Where was Jesus Born? - Archaeology Magazine Archive


Where was Jesus Born?	Volume 58 Number 6, November/December 2005
By Aviram Oshri

Theologians question biblical accounts of the Nativity. Now archaeologists are doing the same.

Many Christians accept the story of Jesus' birth in a manger in Bethlehem in Judea. But what if there was no Bethlehem in Judea at the time of Jesus' birth? (Scala/Art Resource) [LARGER IMAGE]

The town of Bethlehem in the West Bank, some six miles south of Jerusalem, is revered by millions as the birthplace of Jesus. According to the New Testament account of the apostle Matthew, Joseph and Mary were living in Bethlehem in the southern region of Judea at the time of Jesus' birth and later moved to Nazareth in the northern Galilee region. In the more popular account of the apostle Luke, Joseph and a very pregnant Mary traveled more than 90 miles from their residence in Nazareth to Joseph's Judean hometown of Bethlehem to be counted in a Roman census. Regardless of the variation, both apostles agree that Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, the city where King David had been born a thousand years earlier. The Christian Messiah could thereby be considered a descendant of the House of David--a requirement for followers of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

But while Luke and Matthew describe Bethlehem in Judea as the birthplace of Jesus, "Menorah," the vast database of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), describes Bethlehem as an "ancient site" with Iron Age material and the fourth-century Church of the Nativity and associated Byzantine and medieval buildings. But there is a complete absence of information for antiquities from the Herodian period--that is, from the time around the birth of Jesus.

I had never before questioned the assumption that Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea. But in the early 1990s, as an archaeologist working for the IAA, I was contracted to perform some salvage excavations around building and infrastructure projects in a small rural community in the Galilee. When I started work, some of the people who lived around the site told me how Jesus was really born there, not in the south. Intrigued, I researched the archaeological evidence for Bethlehem in Judea at the time of Jesus and found nothing. This was very surprising, as Herodian remains should be the first thing one should find. What was even more surprising is what archaeologists had already uncovered and what I was to discover over the next 11 years of excavation at the small rural site--Bethlehem of Galilee.

Aviram Oshri is a senior archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority

CORRECTION TO THE PRINTED VERSION: The caption on page 45 incorrectly ascribes the church at Bethlehem of Galilee to the fourth century. It was actually built 200 years later, in the sixth century.

For more on the controversy over Jesus' birthplace see Rabbi Jesus by Bruce Chilton (Doubleday, 2000)