The nativity story as portrayed on stage and screen has Joseph and Mary going from Inn to Inn, being turned away because there is no vacancy. The census has turned Bethlehem, as it were, into the ancient equivalent of a medium sized city with a huge convention. The problem is, Bethlehem at that time was not large enough even to have an Inn. So where did this idea come from?
In Luke 2:7, the Greek text says that Mary put the newborn Jesus in a feeding trough because there was no place for them in the kataluma. Kataluma is a guest room. Having come to the ancestral hometown for the census, Joseph's family was staying with relatives and the guest room was already full. In the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:34, the Samaritan takes the wounded man to a pandokion, an inn. It is lodging place, completely different from the kataluma in a private house.
So how did the guest room become an inn, and the lack of space in the inn the basis for lots of background detail in dramatizations? In Wycliffe's translation of Luke 2:7 it's
for ther was no place to hym in no chaumbir.
Tyndale took Wycliffe's chamber and it became
because ther was no roume for them within in the ynne.
And until the 20th century, Bible translations had inn, and inns led to innkeepers, and all the other unbiblical details which populate the modern nativity stories.
