Religions of Bethlehem

'King of the Jews' has been born in Bethlehem, ordered the killing of all the children aged two and under in the town and surrounding areas. Joseph is warned of this in a dream, and the family escapes this fate by fleeing to Egypt and returning only after Herod has died. Some modern biographers of Herod doubt the massacre was a real event. However, it should be noted that Bethlehem was not a big town, with only a few hundred inhabitants, and that there would not have been that many male babies, so the slaughter need not have been mentioned by ancient biographies due to its relatively small scale.

Early Christians interpreted a verse in the Book of Micah as a prophecy of the birth of the Messiah in Bethlehem. Some modern scholars question whether Jesus was born in Bethlehem, seeing the biblical stories not as historical accounts but as symbolic narratives invented to present the birth of Jesus as fulfillment of prophecy and imply a connection to the lineage of King David. The Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of John do not include a nativity narrative, but refer to him only as being from Nazareth. In a 2005 article in Archaeology magazine, archaeologist Aviram Oshri points to an absence of evidence of the settlement of Bethlehem near Jerusalem at the time when Jesus was born, and postulates that Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Galilee. In a 2011 article in Biblical Archaeology Review magazine, Jerome Murphy-O’Connor argues for the traditional position that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, near Jerusalem.

The existence of early traditions of Jesus' birth in Bethlehem is attested by the Christian apologist Justin Martyr, who stated in his Dialogue with Trypho (c. 155–161) that the Holy Family had taken refuge in a cave outside of the town. Origin of Alexandria, writing around the year 247, referred to a cave in the town of Bethlehem