describes two ruins at this site, a synagogue and church. The synagogue has not been identified, but it has been tentatively located in an unexcavated area. The church was first exposed in 1965, when a road from Nazareth to Bethlehem was built, destroying the main hall and revealing sixth-century mosaic floors decorated with medallions of vines with figures of animals and plant motifs.

We know that Bethlehem of Galilee was a bustling center of Jewish life around the time of Jesus’ birth. Among the archaeological evidence we have for this is a workshop that made stone vessels used for Jewish purification rituals, which are otherwise a very rare find in the Galilee in this period There are also the remains of a Herodian-period residential area with ceramic and stone vessels that would have been used by a Jewish population.

When I first arrived at Bethlehem of Galilee in 1992 and saw the ruins, and saw the remains of a natural cave located at the east, tightly situated with the apse of the church.

I didn’t think that there was much left to find But soon I discovered the church’s baptismal font as well as more mosaic floor remains from the church, indicating a structure 145 feet long and between 80 and 100 feet wide. This makes it among the largest Byzantine churches in Israel and raises the question of why such a huge house of Christian worship was built in the heart of a Jewish area.

During that same year, my team found another building from the same period just northeast of the church containing an oil press, an underground vault with candles bearing cross decorations, and an abundance of pig bones. On the basis of these and many other findings, we identified the building as a monastery. Five years later, excavations near the monastery revealed the remains of a large public building , possibly a hotel or inn, with horse troughs on the ground floor and well-appointed facilities on the second floor, which included a lavish mosaic floor. All three buildings - the church, monastery, and inn- appear to have been violently
destroyed during the Persian invasion of the Holy Land in the early seventh century AD.

Over the years, segments of a three-foot-thick fortification wall with ramparts and towers have been discovered by myself and others around Bethlehem of Galilee. Ceramic evidence dates the wall to the sixth–seventh century a.d., before the Persian invasion. If this is a Byzantine-era fortification, its meaning is significant. At this time Bethlehem of Galilee was not a large or significant city, and the fact that it was fortified shows that its existence was in danger. Jews had been expelled from Jerusalem from the second century a.d. to the end of the Byzantine period, but we know from contemporary accounts that the population in the Galilee during this time was overwhelmingly Jewish.

Is it possible that, because of the hostility the Jews had toward Christians in this period, the residents of Bethlehem of Galilee fortified the site which they held to be the birthplace of the Christian Messiah .

Texts from the Middle Ages describe an Eastern Christian community living in Bethlehem of Galilee, and we have archaeological evidence that agrees with this. It is unclear what, if any, Christian population resided in Bethlehem of Galilee during the Ottoman period but at the beginning of the twentieth century, a group of missionaries from a German organization known as the Temple Society settled in Bethlehem of Galilee. Although there is no recorded reason for their settlement, it is widely believed that the religious order chose this Bethlehem because they identified it with the site of the birth of Jesus.
They were eventually exiled to Australia because they supported the Nazis in World War II.

Today, the residents of Bethlehem of Galilee make a comfortable living through agriculture and tourism and are quite happy to leave the crowds of religious pilgrims to Bethlehem in Judea. One man in town grows Christmas trees for Christians living in nearby Nazareth. My government-funded salvage excavations are over, but I am trying to find support to continue the project, as there is still so much left at the site to discover and understand.

If the historical Jesus were truly born in Bethlehem, it was most likely the Bethlehem of Galilee, not that in Judea.
The archaeological evidence certainly seems to favor the former, a busy center a few miles from the home of Joseph and Mary, as opposed to an unpopulated spot almost a hundred miles from home. At the very least, it is an improbable trip for a pregnant women to have made on a donkey.

Aviram Oshri

A version of this article has been published in" Archaeology Magazine vol' 58 no'6 November/December 2005 ."