The ancient settlement of Bethlehem (Arabic: Bayt Lahm, or House of Meat; Hebrew: Bet Lehem, or House of Bread) is possibly mentioned in the Amarna Letters, the fourteenth-century BCE diplomatic documents found at Tell el-Amarna, Egypt), but the reading there is uncertain.

Often referred to in the Old Testament as Bethlehem Ephrathah, or Bethlehem-Judah, it is first mentioned in the Bible (Genesis 35:19) in connection with Rachel, who died on the wayside near there.

Situated in the Judaean Hills, five miles (eight kilometers) south of Jerusalem, it is the setting for most of the Book of Ruth and is the presumed birthplace, and certainly the home, of her descendant, King David; there the prophet Samuel (I Samuel 16) anoints him king of Israel.

Rehoboam fortifies Bethlehem after the division of the state between Israel and Judah. (II Chronicles 11)

Bethlehem is among the towns repopulated by the Judahites returning from Babylonia to Palestine.

The year CE 1, alternately known as 1 AD, is popularly taken to be the birth-year in which Jesus of Nazareth is born, although modern scholarship places the event at about 5 or 4 BCE.

The Gospel of Matthew, in its Nativity account, associates the birth of Jesus with the reign of Herod the Great, who is generally believed to have died around 4 BC/BCE.

Matthew 2:1 states that: "Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king" and Luke 1:5 mentions the reign of Herod shortly before the birth of Jesus.

Matthew also suggests that Jesus may have been as much as two years old at the time of the visit of the Magi and hence even older at the time of Herod's death, but the author of Luke also describes the birth as taking place during the first census of the Roman provinces of Syria and Iudaea, which is generally believed to have occurred in 6 AD/CE.

Most scholars generally assume a date of birth between 6 and 4 BC/BCE.

Other scholars assume that Jesus was born sometime between 7 and 2 BC/BCE.

The year of birth of Jesus has also been estimated in a manner that is independent of the Nativity accounts, by using information in the Gospel of John to work backwards from the statement in Luke 3:23 that Jesus was "about 30 years of age" at the start of his ministry.

By combining information from John 2:13 and John 2:20 with the writings of Flavius Josephus, it has been estimated that around 27-29 AD/CE, Jesus was "about thirty years of age".

Some scholars thus estimate the year 28 AD/CE to be roughly the thirty-second birthday of Jesus and the birth year of Jesus to be around 6-4 BC/BCE.

However, the common Gregorian calendar method for numbering years, in which the current year is 2012, is based on the decision of a monk Dionysius in the sixth century, to count the years from a point of reference (namely, Jesus’ birth) which he placed sometime between 2 BC and 1 AD.

Although Christian feasts related to the Nativity have had specific dates (e.g. December 25 for Christmas) there is no historical evidence for the exact day or month of the birth of Jesus.

Christian tradition, based on the Gospels of Saints Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, has Mary, his mother, being told by an angel that God had miraculously impregnated her.

She and her husband Joseph reportedly traveled to be counted in a census ordered by Augustus, stopping in the town of Bethlehem, the ancestral city of David, to give birth.

The birth of her son, Jesus, is reportedly accompanied by signs and prophecies pointing to his importance as the fulfillment of the hopes of Israel and of God's redemptive purpose for the world.

Jesus is traditionally considered a descendant of Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, and David, their most illustrious king.

Reportedly present at the birth are three "wise men from the East" who follow a star to Bethlehem to worship the infant Jesus, presenting him with gifts of frankincense, gold, and myrrh.

In a Biblical event paralleling the account in Exodus of Pharaoh's massacre of Jewish male babies at the time of Moses' birth, Herod the Great, who died between 4 and 1 BC, had allegedly tried to kill the infant males of Bethlehem, forcing Mary and Joseph to take Jesus to Egypt for safety.

Although Herod is certainly guilty of many brutal acts, including the killing of his wife and two of his sons, the historical accuracy of this event has been questioned, since no other document from the period makes any reference to such a massacre.

Bethlehem is at this time a small rural town, and the number of male children under the age of two would probably not exceed twenty; the number of children actually killed, if any, may have been as few as five or six.

This may be the reason for the lack of other sources for this history, although Herod's order in Matthew 2:16 includes those children in Bethlehem's vicinity making the massacre larger numerically and geographically.

Modern biographers of Herod tend to doubt the event took place; most recent biographies of Herod the Great deny it entirely. (Paul L. Maier, "Herod and the Infants of Bethlehem", in Chronos, Kairos, Christos II, Mercer University Press [1998], p.170.)

Bethlehem, the site of the nativity of Jesus Christ according to the Gospels (Matthew 2; Luke 2), in CE 135 hosts a Roman garrison during the Bar Kochba Revolt.

Second-century Christian apologist Justin Martyr identifies the site of the Nativity as a manger in “a cave close to the village.”

Christians from this point on will accord the cave continuous veneration.

On becoming emperor at York in 306, Constantine had made his mother, Helena, empress dowager; under his influence, she had later become a Christian.

She was devoted to her eldest grandson, Crispus.

Following the double tragedy of Constanine's execution of his son and wife, the story becomes current that Fausta had accused Crispus of attempting to seduce her—hence Crispus' execution.

Fausta, in turn, had been denounced by the grief-stricken Helena and was executed shortly afterward.

It is perhaps in some sense to atone for the family catastrophe that Constantine's mother, Helena, embarks on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

Directed by her son to build churches upon sites which commemorated the life of Jesus Christ, her journey is attended by almsgiving and pious works and is distinguished by her church foundations at Jerusalem and at Bethlehem, where she has the Church of the Nativity built over the cave venerated by Christians as the birthplace of Jesus.

Eusebius Hieronymus, pseudonym Sophronius, popularly known as Jerome, had been confidential secretary and librarian to Pope Damasus, charged with beginning the process of rendering the Bible into Latin. 

Jerome, born in Dalmatia, had fallen from favor following the pope’s death in 384 and for a second time journeyed to the East, making stops in Antioch, Egypt, and Palestine.

Having settled in the summer of 388 at Bethlehem in a monastery established for him by Paula, one of a group of wealthy Roman women whose spiritual advisor he has been, Jerome embarks on what is to be his most productive literary period.

With the aid of Palestinian rabbis, he will translate the Old Testament into Latin from the original Hebrew.

This, together with the New Testament, which he had translated from the Greek before coming to Palestine, will constitute the Vulgate, the standard Latin translation of the Bible used by the Roman Catholic Church.

John Cassian soon afterwards tacitly permits the Pelagians to sack the monastery at Bethlehem, a center of vehement anti-Pelagianism, and is sharply reproved by Pope Innocent I.

Peter the Iberian, or Peter of Iberia, had been born around 411 as Murvan (alternatively, Nabarnugios), prince of Iberia, to King Bosmarios, who had invited a noted philosopher, Mithridates, from Lazica to take part in Murvan’s education.

The prince had been sent in 423 as a political hostage to Constantinople, where he had received a brilliant education under the personal patronage of the Roman empress Aelia Eudocia, wife of Emperor Theodosius II.

The young prince, together with his mentor Mithridates, eventually left the palace and escaped to make a pilgrimage to Palestine where he had become a monk at Jerusalem under the name of Peter.

He founds his own monastery in 430 at Bethlehem (later known as the Georgian Monastery of Bethlehem).

Justinian, during whose reign new construction of buildings defines the Roman Byzantine style, has undertaken a substantial reconstruction of St. Helena's fourth century Church of the Nativity, which had been destroyed by fire in the Samaritan revolt of 529, to create its present form (It is thus one of the oldest Christian churches extant.)