The Church of the Nativity and Islamic Aniconism
Lisa Mahoney
DePaul University
The twelfth-century mosaic interior of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem
combines long stretches of text announcing Christian doctrine with images chronicling
the life of Christ. It is a combination of forms without precedent and, accordingly, one
that has consistently frustrated interpretation. This study offers a reading of these
mosaics that takes account, on the one hand, of the church’s site—the location of the
birth of Christ—and, on the other, of a historically and geographically specific anxiety—
the contested orthodoxy of representations of Christ. I will argue that this anxiety was
the result of the crusades and the contact between Latin Christians and Muslims they
occasioned. Indeed, this program was begun and completed during the years that
Bethlehem lay within the Franks’ Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, and its church under the
auspices of their ecclesiastics. This particular understanding of the mosaic program is
confirmed by content reflecting theological decisions that argued for the necessity of
representing the divine. And it was the perfect marriage of message and venue, for what
took place in Bethlehem justified such representations, namely, the divine had taken
human form, becoming perceivable and, ultimately, delineate-able. That this response
was motivated by a context-specific encounter with Islam is suggested by contemporary
Arab historians who complain about the Frankish use of images and ridicule their
portrayals of Christ, by the employment in the Church of the Nativity of artistic patterns
that echo walls of nearby mosques, and by the fact that Bethlehem was a site of
communal (i.e. Christian and Muslim) worship. As such, the Church of the Nativity
becomes our best evidence for real, substantial exchange between these cultures during
the twelfth century. In its espousal of religious doctrine and aesthetic preference, it also
becomes our clearest expression of the extent to which assertions of Frankish identity
were bound to their immediate environment. For both of these reasons, the Church of the
Nativity in Bethlehem promises to fundamentally affect our understanding of the form
and function of the art of the crusades.