Bethlehem is one of my favourite places - but when it snows it can be very cold indeed. My first visit to Bethlehem was in January 1989 and I huddled against the wind that brought driving snow to the Judean hills.

The town is 3000 feet above sea level and the wind swept across the barren, stony hills. It was good to go into the Church of the Nativity in Manger Square and especially into the cave that 2000 years ago was the stable of an inn in Bethlehem. It was here that Jesus was born and on this January day it was wonderful to be in the warm - no wind, no draughts, just warmth from the candles and oil lamps that constantly burn there.

Bethlehem is a place to which, down the centuries, emperors and kings, saints and bishops, poets and philosophers and millions of pilgrims have made their way. They came because in this little hill-town God himself came to a troubled world.

It has been a holy place since the earliest times. Justin Martyr, born around the year 100 in Samaria, was a Greek philosopher. His writings tell us that the Emperor Hadrian caused a temple to Adonis to be built over the birth-place of Jesus in order to dissuade Christians from making pilgrimages here. Saint Jerome, writing in 395 said that Hadrian had done Christianity an inadvertent service by marking the place so clearly for future generations.

At Epiphany the Church remembers the Wise Men coming to Bethlehem. Saint Matthew, the only Gospel in which there is an account, does not mention any specific number, nor does he call them "kings", but instead uses the Greek word magoi, derived from the old Persian language word Majusian. It was only in the sixth century that the number of Magi settles at three.

The Empress Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine, became a Christian and when her son called a meeting of all the Bishops from across the Roman Empire she met Macarius, Bishop of Aelia Capitolina, as Jerusalem was then known. Helena was troubled by the Bishop's story of the neglect of the sites associated with the life of Jesus and resolved, with her son's blessing, to visit the Holy Land.