Midwives Belong in our Nativities

I collect a few things: Beatles records, broadway playbills, mugs, and nativities.

Every year, I unpack my nativities from the Christmas boxes and set them up around my house. Seeing them brings me joy during the holiday season. Even my children love to take them out and fight over who gets to set up which one.

My nativity collection has grown to over twenty different sets, all in a gorgeous variety of mediums, colors, and origin. I particularly love to collect nativities from different places around the world. My in-laws sent me several from Africa; my brothers each brought me one from their missions in Ecuador and Italy; I’ve picked them up on islands at cruise ports. If a friend or family member travels abroad, I always ask for them to look out for a nativity for me.

I have nativities with fat Target birds, Little People toys, even giraffes and zebras.

But not a single one, from anywhere in the world, has any women besides Mary.

There’s always shepherds, their animals in all kinds of varieties, Joseph, angels. The Wise Men didn’t even come for days, or possibly years, after Christ’s birth but they still get to be part of the nativity display.

According to scripture, no women came to attend a birth of a first-time mother, who may have been as young as 14 years old, in a time before hospitals and meal trains.

I find this impossible to believe.

Women had to have been there. Midwives had to have been there. But like so many other places in scripture, the women are simply erased or ignored in the narrative.

Let’s back up.

The New Testament tradition begins the story of Christ’s birth with Caesar Augustus declaring a tax or census. The text states that all were required to travel to their ancestral homeland for this accounting. However, scholars have pointed that this isn’t backed up with historical data. For starters, the census of that era, the Census of Quirinius, took place 6 CE, approximately 10 years after Christ’s likely birth. Second, there’s no evidence of residents being asked to return to their ancestral land. It doesn’t make much practical sense either; disrupting a wide region for people to travel back and forth in a time period where walking was the main form of travel would’ve caused major issues for economy and trade.

Biblical scholar Dan McClellan discusses how most likely Luke 1 & 2 containing the story of the nativity was written by another author after the rest of the book had already been written. The idea of the census and having to return to Bethlehem was possibly an invention by this author or old tradition in order to correlate Jesus’s birth with prophecies from earlier scripture about the birthplace of the Savior.

Either way, Mary most likely gave birth around family members or friends that she was familiar with. There would’ve been no reason for her to be alone during her travail. Even if they did have to travel for a census, Joseph would’ve brought them to a family home, which leads to the next part of the narrative.

The story goes on that Jesus was born in a stable because there was no room for them in the inn. We’ve all seen the depictions of Joseph leading a donkey carrying Mary from inn to inn, only for each door to be slammed in his face until someone takes pity on them. However, this tradition most likely came about from mistranslations.

The Greek word kataluma has been translated as inn, when it was much more likely to be used to mean upper room. An entirely different word would’ve been used to describe an inn full of strangers. Instead, the upper room refers to the top floor of a Palestinian home around the 1st century. The family slept and ate upstairs in a large upper room. A lower, ground floor room was used for every day living and cooking, and was also where they brought in their animals at night. The lower room would’ve been filled with straw and also had a trough for feeding the animals.

Cross-section of a first century Palestinian home with an upper room.

Jesus was most likely born among animals because there wasn’t room for Mary to give birth in the upper family room above. This could’ve been because there were too many visiting family members staying in the home. Or, in my opinion, the author of Luke 2 just wanted to make sure Jesus was placed in a manger to further fulfill prophecy.

Either way, Mary gave birth in a family home. Not a lonely stable or cave. She would’ve been surrounded by family members—and yes, women! The women around her would’ve have followed the standard protocol for births during this time period.

Midwives would have attended the birth. They would’ve prayed over and blessed the mother and child, along with working to safely deliver the baby and performing aftercare. Men were absent from birthing world during this time.

It was women who helped Mary be as comfortable as possible as she struggled. They held her hand through contractions and assured her when the pain became too much. They welcomed the baby into the world, guiding Him from the birth canal, and were the first to hold Him. They cleaned up the blood and buried the afterbirth. They swaddled Him and placed Him at His mother’s breast. And perhaps also in a manger.

(I want to stop and make a quick note that not all Christian traditions believe that Mary gave birth the same as other women. Some believe in a divine C-section, a bloodless birth, a painless birth, and/or that she remained a virgin even after giving birth. I understand that within those traditions, the presence of any other person to aid Mary might not have been necessary. I greatly respect these beliefs. For this post, I’m approaching the story of Christ’s birth from the Christian perspective I was raised with, which didn’t include Mary’s divinity.)

Throughout my life as a Mormon, I’ve heard many times in church classes and over the pulpit people wondering how Mary did it. How she gave birth all alone. I’ve heard all kinds of theories on how this happened too: angels told Joseph what to do; Mary just blacked out and the baby came out; the Holy Ghost was some kind of pain medicine for her. But usually, I hear both men and women suggesting that Mary simply went through the entire process alone and amazingly, no complications or issues arose.

I suppose that could be true.

But I think it’s far more likely that God helped Mary through the birth by simply calling women to her side.

Isn’t that how most of our own prayers are answered and miracles performed? It’s through others who come to serve and help us in our times of need that we feel God’s hand in our lives and Their love.

Maybe we can look back on the author of Luke and admit that he, like so many other men, just erased the women from the story because they didn’t fulfill his rhetorical goals. Those women were simply cut from the narrative, deemed unimportant or uninteresting or unnecessary in a patriarchal world.

I think it’s finally time to reclaim these women, untold and hidden from the pages of the Bible.

Women were present at the birth of the Savior. They belong in our nativities. They deserve to be on displays. Their hands safely brought Christ into the world. We wouldn’t have a child to celebrate at Christmas without them.

We should talk about them openly. Discuss them with our families as we set out nativity sets and read the Christmas story. State their role as God’s miracle workers over the pulpit. And the more we acknowledge the role of women in Christianity’s past, the more we’ll see women’s value in Christianity’s present.

*This post was originally posted on my substack with the title “While Midwives Watched”*

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