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.

Jerome came to Bethlehem in 384 and by then the temple had been replaced by a church. The first church was built on the orders of Saint Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine, and was dedicated on May 31st 339. The only remaining visible parts of this building are the intricate mosaic floors, which lie some two feet below the existing floor of the nave, parts of the outer walls and, possibly, some of the red limestone columns.

Saint Jerome settled in Bethlehem and in a cave close by the cave of the nativity he worked on his translation of the Bible, which was to form the basis of subsequent translations down the centuries

A new church was built following the first Samaritan uprising in 529 during which many churches in the Holy Land were destroyed or damaged. The Emperor Justinian ordered the building of the new church - the nave was lengthened, a narthex added and an octagonal apse replaced by a triapsidal form, which proved more space in the sanctuary. A feature of the basilica was the double row of red limestone pillars, which were quarried near Bethlehem. Some of these might, although not certainly, have formed part of Helena's church.

The Church survived the Persian invasion of 614, when all the other churches of the Holy Land were destroyed, because a mosaic over the main door, now gone, showed the Wise Men dressed as Persians - which, of course, they were. When the Caliph Omar visited Bethlehem, after conquering Jerusalem in 638, he prayed in the south apse of the Church of the Nativity where he could face Mecca and, by agreement with the Patriach of Jerusalem, Sophronius, Muslims continued to be allowed to pray there. It was probably because of this that the church escaped the almost total destruction of churches in the Holy Land ordered by Caliph al-Hakim in 1009.

Saint Willibald is the first known pilgrim from the British Isles (although the second if Saint Helena was, as some think, from Britain). He wrote that the Church and its cave was "a place of great beauty".

The Crusaders were fascinated by Bethlehem. As the army of the First Crusade was moving towards Jerusalem, envoys came to the princes from Bethlehem, whose population was entirely Christian, and asked for help. Tancred and Baldwin of Le Bourg at once rode across of hills from Latrun with a small detachment of knights. They arrived in the middle of the night and the townsfolk at first thought them to be part of an Egyptian army moving to the defence of Jerusalem. As dawn broke, however, on Monday, June 6th 1099, they were recognised as Christians and the whole town came out in procession to welcome them.

Tancred was later to become Prince of Galilee while Baldwin, following the death of Godfrey de Bouillon who refused the title of King in favour of that of Advocatus Sancti Sepulchri, was crowned King of Jerusalem in the Church of the Nativity on Christmas Day 1100.

During the time of the Crusader Kingdom more building work was undertaken at the Church. A cloister was added and the present south and north doorways built for the cave while the walls of the church were decorated with mosaics of saints by two artists from Constantinople, Basilius Pictor and Ephraim the Monk.

At the fall of the Christian Kingdom after the Battle of the Horns of Hattin in 1187, Saladin, the leader of the Arab army and a most courteous man, allowed two monks to continue to care for the Church and to say Mass there.

The Church today remains much as it was when built by Justinian in 529, with a grandeur faded by the centuries. Only the roof and floors have been renewed - the red pillars are still in place, part of Helena's floor exists, as does some of the work of Basilius and Ephraim. The great doorway, which once was surmounted by the mosaic of the Wise Men, has been blocked up for centuries to prevent horsemen riding in, and today's pilgrim must enter humbly, bowing the head to get through the low door.

The main body of the basilica is dark and bare but at the far end the Greek Orthodox altar is a pool of light, from oil lamps and candles. Beneath it is the Holy Cave and pilgrims enter by slippery steps through the Crusaders' south door. The place of the Nativity is a cave such as was often used to house cattle or sheep on the barren windswept slopes of winter Bethlehem.

A silver star set into the floor marks the traditional birth place and to its right is the manger. None of the furnishings within the cave predate a fire of 1869. The thick leather hangings on the walls were placed to minimise the risk of any further fire. There is a passageway from the back of the cave to the other caves in the complex but the door is only opened on ceremonial occasions. Friar Felix Fabri on his Holy Land pilgrimage, in 1480, said that it was closed to pilgrims - as it still is. The other caves can be visited by leaving the place of the Nativity through the north door and crossing the Armenian Chapel to the Roman Catholic Church of Saint Catherine, built in 1881 adjoining the Basilica.

Pottery and masonry work show that this series of caves was in use in the first and second centuries. They have, however, been considerably altered since then and took their present form in 1964. In one of the caves Saint Jerome lived and worked and in another are stone coffins said to be those of the children of Bethlehem killed on the orders of King Herod. The children are venerated as martyrs, who died, if not for Christ, quite literally in place of Jesus. It may be that there were only a dozen or so of them as Bethlehem was just a small village at that time. However, one of the foremost present-day historians of the Holy Land, Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, says "These identifications have no historical value".