Bible & History

No Innkeeper, No Barn: The Bethlehem House Behind Luke 2

The Christmas pageant has an innkeeper and a stable, but Luke's account has neither. A single Greek word, and the layout of an ordinary village house, paint a warmer and more surprising picture of the night Jesus was born.

YESHVA EditorialOctober 9, 20266 min readEditor: Luciano Olguin

Join free to read 3 articles a month

Create a free Yeshva account — it takes a minute.

Join free Sign in

More like this

Bible & History6 min read

The Emperor's Letter That Dates the Apostle Paul

Neither Acts nor Paul's letters mention a single calendar year. So how do we know when Paul was in Corinth? The answer lies in a few broken stones at Delphi, carved with a letter from Claudius about a town that needed more citizens.

Bible & History6 min read

The Credit-Card-Sized Scrap of John in Manchester

In a library in northern England lies a scrap of papyrus you could cover with your palm. It carries a few Greek lines from the trial of Jesus, and for ninety years it has been at the center of the question of how early the Gospels were copied and how far they had already traveled.

Bible & History6 min read

Lydia, the Dealer in Purple, and the First Church in Philippi

A businesswoman from Thyatira, far from home, sat by a river in Philippi and heard Paul. What she did next put the first European church in her living room.

Bible & History6 min read

Tertius Held the Pen: How Paul's Letters Were Written and Delivered

The average letter in Paul's world ran under a hundred words. Romans runs to about 7,100. Behind every one of Paul's letters stood a secretary, a team of coworkers, a costly roll of papyrus and a trusted friend who carried it across the sea.

Bible & History6 min read

Capernaum: The Black-Stone Village Where Jesus Made His Home

Franciscan archaeologists spent nearly twenty years digging out the village where Jesus taught, healed and stayed. The black stone houses they found explain more of the Gospels than you might expect.

Bible & History7 min read

Codex Sinaiticus: The Fourth-Century Bible Split Between Sinai, London, Leipzig and St Petersburg

In Christmas week of 1933, some 20,000 people queued at the British Museum to see a Greek Bible copied by hand sixteen centuries earlier. How it left a monastery below Mount Sinai is still disputed. What it shows about the Bible's text is not, and it explains some footnotes in your Bible.

Bible & History6 min read

The Men Who Judged Jesus Left Their Names in Stone

For centuries Pontius Pilate and the high priest Caiaphas were known almost only from texts. Then a block in a Roman theater and a bone box found by a bulldozer put both names back in the hands of archaeologists.