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Bethlehem

This is the season when we hear the familiar words from Luke’s Gospel: ‘And Joseph also went up from Galilee out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, into the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child’. Mark and John do not provide Nativity narratives, but Matthew does, and he likewise places the birth in Bethlehem. Indeed, in his gospel the Wise Men, enquiring of King Herod where they may find the newly-born King of the Jews, refer to one of the Old Testament prophets (actually Micah 5 v. 2) in support of the idea of a birth in Bethlehem: ‘And thou Bethlehem, in the land of Juda, art not the least among the princes of Juda: for out of thee shall come a Governor that shall rule my people Israel’.

The tradition that Jesus was born in Bethlehem emphasises his descent from David since this was the town from which he came and in which he was proclaimed as the founding king of Israel. Matthew spells out the connection with David through his genealogy in Chapter 1; and Luke was clearly aware of this link too, as we see from the quotation above. But they part company in some important ways. The implications of Matthew chapters 1-2 is that Mary and Joseph lived in Bethlehem (there is nothing to suggest otherwise), and that they settled in Nazareth in Galilee only after their return from the flight into Egypt, when they thought it best to avoid the attentions of Herod’s successor Archelaus, who was by then ruling over Judaea. So, according to this story, Jesus was born in Bethlehem because his parents lived there: no inn, no stable, but rather a house (Matt 2 v. 11.). Luke, by contrast, presents a tradition in which they lived in Nazareth all along, and only found themselves in Bethlehem, in rather difficult circumstances (inn, stable, and all the rest) because, in common with crowds of other people, they had to travel there to meet the Roman taxation (i.e. census) requirements which, as Luke explains it, demanded that everyone went to the place of their historic lineage — Bethlehem in this case, because Joseph was descended from David. The trouble with this scenario is that it doesn’t fit the historical facts. In the first place, if, as Luke claims, the census was that ordered by Cyrenius (Quirinius), the Roman Governor of Syria, this well-attested event actually happened a couple of years after the death of Herod. In fact, there was no overlap between the reign of Herod and the governorship of Quirinius. Furthermore, Roman census rules did not require anyone to travel to the place of their ultimate family origins.

Still, without probing the complexities that underlie all of this, it is clear that from earliest times the town of Bethlehem in Judaea, only a few miles south of Jerusalem, was understood to be the site of Jesus’s birth. Apart from the gospels, there are passing references to Bethlehem being the location in two texts from the second and third centuries respectively. But what turned Bethlehem into a major pilgrim centre was the claim by Helena, mother of Constantine, to have discovered the cave of the Nativity when searching for holy sites and relics between 326 and 328. The church that she ordered to be erected over the spot was burned in a Samaritan revolt in 529, but it was soon rebuilt by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I (ruled 527-65), and it is essentially this structure, of course modified over time, that is the present Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

Joyce Hill