Leading up to Christmas I was going through Matthew and Luke's birth narratives with my eighth graders. In order to give the students an appreciation of how arduous the journey may have been for Joseph and Mary to trek all the way down to Judea from Nazareth, I googled (yes, I know, very hard-core research) something like "distance from Nazareth to Bethlehem."
Imagine how surprised I was when a site popped up indicating the total distance as 7.4 miles. Perhaps I should have known this, but there is actually a second Bethlehem actually situated in Galilee, which means of course, that the journey would have been much more amenable to Joseph and his young wife. Who cares about that silly little business about Jesus being born in the city of David.
Clicking on one of the links that came up, I actually did discover that some scholars do in fact advocate that Jesus was born in the Bethlehem of Nazareth. Jim Davila, over at PaleoJudaica, came upon an article about an Israeli archaeologist who argues just that. Read Davila's excerpt from the article as well as his accompanying comments here.
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