The Church of the Nativity

Bethlehem's basilica is governed by the same Status Quo as the Holy Sepulchre, and for the same reason: three communions occupy one building and none of them will concede anything to the others.

Who holds what

• Greek Orthodox, the sanctuary and the greater part of the basilica
• Armenian Apostolic, the north transept and specified rights in the Grotto
• Roman Catholic, the Latin rights, exercised by the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land from the adjoining Church of Saint Catherine

Each community's clergy process into the Grotto at appointed times, and the boundaries of who may clean, repair or light which surface are as precisely drawn here as in Jerusalem. Disputes over encroachment have produced physical altercations between clergy within living memory, which is less scandalous than it sounds and more explicable: under a regime where possession is the whole of the title, letting another community sweep your floor is how you lose it.

The star

A silver star with fourteen points, set into the marble of the Grotto floor, marks the traditional place of the birth. It carries a Latin inscription, which is itself the point, it was placed there by the Latins, and the Greeks disputed it.

The star was stolen in 1847. The quarrel over who should replace it, and under whose authority, escalated through the usual channels into a dispute between France, as claimed protector of Latin Christians, and Russia, as claimed protector of the Orthodox. That dispute over the holy places was among the proximate causes of the Crimean War. It is the standard example of how the Status Quo became a matter of great-power treaty rather than of church discipline, and why no one has been willing to reopen it since.

What is actually under the floor

The present basilica is Justinian's, sixth-century, replacing Constantine's dedication of 339, which makes its walls the oldest standing church fabric in the Holy Land, older than anything at the Holy Sepulchre, which was demolished in 1009 and rebuilt.

Sections of the fourth-century mosaic floor of Constantine's church survive beneath trapdoors in the nave, a metre or so below the present level. The cave itself was identified as the birthplace well before Constantine: Justin Martyr, writing in the middle of the second century, refers to a cave at Bethlehem, and Origen mentions it being shown to visitors. As with the Holy Sepulchre, the identification is early, which establishes what second-century Christians believed, not where Jesus was born.

A working church under pressure

Israeli forces besieged the compound for thirty-nine days in 2002 when armed Palestinians took refuge inside, with clergy and civilians in the building throughout; several people were killed. UNESCO inscribed the church in 2012 as the first World Heritage Site listed under Palestine and placed it on the List of World Heritage in Danger the same day, on account of the state of the roof. A long structural, roof and mosaic restoration allowed its removal from that list in 2019.

Christmas at Bethlehem is a working liturgical event and not a spectacle, and the town's Christian population has fallen sharply over the last century, which is the fact most often left out of accounts of the building.

Visitors to the Church of the Nativity have to bow to get in, a design change made centuries ago specifically to stop people riding horses and carts through the front door.

A door built to be small on purpose

The main entrance, known as the Door of Humility, was reduced to a low rectangular opening under Ottoman-era modification, requiring nearly all adult visitors to stoop to pass through, a practical alteration intended to prevent looters and mounted riders from entering the church directly rather than an original architectural feature of the building's earlier, larger entrance.

A 2002 standoff

In 2002, during a period of intense Israeli-Palestinian conflict, dozens of Palestinian militants and civilians took refuge inside the church, leading to a weeks-long armed standoff with Israeli forces surrounding the building, an episode that placed one of Christianity's most significant sites at the centre of an active modern military confrontation rather than only historical or denominational dispute.

As this entry's companion article covers

The shared custody of the building among multiple Christian denominations, and the disputed theft of a silver star marking the traditional birthplace, an incident that fed into wider nineteenth century diplomatic tensions between European powers over protection of Christian sites, are addressed directly in this entry's companion article rather than repeated here.