Jesus was born in a cave and rose from the dead in a cave. Like most Westerners, I always thought of the stable in Bethlehem as a wooden lean-to filled with straw, at least until I went to the Church of the Nativity in the West Bank. There I learned that caves made the best stables in Jesus’s day—no wind whistling through the boards, no predators sneaking up on you from behind. The traditional place of Jesus’s birth is not in the Church of the Nativity but under it, in a small cave under the altar.
