O LITTLE TOWN OF BEDLAM...
JOHN PRESTON
In 1837, Oscar Wilde’s father, William, a Dublin eye and ear surgeon, visited Bethlehem and went to see the grotto beneath the Church of the Nativity where Christ was believed to have been born. He was not impressed. It looks, Wilde wrote later, just like a large bread oven.
He may have been more right than he ever imagined. In Canaanite, one of the ancient languages of Palestine, Bethlehem means ‘house of bread’. For about 9,000 years the town was little more than a stopover on the way to Jerusalem around 10km to the north, a place to grab a bite to eat and move on.
It did, however, have one big thing going for it – water. When King Herod took control of Judea in about 35 BC, he ordered the construction of an aqueduct to carry water to Bethlehem’s parched neighbour. As Joseph and the pregnant Mary walked into town looking for a room for the night, they would have seen Herod’s great aqueduct stretching before them.
That’s assuming they came at all. Nicholas Blincoe’s history of Bethlehem rather hedges its bets on whether Christ was actually born there. While Matthew and Luke’s gospels place the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, and pilgrims began visiting Bethlehem within 100 years of Christ’s death, there’s no actual evidence of his birth.
Nevertheless, by 400 AD, Bethlehem was firmly established as a tourist destination.
With it came a flourishing souvenir industry. Early visitors would go away with flasks containing samples of earth that Christ had supposedly trodden on.
As the years went by, people came in ever-increasing numbers. In 1074, thousands of peasants walked all the way from Italy armed with nothing but gardening implements following a man called Peter the Hermit – he was clearly a very un-reclusive hermit – who had declared a global war against Islam.
Almost 1,000 years later, Nicholas Blincoe arrived in Bethlehem clutching a Christmas pudding – a gift for his girlfriend’s family – only to find that almost all the ingredients (sultanas, almonds, figs etc) came from there. The town itself, he writes in a rather creaky analogy, is a similar hotch-potch of different ethnic groups and influences. ‘It is history made pudding.’
If so, it is a depressingly combustible pudding with its inhabitants perpetually at one another’s throats. Part of Palestine since 1995, Bethlehem is now
The grotto, where Jesus was believed to have been born, looked ‘like a large bread oven’
criss-crossed by tunnels and flyovers designed to keep the Arabs and Israelis apart – they even have separate water and electricity supplies.
Personally, I could have done with fewer references to the deeply fashionable – and deeply impenetrable – French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
For the most part, though, Blincoe proves an erudite and evocative guide to a city whose place in biblical history has proved to be more of a curse than a blessing.