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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
December 23, 2007
O little town
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,” the theft of their land, 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, may well have contributed to the exodus. 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 identity actually predates Islam. In the case of Bethlehem, Caliph Omar personally guaranteed the continuing use of the basilica we call the Church of the Nativity -- which still stands, vandalized and stripped -- by the Christian residents, after the Arab conquest of A.D. 637. In its present form, that basilica was completed in 565 A.D., over the site of an earlier basilica, over a cave, in which was once the manger in which -- 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 A.D. 132-135, the Roman re-occupiers ordered the building of a Temple of Adonis over the grotto. They did such things expressly to cancel previous religious observance at the site, just as they ploughed up the Second Temple of Jerusalem, containing the Jewish holy of holies, and built a Temple of Jupiter over that, renaming the city Aelia Capitolina. Just as they built a Temple of Venus over the site of Christ's crucifixion, at Golgotha, outside the old Jerusalem wall (though well inside the 16th-century walls erected by the Ottoman Turks). St Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine I, and herself among the most astute and knowledgeable travellers in the Holy Land, was the patron of the earlier basilica at Bethlehem, completed in A.D. 333. She was, by all accounts, a pioneering archaeologist, who established that sites of Christian veneration were to be found just under their Roman Imperial 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 understanding of the successive strata. St Helena's basilica at Bethlehem was sacked and burned during the Samaritan revolt of A.D. 529; the Emperor Justinian I (who built the magnificent Hagia Sophia at Constantinople) ordered its replacement in good stone. This in turn would have been demolished, by the Persian invaders of A.D. 614 (fanatic Zorastrians), 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, dressed in Persian-looking 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 Catholic Church has failed to stand up for them -- and the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem today, Michel Sabbah, is content to spout anti-Israeli propaganda. Against the intimidation of their fellow Palestinians, they have no protection at all, and the slightest complaint will only make things much worse for them. 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. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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