Why Was Jesus Born in a Manger, and What Is a Manger?

A manger is a feeding trough for animals, the box or hollowed stone that held hay and grain for oxen and donkeys. Jesus lay in one because there was nowhere else to lay him: Luke says Mary “wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn” (Luke 2:7).

That is the first reason, and Luke does not leave it there. The same night an angel appears to shepherds in the fields and gives them something to look for: “And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger” (Luke 2:12). A baby in swaddling clothes was an ordinary sight in any village. A baby lying where the animals ate was not. Luke names the manger three times in ten verses, and the third time the shepherds find it. The makeshift cradle has become the sign by which God points out his Son.

What is a manger?

Luke’s Greek word is phatnē, from a verb meaning “to eat”, and Thayer’s lexicon gives it simply as “a crib, manger”, the place where the animals’ food went. It is a farmyard word, and Luke uses it once more, on the lips of Jesus himself. A ruler of the synagogue is angry at a healing on the Sabbath, and Jesus answers him, “doth not each one of you on the sabbath loose his ox or his ass from the stall, and lead him away to watering?” (Luke 13:15). The King James translators wrote “stall” there, but it is Luke’s same word. Every man in that synagogue knew the trough he untied his ox from, and the one asking him about it had once been laid in such a trough himself. The old Greek translation of Isaiah has the word too, where the King James says “crib”: “The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib” (Isaiah 1:3).

The mangers archaeologists have found in the land were part of the house itself. For centuries the ordinary Israelite house sheltered people and animals together: the livestock came into the ground-floor rooms at night, the family ate and slept above them, and some of the low stone walls between the rooms had mangers built into them. Where animals were kept in a cave, the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia notes, “a place for food for cattle may have been cut in the side of the rock.” The manger on our Christmas cards is a tidy wooden box on legs. The one Luke’s first readers pictured was more likely a low trough built into a wall or cut from rock, the kind of thing any farmer in Bethlehem had, and God chose to be laid in it.

Why was Jesus born in a manger?

Luke gives the first reason in a few words: there was no room. Luke says Caesar Augustus had ordered the whole empire enrolled for taxes, and that Joseph went up from Nazareth “unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:) To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child” (Luke 2:4–5). Bethlehem was also the town the prophet Micah had named as the birthplace of Israel’s ruler, which is told more fully in why Jesus was born in Bethlehem. While they were there, Mary’s time came. Luke names no innkeeper and no door shut in their faces. He says only that there was no room, and that she laid her son in the animals’ trough.

Mary was far from her home in Nazareth, there was no space for her where they stayed, and her firstborn son’s first bed was a feeding trough. Luke tells it without comment, and Paul shows us how to read it. He puts the whole mystery in one sentence: “though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). Christ, he writes to the Philippians, “made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:7).

The manger is where that self-emptying first becomes something we can see. The child we kneel to at Christmas began his life with no room made for him, and he lived it the same way. “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests,” he said as a grown man, “but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head” (Luke 9:58).

Why was there no room in the inn?

Was there an innkeeper at all, turning the couple away from his door? Luke never mentions one, and his word may not mean an inn. The English “inn” makes us picture a roadside hotel with a sign over the door. Luke’s word is kataluma, a place where a traveller stops and stays, and the only other time he uses it the King James Version calls it something else. Before the Last Supper, Jesus sends two disciples into Jerusalem to ask the master of a house, “Where is the guestchamber, where I shall eat the passover with my disciples?” (Luke 22:11). When Luke does mean an inn, the one the Good Samaritan pays for in the parable, he chooses another word, pandocheion, which Thayer gives as “a public house for the reception of strangers” (Luke 10:34). So the room that had no space for Mary’s child is called by the same name as the room where, as a grown man, he would keep his last Passover.

Here are Luke’s three words and how the King James Version renders them.

So what was full? Interpreters still differ, and the question is old: Stephen Carlson, in a 2010 study in the journal New Testament Studies, notes that Western scholars have debated it “for over five hundred years”. Many Bibles keep “inn”. Others read it as the guest room of a family house, the same kind of room in which Jesus would keep the Passover. Carlson argues for the simplest sense of the word, a place to stay, and renders Luke’s clause “because they had no space in their place to stay”; in his reading, that place was “a marital chamber too small for giving birth”. Whichever reading we take, Mary had somewhere to stay and it could not hold what was happening to her. The room was too small for the birth of the Son of God, and so her son was laid where the animals fed.

Was Jesus born in a stable or a cave?

Luke mentions only the manger, which tells us there were animals close by, and leaves the building unnamed. Christians pointed to a cave very early. Justin Martyr, writing in the middle of the second century, a few years before he died for the faith in Rome, said that “since Joseph could not find a lodging in that village, he took up his quarters in a certain cave near the village; and while they were there Mary brought forth the Christ and placed Him in a manger”. In the 240s Origen answered the pagan critic Celsus by telling him, in effect, to go and look: “there is shown at Bethlehem the cave where He was born, and the manger in the cave where He was wrapped in swaddling-clothes”, and the place was “greatly talked of in surrounding places, even among the enemies of the faith”.

A church was completed over that cave in 339, built so that its eastern end surrounded the cave and gave a view down into it. The Church of the Nativity that replaced it in the sixth century still stands there, the oldest Christian church in daily use, and the Greek Orthodox Church, the Franciscans of the Custody of the Holy Land and the Armenian Church care for it together. Christians who are divided on a good deal else keep watch over one manger side by side. Some archaeologists read Luke another way and picture an ordinary Bethlehem farmhouse, with the manger built into the wall of the animals’ room downstairs. The Gospel allows either, and either way the child lay where the animals fed. By the time the wise men arrived, Matthew says, the family was in a house: “when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother” (Matthew 2:11).

Why are an ox and a donkey always beside the manger?

Luke never mentions an ox or a donkey; they came into the scene from Isaiah, whose first chapter grieves over a people who have forgotten their God: “The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib: but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider” (Isaiah 1:3). Isaiah is grieving over his own people, and the fault he names is ours as much as theirs. The animals remember the hand that feeds them, and we forget. The Greek Bible uses Luke’s word for manger in that verse, and Christians came to read it at Bethlehem, where the animals stood beside the manger of the Lord who made them.

Saint Francis of Assisi set a living ox and donkey beside a manger of hay. At Greccio, a hill town near Rieti in Italy, he asked a local man named John to prepare a Christmas night in 1223, because he wanted, as his first biographer Thomas of Celano records, “to see as much as possible with my own bodily eyes the discomfort of his infant needs, how he lay in a manger, and how, with an ox and an ass standing by, he was laid upon a bed of hay”. Friars and families from the farms around came with torches. There were no statues, only a manger full of hay, an ox and a donkey, and the Mass was celebrated over the manger itself. Pope Francis, writing from Greccio in 2019, called that night the beginning of the tradition of the nativity scene. The figures we set out each December go back to one friar who wanted to see that discomfort with his own eyes. The other signs of the feast are gathered in the Christian symbols of Christmas.

Was Jesus really born in a manger?

Strictly, Luke says Mary gave birth and then laid her son in the manger, so the manger was his first bed rather than the place of birth itself. When we sing that he was born in a manger, we mean what Luke means: the feeding trough was the first place his mother laid him down. Luke is the only Gospel writer who mentions it, and Christians have read his account as history from the first centuries. Wherever the trough stood, the shepherds were told to look for a child lying in one, and that is where they found him.

What does the manger mean?

The shepherds were told to look for a child in a feeding trough, and Catholic, Orthodox and Lutheran Christians have kept looking into that sign ever since. Many have found bread in it. Bethlehem’s Hebrew name, Beth Lechem, means “house of bread”, and the child laid where the animals fed grew up to say, “I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger” (John 6:35). Saint Augustine put it in a single line, “Laid in a manger, he became our food”, and Pope Francis said it again on Christmas night in 2018: “There God, in the house of bread, is born in a manger.”

The same sign points ahead to the cross. The Orthodox Church sings at Christmas, “Heaven, a Cave; the Virgin the Throne of the Cherubim; the Manger a room, in which Christ, the God Whom nothing can contain is laid.” In its icon of the Nativity the child is wrapped head to foot in bands that, in Fr John Breck’s words, “envelop His body like a shroud”, and his cradle is “given the form of a sacrificial altar”. The one laid in the animals’ trough was born to give his life for the world.

God announced his Son to a handful of shepherds, and the sign he gave them was a feeding trough. He still lets himself be found in plain places, and we go looking for him as the shepherds did. Martin Luther, in his preface to the Old Testament in 1523, heard the angel’s sign as a pattern for reading the whole Bible, whose simple stories he begged readers not to stumble over: “Here you will find the swaddling clothes and the mangers in which Christ lies, and to which the angel points the shepherds. Simple and little are the swaddling clothes, but dear is the treasure”.

Related reading

• Where is the Christmas story in the Bible?
• Who were the shepherds in the Nativity story?
• Why was Jesus born in Bethlehem?
• How big was Bethlehem when Jesus was born?
• How old was Jesus when the wise men came?
• The Christian symbols of Christmas and what they mean