Bethlehem - June 19 - Part 2

Barluzzi designed the Shepherd's Field chapel to look like a shepherd's tent.

The shepherds may have been staying in a cave like this the night the angels visited.

Reading the Christmas Story 

Another shopping stop.  This time at the shop of Palestinian Christians.

Church of the Nativity

Mosaic from the church from 339 CE.

Our tour guide of the Church of the Nativity is a Palestinian Christian.  He is only allowed to give tours in Bethlehem because he's not allowed to leave Area A to go into Jerusalem or the rest of Israel.  He's been waiting for a work permit that would allow him to for many years.

They just discovered this angel under the plaster last year.

Looking down into what is remembered as the Cave of St. Jerome

St. Jerome

We didn't walk down to the cave of St. Jerome.

St. George was a Roman soldier who became a Christian and the Romans killed him.

The Jerusalem Cross.   There are several different versions of what it represents.  One is the the large cross is Jerusalem and the four small ones are the four corners of the world.  Another is that the large cross is the Cross of Christ and the four small ones are the four gospels.  Still another is that the five crosses are the five wounds of Christ.

Water collection system built by Herod the Great

There were three pools each above the next.  In the 16th century the Ottomans saw the value and built a castle to protect the water pools.

The British built a pump house.

Palestine is very poor, especially in Area A.  Unemployment is 50% in Area A.  It's hard to get out of Area A to sell their goods or to work.  Israel won't allow them to export goods because they are afraid of what the extremists will bring in.  If a Palestinian is able to get a work permit to work in Israel they make three times less than an Israeli would make doing the same job.  Palestinians have to get an invitation and permission to leave Area A.  IF they can get permission to leave, they can't fly out of Tel Aviv.  They have to get permission to to go Jordon and fly out of there and they may not be allowed to come back.

We got stuck in traffic behind a funeral so we sat on this street for a while.

The church at the top of the hill is the church of St. Nicholas and it's right up the road from our hotel.  Paul and I walked up the hill on another night to see it.

But for today, it was time to rest!

Before I end this post I want to remember some more of what Mark told us today.  He joked that he was going to "ruin" Christmas for us.  If you read the pictures from the tour book above you saw that it wasn't that there wasn't room for them in the inn but that they were most likely at Joseph's family house and it was crowded and Mary needed more privacy so she went to the cave that was their barn.  So already the wooden stable of our nativity scenes is wrong.  In one of the earlier posts I showed a picture of what the manger looked like, a stone manger, not wooden like in our nativity scenes.  Mark went on to explain that since they were staying in Joseph's family's house that Mary was most likely giving birth in the cave with the midwives and other women of the family and Bethlehem.  Joseph (and the other men of the family) would most likely not have been there at the time of the birth because it would have made him unclean and unable to go to the Temple.  The shepherds, on the other hand, were already considered unclean.  So they had nothing to lose to visit Mary and baby Jesus in the cave.  So our nativity scenes should be caves with stone mangers and no Joseph.  And there were probably more than three wise men, who were most likely royals from the Parthian empire, and they wouldn't have visited the cave anyway because they came later and Mary and Joseph were living in a house by then!  I looked for more accurate nativity scenes when we visited stores that sold them.  Some of them looked like they were in a cave but many were wooden stables and they all had Joseph in the stable with Mary and baby Jesus and most had wooden mangers!