Having myself, in past years, alluded sentimentally to the Christmas celebrations in Bethlehem—the birthplace of Jesus of Nazareth—I feel an unsentimental obligation to mention that these won’t be happening this year, or in any foreseeable year.
Bethlehem, for many, many centuries an entirely Christian town, has now been largely depopulated of Christians. While this is generally explained, in media accounts, as the result of “harsh Israeli security measures,” other factors may well have contributed to the exodus, such as violent impositions of the Shariah code, the takeover of their church by Palestinian gunmen in 2002, and the hideous desecration that followed, the use of Christian homes by “militants” of both Fatah and Hamas as cover for the shelling of Jewish targets in south Jerusalem, and sundry murderous attacks on Christians around the town during the Al Aqsa Intifada and since. Against which background, the loss of the pilgrim trade has deprived the dwindling Christian community of their chief source of income. The town is now overwhelmingly Muslim, and may be Christian-free very soon.
The town is one of many, many ancient Christian settlements scattered through the Middle East whose religious character actually predates Islam. In Bethlehem, Caliph Omar guaranteed the right of Christian residents to use the basilica we call the Church of the Nativity—which still stands, vandalized and stripped—after the Arab conquest of AD 637.
In its present form, that basilica was completed in AD 565, over the site of an earlier basilica, over a cave, where—according to surviving testimony dating back to the cusp of the first Christian century—Jesus was born.
Indeed, the site had been so well known, and for so long, that after Bethlehem was wrecked, during the Revolt of Simon Bar Kokhba in AD 132-135, the Roman re-occupiers ordered the building of a Temple of Adonis over the grotto. They did such things to cancel religious observance at the site, just as they ploughed up the Second Temple of Jerusalem, with the Jewish Holy of Holies, and built a Temple of Jupiter over that, renaming the city Aelia Capitolina. They also built a Temple of Venus over the site of Christ’s crucifixion, at Golgotha, outside the old Jerusalem wall (though inside the Turkish 16th-century walls).
St. Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine I, and herself among the most knowledgeable and assiduous travellers in the Holy Land, was the patron of the earlier basilica at Bethlehem, completed in AD 333. She was, by all accounts, a pioneering archaeologist, establishing that sites of Christian veneration were to be found just under their Imperial Roman coverings. Miraculously enough, both the grotto at Bethlehem and the knob of Golgotha had been merely covered with landfill for the platforms of the grand pagan temples. Underneath, they remained intact, and we have some witness of the great joy contemporary Christians felt, when they were revealed by the excavations; those Christians who had already passed down the traditions of Nativity and Crucifixion, through a dozen generations. There can be no reasonable doubt the sites were identified correctly, for they fit perfectly with our modern archaeological knowledge. St. Helena’s basilica at Bethlehem was sacked and burned during the Samaritan revolt of AD 529; the Emperor Justinian I ordered its replacement in good stone. This in turn would have been demolished by the Persian invaders of AD 614 (fanatic Zoroastrians), who laid a swathe of destruction across the Holy Land. But their commander, Shahrbaraz, ordered it spared—quite possibly because the Three Magi were depicted inside, in Persian robes.
The Christians of Bethlehem, or formerly of Bethlehem, and in so many ancient Christian communities across the Middle East, only now being erased after surviving 60 generations under one form or another of Muslim rule, have seemingly no allies. Lord knows the Roman Catholic Church has failed to stand up for them—and the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem today, Michel Sabbah, is content to spout anti-Israel propaganda. Against the intimidation of their fellow Palestinians, they have no protection at all, and the slightest complaint will only make things much worse.
But we, who are not subject to this physical intimidation, and still have in theory the right to free speech, could speak, and might pray for them in their annual ordeal of Christmas.
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