With best wishes to all who pass through here in coming days, a little Christmas thought: I found this article interesting Craig Keener, professor at Palmer Theological Seminary, which you can download and read from the site of the Journal of Greek-Roman Christianity and Judaism, a magazine published on-line. The title of the paper (The Nativity Cave Myths and Gentile - "The Grotto of the Nativity 'and pagan myths") makes your mouth water, even if it turns out that the wise and' partly spoiled by some methodological problems.
In particular, Keener, and that 'an evangelical, and' very worried defend the authenticity 'of the tradition that gives rise to Jesus' in the cave of Bethlehem, next to which Jerome retired' to live in the late fourth century. To achieve its purpose, Keener adopt the usual tactics I've already 'described and which' consists in equal parts by silencing the basic elements that go against his thesis (above all, the fact that the same tradition of Bethlehem and 'made unsustainable contradictions of Matthew and Luke) and create a chain of evidence "plausible" that would eventually provide a "demonstration" (see page 60: Bethlehem 'to 6 miles from Jerusalem - Relatives of Jesus' had the property 'in the town - there are caves in Bethlehem!).
In reality ', everything wheel on the news, told by Jerome and Paulinus of Nola, that Adriano (after 136) would place a grove sacred to Adonis on the site of Jesus' birth to "desecrated". If this were true, we would have a testimony about the identification of very old cave. The problem 'that the story is furi only in the fourth century: Justin and Origen, who also know the detail of the cave (ignored by the canonical Gospels, but not from the Proto-Evangelium of James), do not say anything about Adriano. In addition, 'should be added that these testimonies are very suspicious. After Constantine, Christians will enter into a major program of "Christianization" of the Land of Israel, as also happens in the rest of the empire, is especially their sacred places in the installation directly over those who were the first Jewish and / or pagans. In this sense, and 'much more' likely to have been Constantine to take possession of the cave for "desecrating" the grove of Adonis. The story of Jerome serves to justify the operation "proving" that Christians were there 'from before the Gentiles: and' the same thing happens when the apologists say that Plato's philosophy has learned reading the books of Moses'.
When Keener is free from the obsession historically, its analysis reveals very well the element most 'important, the divine birth in a cave and' common in myths greek-roman. From the historical point of view, the Christian tradition configured as "imitation" (page 64). A theological interpretation might see this as a particularly "divine contextualization" (whatever the meaning of this expression), but this' something else than the historical research.
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