JESUS WAS NOT BORN IN BETHLEHEM, BUT IN ANOTHER TOWN OF THE SAME NAME. This is evidently being seriously argued by an Israeli archaeologist. This Sky News article was noted just before Christmas by Jack Sasson and Joseph I. Lauer:

Archaeologist Questions Site Of Nativity

By Dominic Waghorn
Middle East correspondent
Updated:23:56, Sunday December 23, 2007
Millions are about to celebrate the story of Christ's nativity.
But - and it may not be the best time of year to bring this up - that story could have a flaw in it. We may have got wrong the place where it happened all this time.

Thousands have visited the town of Bethlehem, south of Jerusalem, in the run-up to Christmas.

But, according to Israeli archaeologist Aviram Oshri, this is the wrong Bethlehem.

There is little evidence anyone was living in the traditional Bethlehem at the time of Jesus' birth, he says, and controversially he has an alternative site.

Oshri points to another Bethlehem in the rolling hills of the Galilee.

"There is the fact that Jews were living here at the time of Jesus, that is absent in the other Bethlehem," he says.

"We have a Christian community, a very large Christian community, living here and defending itself by building a fortification wall, signifying that the spot was very important for them.

"We have a large church with a cave underneath which is exactly the same as the other Bethlehem."

Oshri has found the remains of the strong fortification walls among olive trees on the edges of Bethlehem of the Galilee. Early Christians here were protecting something important, the real site of Christ's birth, he believes.

But at some point all traces linking this place to the nativity disappeared. "They did not die out, they were killed off, deliberately" says Oshri.

Why would early Christians cover up the real place of Christ's birth? The answer may be found in the bible.

The Old Testament prophets had predicted that the Saviour of the Jews would be born in Bethlehem of Judea.

To be the Messiah, Jesus could not be born in the Galilee - so could the early Christians have changed the story on purpose to reinforce the messianic credentials of Christ?

The problem for Oshri is that the key piece of evidence has been destroyed.

In the 1960s the Israelis built a road through the ruins of the early Christian church in the heart of his Bethlehem.

The cave underneath the church was only partially damaged but he cannot get permission or funding to excavate it.

Touting a theory undermining the claims of the established church might not make him friends.

[...]

It's hard to judge a theory on the basis of a single newspaper article on it, but this one does seem to me to be unnecessarily complicated. The birth narratives in Matthew 1 and Luke 2 clearly place Jesus' birth in Bethlehem of Judea. Matthew makes a point of associating this with the royal oracle in Micah 5, which he interprets to mean that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem of Judea. (In fact, the oracle probably just alludes to the origin of the Davidic line in David's home town, but that's neither here nor there.) Now either Jesus actually happened to be born in this Bethlehem or he was actually born somewhere else, likely in Nazareth, and the Bethlehem birth narratives are later midrashic compositions based on the messianic prophecy in Micah. (The latter seems much more likely to me.) Oshri's theory asks us to believe that Jesus was actually coincidentally born in another Bethlehem (which I confess I've never heard of before this) in Galilee, but that the Gospel birth narratives transferred the location to the Judean Galilee in light of the Micah passage and that all knowledge of the real birth in the Galilean Bethlehem was successfully suppressed, even though this was an obvious weakness that ought to have been fully exploited by the enemies of the early Jesus movement and which should have left an apologetic trail in its wake.

That said, Oshri does cite some archaeological evidence in favor of his theory. I am not qualified to speak to the accuracy of this, but if it's true that the Judean Bethlehem was not an inhabited Jewish site at the turn of the era, it does speak against the historicity of Gospel birth narratives, but these have plenty of other problems on other grounds. If they are unhistorical midrashic stories, the historical situation of Bethlehem at the time scarely matters. It's interesting that the Galilean Bethlehem seems to have been an important Christian site later on, but if this is so, the reasons are not clear.

But all that said, Oshri has formulated a falsifiable theory and I wouldn't be at all disappointed if he does get the funding to excavate the site. I doubt that he will confirm his theory, but he's bound to find something interesting.

Incidentally, I see Jesus' Davidic lineage as a different issue from his supposed birth in Bethlehem. Paul refers to Jesus descent from David in the 40s in Romans 1:3, and there is adequate evidence later on that Jesus' family were leaders in the early church and were considered to be of the Davidic line. I see no reason to doubt that genealogical traditions about the royal lineage were kept in the first century and that Jesus and his family belonged to that line.

Two recent articles in Biblical Archaeology Review make the respective cases for Jesus' birth in Bethlehem or an unknown location (Nazareth?). See Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, "Bethlehem…Of Course" and Steve Mason, "O Little Town of…Nazareth?" I think Mason makes by far the stronger case, but read them and decide for yourself.

UPDATE: Joseph Lauer e-mails to tell me that Simcha Jacobovici visited the Galilean Bethlehem and talked with an archaeologist (Oshri?) about the theory of it being Jesus' birthplace in an episode of The Naked Archaeologist series. The episode summary reads:

Jesus: The Early Years

The Gospels sometimes contradict one another in their descriptions of Jesus' early years, and to this day little is known about how he spent his childhood. Now, as host Simcha Jacobovici reveals, archaeology is helping to uncover clues about his early influences – and even his birth. Could it be that the famous manger was in a different Bethlehem entirely?

The trailer for the episode is here, but it's not very informative. I have some less than enthusiastic observations on The Naked Archaeologist series here.