Don’t be surprised if neither the Blairs nor the Camerons can make it to dinner
One of the two weekend polls putting Mr Cameron’s Conservatives ahead of Labour also had a majority preferring to have dinner with Mr and Mrs Cameron than with Mr and Mrs Blair. Presumably pollsters are trained to spot social change, but I had not realised that so many people now invited the First Political Couple and the Opposition First Political Couple to dinner. How long has this been going on? Not under Mrs Thatcher; probably since the more sociable John Major.
But I can see the hazards.
‘Hello, Mrs Blair? My wife and I were wondering whether you’d like to come over to our place for dinner.’ Mrs Blair: ‘Yeah, great. My fee will be £5,000. But you’ll have to talk to my agent. Tony’ll come for nothing. What did you say you did in the government?’ ‘Nothing.’ Mrs Blair: ‘So at least you’re Cabinet-rank. We don’t dine with the B team, y’know.’ ‘It’ll be very informal. We’ll just have a few neighbours in. No one posh.’ Mrs Blair: ‘Er, I’m looking at the diary. I don’t think we can make it.’ Mr Cameron would pose different problems.
‘Er, dinner. Cool. When? Where? Not in Notting Hill, though. Bad for the image. And could you make sure that half the guests are women? Not drawn from an all-women shortlist, though. We don’t want to go down that road yet. Dinner party guests should be invited from a guest list drawn up by the hosts — at least for the time being, until we have to give Francis Maude his way. Same goes for the menu. We don’t want to impose organic food in private homes, but equally we don’t want to lose Zac. But I agree with him that the party has got to reach out further, and that means the Dinner Party too. Who’ll be the other guests, if you don’t mind my asking?’ ‘Well, my wife and I were thinking of Norman Tebbit, Jane and Nicholas Winterton, and Simon Heffer.’ Mr Cameron: ‘I said reach out, not reach back. Strangely, I find the diary full for the next four years. But thanks for asking.’ That Bethlehem stable of 2005 years ago is once again in the news. It always is at this time of the year. The place has long been sacred to Christians. Over the last 50 years it has become sacred to anti-Christians. That Jesus had to be born in a stable is a symbol of government neglect of homelessness, it is said. Bethlehem Council should have provided better accommodation for such pregnant women and their husbands. If necessary, central government should have helped finance it. In the 1950s and 1960s Jesus’s birth in a squalid stable was held to be an example of the housing shortage or even slum landlordism; the innkeeper who denied the couple accommodation was seen as an example of either a Tory housing minister or a rapacious property shark who preferred to house people who had more money than Jesus’s parents. (We should exempt from censure the Christian socialists; a noble, though sadly declining group.) There is, however, no evidence that Jesus was born in a stable. It will be objected: what? It’s in the Bible. That and many other things about the Bible are always said by people who do not read the book.
Only two of the four Gospels give an account of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem: Luke and Matthew. The latter begins the story with the Three Wise Men visiting him after he is already born. Luke has Joseph and Mary going to their home town of Bethlehem to be taxed (though modern scholarship says that the Authorised Version mistranslates Luke by saying ‘taxed’, and that Mary and Joseph went home in order to take part in a census of the Roman empire.) The child is born. Mary ‘wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because “there was no room for them in the inn”’. In the next five verses Luke tells of the shepherds abiding in the fields to whom an angel brings good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. ‘Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.’ Not, it should be noted, lying in a manger in a stable.
That is all that Luke says about manger or inn. Matthew has the Wise Men, the star hav ing guided them to the birthplace, falling down and worshipping the child ‘when they were come into the house’. Not the stable; if it had been a stable, Luke and Matthew especially Luke, a superb reporter and storyteller — would have said so.
Neither Luke nor Matthew censures the innkeeper. Luke, the storyteller, would undoubtedly have thought it an important part of the story that an innkeeper should turn away the Saviour of mankind, even if the innkeeper could not have been expected to know who the child was. Matthew does not even mention the innkeeper, perhaps an even more telling point in the innkeeper’s favour.
It may be objected: surely the child’s being put in a manger (a feeding trough) suggests that it was in a stable? But, as I say, Luke does not mention a stable. The angel, addressing the shepherds, mentions the swaddling clothes and the manger, but not the stable. Mary and Joseph, not having a cradle, would have needed an alternative had they been in an inn or a house. For all we know, the innkeeper might have lent them the manger, or there could well have been a manger in the house, this being an agricultural society. A manger was a good substitute for a cradle, except that it would have been too big. Hence the need for swaddling clothes to wrap around the baby and make the manger seem smaller. It is reasonable to suppose that Luke mentions the manger, and there being no room in the inn, because, as the Gospel writer who most emphasises Jesus’s concern for the poor and the cast-out, he wants to emphasise the humble circumstances of his birth; all the more reason that he would have mentioned the stable.
Why then has the stable come down to us? Perhaps it was because early Christians wanted a Jesus who fulfilled Old Testament prophecy, and Isaiah (1.3), seemingly emphasing the need for a Messiah, says: ‘The ox knoweth his owner and the ass his master’s crib, but Israel doth not know.’ So, in early Christian art, and through to the great Italians until the end of the Renaissance, oxes and asses gaze at a child in a stable, but only because that is where oxes and asses would be found with children in mangers.
We would not wish it otherwise. One of Christianity’s gifts to us is so much beauty, especially from Italy. My vain purpose is to discomfit, if that were possible, not Christians but their enemies, on which perhaps unChristian note I wish you a happy Christmas.
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