“Baby Born in Bethlehem” came to us the way the oldest songs do — without a return address. My dad led it on guitar in his youth-pastoring days at Emmanuel Bible Church in Seattle, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, and it stayed with him long after. For all our searching, we were never able to confirm who wrote it — the one name we turned up, we could never pin down, and every time we asked, no one knew.
What we did find were fingerprints of something older: phrasing with the cadence of the spiritual tradition, lines like “Baby born in Bethlehem” that land like a hand-lettered headline. By the time the song reached us it had passed through many hands — we heard it more than one way, and no two tellings quite matched. There may be no single canonical version at all, only the one each singer carried.
So Dad and I did what caretakers do. Leaning on his remembered version, we kept the song’s unadorned heart and clarified just a few lines so their meaning couldn’t be mistaken — “Jesus with the Father now” became “He is with the Father now,” and “Son of God said, ‘I must go’” became “The Son of God said…” We even let the song lean forward: it opens remembering that since His birth “the world has never been the same,” and closes trusting it “will never be the same.”
We never learned the author’s name. But we know the One the song is about — and we’re glad to carry it a little further down the road.
— Dan Parks
