Church of the Nativity

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The Church of the Nativity is a basilica in Bethlehem built over a cave that Christian tradition identifies as the place where Jesus was born. It is among the oldest churches anywhere to have remained in continuous use, and the cave beneath its chancel — the Grotto of the Nativity — has drawn pilgrims since before the building above it existed. To reach the floor of the basilica today a visitor stoops through the Door of Humility, a low rectangular opening cut down in Ottoman times from a wider Crusader portal whose pointed arch is still legible in the stonework above it; the doorway was narrowed to keep carts and mounted men out of the sanctuary, and it forces everyone who enters to bow.

The veneration of the site is older than the structure. The second-century writer Justin Martyr, himself a native of the region, reports in the Dialogue with Trypho that Jesus was born in a cave near the village of Bethlehem, and Origen a few decades later writes in Contra Celsum that the cave was shown locally to visitors — the spot pointed out, the manger inside it, the place named and known even to those outside the church. What happened in the cave is a confessional matter rather than a question the documentary record can settle; what the record does fix is that the tradition naming the spot is early, reaching back into the second century, and that the place has been held sacred for roughly eighteen hundred years. The grotto is, on this reckoning, probably the oldest of the venerated caves of the Holy Land.

The first church was commissioned under the emperor Constantine and his mother Helena and dedicated on 31 May 339, an octagonal sanctuary raised directly over the grotto and joined to a five-aisled basilica and an atrium. Its octagon stood above the cave so that the holy point could be seen from the floor of the church. Portions of that fourth-century pavement survive beneath the present floor; rediscovered in 1934, the Constantinian mosaics can be glimpsed through wooden trapdoors set into the later marble. The first church was destroyed or heavily damaged in the sixth century — by the prevailing account during the Samaritan revolt of 529 — and rebuilt under the emperor Justinian I. The present basilica is in essence the Justinianic church: a long colonnaded nave of forty-four monolithic columns, its ground plan and standing walls older than almost any other fabric in continuous Christian worship. The same reign that closed the philosophical school at Athens in 529 and built the great churches of the empire set, at Bethlehem, the walls that still enclose the cave.

The basilica survived the Sasanian Persian invasion of 614 that razed churches across the Holy Land, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. By a tradition recounted at a ninth-century synod in defense of icons, the invaders spared the Nativity because a mosaic on its façade depicted the Magi in Persian dress, and the soldiers would not destroy the image of their own. The church passed through the centuries of Muslim rule largely intact; by tradition the caliph Umar prayed within it without converting it, and it kept its late-antique fabric where most of the great Constantinian foundations of the region were rebuilt or lost. Under the Crusader kingdom it served as a coronation church: Baldwin I was crowned king of Jerusalem there on Christmas Day 1100, choosing Bethlehem over Jerusalem so as not to wear a crown of gold where Christ had worn one of thorns, and Baldwin II was crowned there in turn. In the twelfth century the nave was reclad in mosaic under a rare joint patronage — the Latin king Amalric I, the Byzantine emperor Manuel I Komnenos, and the Latin bishop Raoul of Bethlehem — work finished in 1169 and signed in a bilingual Greek and Latin inscription naming the mosaicist, the monk Ephraim. The columns still carry painted figures of saints from the same period, and fragments of the gilded wall mosaic survive above the colonnade.

Custody of the church is shared, under a fragile arrangement, among the Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, and Roman Catholic communities, each holding defined rights to particular altars, hours, and tasks. This is the Status Quo of the Holy Places, the frozen settlement of nineteenth-century Ottoman decrees that also governs the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem: an unwritten division of every column, lamp, hour of cleaning, and right of procession, fixed precisely because no single communion can be allowed to gain or lose ground. The Greek Orthodox and Armenians hold the basilica and the grotto by the largest share; the Roman Catholic right is exercised through the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, whose adjoining Church of St Catherine is the seat of the Latin Christmas liturgy broadcast from Bethlehem. Where the parcels meet, friction follows: rival monks have come to blows over the sweeping of a contested ledge, and the smallest unsanctioned change — a moved lamp, a swept stone, a ladder set against the wrong wall — can be read as a claim. None of the three custodians may adjudicate the others; the settlement holds by being held still.

Beneath the chancel, in the grotto, a silver star is set into the marble floor at the point tradition fixes as the birth. It has fourteen points and bears a Latin inscription naming the place — Hic de Virgine Maria Jesus Christus natus est, “Here of the Virgin Mary Jesus Christ was born” — with the date 1717. Its theft or removal in the disputes of the 1840s, when the Greek Orthodox displaced the Latins in the grotto and the Latin-lettered star was taken away, became one of the ostensible grievances behind the great-power quarrel over the Holy Places that helped ignite the Crimean War of 1853–56. A replacement star marks the spot today, and the lamps that hang above it are tended in turn by the three communions, so that the fixed silver point of the cave is the one thing all three hold in common while sharing nothing else freely.

The site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2012 as Birthplace of Jesus: Church of the Nativity and the Pilgrimage Route, Bethlehem — the first listing entered under the name of Palestine — and placed the same year on the List of World Heritage in Danger, its timber roof rotted and leaking onto the nave. A campaign of conservation across the 2010s, carried out by the Italian firm Piacenti under the joint authority of the custodians, repaired the roof and façades, cleaned the surviving wall mosaics, and uncovered a seventh mosaic angel long hidden under grime; the grotto itself was restored after some six hundred years. On 2 July 2019 the World Heritage Committee, meeting at Baku, removed the church from the danger list. Three communions keep the parceled lamps and altars of the Status Quo, each by its appointed hour; the silver star in the floor is the single point on which their separate clocks agree.

Texts, scholarship, and the fabric

The earliest written testimony to the cave is patristic. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho chapter 78, written about the middle of the second century, places the birth in a cave near Bethlehem; Origen, Contra Celsum I.51, written about 248, records that the grotto and manger were shown at Bethlehem and known even to non-Christians. Both predate the Constantinian basilica by generations and anchor the tradition in the period before any church stood on the spot.

The architectural and art-historical record is concentrated in the twelfth-century program and in the conservation of the 2010s. The bilingual mosaic inscription of 1169 — naming Amalric I, Manuel I Komnenos, Bishop Raoul, and the monk Ephraim — is among the rare surviving monuments of joint Latin and Byzantine patronage in the Crusader Levant, and the recent cleaning has recovered its figures and the angels of the nave. The official documentation of the property, its boundaries, the criteria of inscription, and its passage onto and off the List of World Heritage in Danger is held by the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, whose record of the 2 July 2019 delisting summarizes the restoration of the roof, façades, mosaics, and doors. For the building’s long custodial history, the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land maintains an account of the basilica from Constantine through the Status Quo, written from inside one of the three communions that share it.

→ Related: Archbasilica Of St John Lateran · Basilica Di Santa Maria Maggiore · Saint Sophia Cathedral · Church Of The Holy Sepulchre · Justin Martyr · Origen · Justinian I · Crusades · Byzantine Empire · Holy Land