longer I believe it, though, the more I actually struggle to comprehend such a wild, profligate Crazy-Tearaway-Love.

But that’s Christmas. In a nutshell.

Tip – Link to cobbler (an old recipe I got from my friend Brittany who texted it to me or gave it to me out of her head. Excuse my messy handwriting, link to GF cobbler (My sister Lis was GF. So I have GF versions of some things. And this one I liked.)

Tote – Best Christmas album EVER: Immanuel, Melanie Penn. I love every single song. I love every single word. Each track is the Christmas story told from a different perspective: Gabriel, Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, the Star of Bethlehem, the Magi. It’s gorgeous. Mary’s song is my favorite. Listen now on Spotify.

For the beautiful person on your list, you can make a donation to International Justice Mission in their name and provide a survivor of human trafficking with needed therapy for healing. Thank you IJM for not just rescuing but restoring.