(UNDATED) ‘Tis the season for Christmas pageants everywhere to dramatize one of Scripture’s most familiar scenes and cast a cold-hearted innkeeper, who shoos away the holy family to a lowly stable.

But pageants and sermons castigating the infamous innkeeper are giving him an underserved bad rap, scholars say, and are feeding dangerous misconceptions about how Jesus’ contemporaries received him.

“We’re so brainwashed into this idea of the mean old innkeeper and no room at the inn, we don’t even notice that this is a violation of the text that we’ve just read,” says Kenneth E. Bailey, a Bible scholar and author of “Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes.”

The innkeeper’s reputation stems from a single, oblique reference in Luke 2:7. The verse says Mary wrapped the newborn Jesus in cloth “and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.” From this text, Christian communities through the centuries have inferred that their savior was rebuffed at birth.

The reality was possibly much different. The “inn” (or “lodgings” in some translations) was not a hotel or hostel but perhaps a guest room in the private residence of one of Joseph’s relatives, according to Mikeal Parsons, a Baylor University New Testament scholar who’s writing a commentary on Luke. Because that room was already occupied, Parsons says, hosts may have made room for Mary and Joseph within their own family quarters and cleaned up an animal feeding trough (manger) to serve as a crib.

Such details are important, scholars say, in part because the birth narrative is rich with symbolism. The divine infant’s portrayal in modest circumstances suggests, for instance, that God humbled himself to join the commonest of humankind. Hence for later generations to conjure a fictitious innkeeper and make him into something of a villain may be to read a new, unwarranted and potentially misleading significance into the story.

“It’s kind of a ‘gotcha’ moment to recognize there is no innkeeper or reason to castigate an innkeeper, but that’s what we tend to do,” says Thomas Stegman, associate professor of New Testament at Boston College School of Theology and Ministry. “It’s an easy thing to cast judgment on this figure, (but) anything that gives us an out from examining ourselves first is not a good thing in the spiritual lifeâÂ?¦ We need to consider instead how hospitable have we been?”

Surrounding the innkeeper’s image is the question of who welcomed Jesus and who rejected him. Boston College theologian Harvey Egan notes that some Christian traditions have presumed an innkeeper’s rudeness foreshadows Jesus’ rejection by religious authorities on the eve of his death. Bailey cautions that Christians need to be careful not to let innkeeper legends perpetuate harmful stereotypes about Jews as people hostile toward Jesus or insensitive to the plight of a pregnant woman.

“It’s important for us as Christians to look at our text and say, ‘We have read an anti-Jewish undercurrent into a lot of stories where it’s not there, and here’s one of them’,” Bailey says. “The message is not: ‘Bethlehem did not open its hearts. Are we willing to?’ The message is: ‘Bethlehem opened its hearts. Are we willing to?”‘

Scholars are taking steps to set the record straight. Bailey, for instance, published in 2005 “Open Hearts in Bethlehem,” a musical now performed by church groups to underscore the hospitality that baby Jesus received. Marcus Borg, co-author of “The First Christmas: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’ Birth,” says the elusive innkeeper figure could be understood as a low-status employee who welcomed what Jesus represented.

“Those who are in the peasant class, the bottom 90 percent oppressed by Roman imperial rule, provide hospitality for the newborn Jesus-and that would include the innkeeper as well the shepherds, (who) are intrigued by an alternative lord who brings a new kind of peace,” Borg says.

Not everyone is ready, however, to see the innkeeper as open-hearted from the get-go. Mac McConnell of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., has for years used his one-man drama ministry to portray the innkeeper as a respectable businessman who was just too busy to put up with a crying child and offered a spot among animals just to get the family out of his way. Last month (November), he published his tale in a book he describes as historical fiction: “Hadad, The Innkeeper’s Journey.”

McConnell’s innkeeper “is not generous at all,” he says, in offering a manger to the holy family. The portrayal of a guy too busy for the Lord “is a dramatic foil to a degree, but it’s also there because those in Bethlehem missed (the signs of a savior’s birth) even though it was obvious.”

Scholars meanwhile continue to press for a new image of a redeemed innkeeper (or host) who never hesitated to show respect-and who now deserves a little reciprocity.

“Luke is highlighting the hospitality of the anonymous householder (friend or relative) and not condemning the inhospitality of an insensitive innkeeper,” Parsons said. “His point seems to be … that Jesus came to his own and his own received him!”

DEA DSB END MacDONALD