>If there were any doubts about the Christian tradition on this point,
>let's remember that Mary was an unwed mother in poverty. If the three
>kings from Africa, Arabia, and Persia (I think), hadn't showed up a
>nacimiento, with welfare goodies, Mary might or perhaps would have put
>the kid out on the rocky hills around Bethlehem like Oedipus and
>continued on her journey with her molester-protector and co-dependent,
>dirty old Joe an unemployed and migrant carpenter.
>
>CG
Later the kid might have gone to a foundling hospital, like Genet. No wait, would there have been a foundling hospital if he hadn't been born when he was (assuming he was really born at all)? Sounds like a Star Trek time travel episode.
Boswell, John The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance.
In The Kindness of Strangers, John Boswell argues persuasively that child abandonment was a common and morally acceptable practice from antiquity until the Renaissance. Using a wide variety of sources, including drama and mythological-literary texts as well as demographics, Boswell examines the evidence that parents of all classes gave up unwanted children, "exposing" them in public places, donating them to the church, or delivering them in later centuries to foundling hospitals. The Kindness of Strangers presents a startling history of the abandoned child that helps to illustrate the changing meaning of family.
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/13653.ctl