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Bethlehem, December 1999.
A cold coming we had of it. It started with the Mossad grilling from two 12-year-old immigration girls at Ben Gurion airport. Almost everyone in Israel who exerts any street-level power turns out to be an improbably young woman with a face and figure out of the Song of Solomon and a manner that implies she would happily drive a tent peg through your sleeping philistine head. “Why exactly don’t you want Israeli stamp in your passport?” Well personally, you know, I’d adore one, but a lot of other countries might not appreciate it. “You are a journalist?” Sorry. “Who are you planning on talking to?” Baby Jesus.

And then there was no room at the inn. Baby Jesus has a sense of humour. You mean you have no rooms at all? “None. We have no confirmation of you. And you know what time of year it is?” Don’t tell me, there’s a census. It’s the perfect start to a story about Bethlehem and the real heart and soul of the millennium. Forget your domes and Ferris wheels and all-inclusive tropical luxury breaks seeing in the sunrise 20 minutes early. Bethlehem is the hub - the raison d’étre of it all. If this was just another two-camel sheep station in the desert, then all we’d be celebrating on January 1st would be computers that can’t count. I’m here to spend one day in the life of God. Sunday. God’s day. I finally get a room at the Hyatt. “I’m sorry, you can’t check in until 7:30. Sabbath, you know.” Of course, God’s dad’s day. The Hyatt is a tour-guided pilgrim’s hotel of irredeemable ghastliness. It’s full of money-belted southern Baptists in baseball caps with peaky inspirational messages. At breakfast, I hear a shingled pensioner in complete Christian combat gear ask. ”if you see any Jews, can you bring one over to me?” “Sure, honey. What do you want? Orange Jews or grapefruit Jews?”

No corner of the earth has been gilded with as many great expectations as the Holy Land. It is the crucible of the two greatest stories ever told, the Bible and the long homeward journey of the Jewish Diaspora. In terms of tears and blood, and inspiration of it all: steeples and spires, gilded domes and Roman pillars, mixed with pre-war Yiddish sophistication, cafés with chess players, violin music wafting from upper windows, carpets and diamonds, all that old dusty, winey, velvet sentimental richness. I wanted hand-waving and philosophy and cheesecake and chicken soup and Barbra Streisand. It’s not here. Not remotely. Not any of it. And it was foolish to imagine it would be.

Israel is a half-century-old Middle Eastern country built in a hurry on the horns of dilemma. It’s low-rise breeze block with limestone cladding. It’s dust and rubbish. Cacophonous neon, fraying tempers and suicidal driving, all strung about with barbed wire and observation towers and concrete security chicanes and a sense of extemporary make-do-and-mend. Israel is work in progress where the architects’ plans were written after the foundations were laid. The other thing is size. Size shouldn’t count, but Israel is very small, and the Bible implies that it’s vast, all those journeys, all that old age and those wanderings. Forty days in the wilderness and you could wander round the place twice.

Early on Sunday morning I set out for Bethlehem, which is virtually just a suburb of Jerusalem. “Would like to go to the Mount of Olives first?” asked my Palestinian driver, who started pounding his horn under the British mandate. Sunrise on the Mount of Olives first?” asked my Palestinian driver, who started pounding his horn under the British mandate. Sunrise on the Mount of Olives; that would be wonderful. Up to a point. The Mount of Olives is a car park. More precisely, a bus park and turn-around roundabout. May all your beatitudes be platitudes. But it’s not yet finished yet. Piles of rubble and extruded steel macramé for reinforced concrete fray around its edges. The bulldozers and trucks are already kicking up the dust. An early Arab sits with a sad donkey beside a Portakabin waiting for the stream of photo opportunities, more Kismet-me-quick than hosanna.

Beneath us, in the hazy grey morning light, lies unprepossessing Jerusalem. Only the golden Dome of the Rock catches early rays and glitters a counterpoint to the dun, sparse hills. The mosque is the third holiest site in Islam, and it only just avoided being blown to somebody’s kingdom come by furious Israeli sappers after the six-day war. Somewhere on the slope beneath us, in the stepped cemetery, Robert Maxwell awaits the day of judgement. Two minutes is more than enough. The garden of Gethsemane is just around the corner. It’s also tiny. An amenity area of gnarly olives and municipal scrub planting, about as spiritual and contemplative as a Little Chef playground.

You approach Bethlehem through Israeli security barriers, where nervous, sullen, clean-shaven young soldiers in green fatigues smoke cigarettes and heft their combi rifles-cum-rubber-bullet launchers. A few yards away there’s another checkpoint. This time the men are in black uniforms with moustaches. They smoke and cradle Kalashnikovs and are the Palestinian police. Their shoulder flashes say Tourist Police, which could mean they are there for us, or that they are just visiting themselves.

Bethlehem is an Arab town, part of the disparate segregated ghettos of the proto-Palestinian state. I walk up to Manger Square in the centre of town. This is Bethlehem’s moment, and it knows it. Moments like this only come along every thousand years, and they’re going to make the best of it. The place is one huge, confused building site, getting ready for the prayed-for influx of millennial tourists. They are building a multi-storey car park and bus station, an Arab heritage centre. The streets are being repaved. The gift shops and falafel shops are being scrimmed. Hoardings explain that the money for this development has been given by the Swedes and the Norwegians, the Japanese and the European Union. Palestine is a Big Issue state: it only exists on the philanthropy of strangers. But then again, so does Israel.

“O Little Town of Bethlehem, How Still We See Thee Lie” is pounded away in a reggae timpani of hammers and grinding gears. I’ll never sing carols again without the ferrous taste of irony and cement dust. The Church of the Nativity, which covers the actual spot where Christ was born, is the oldest place of pilgrimage in Christendom, invested first by the Emperor Constantine’s mum, who came here and built the first chapel, which was later shrouded in a second, bigger church. Although most of the religious buildings in this part of the worlds have been flattened by the ebb and flow of competing dogmas, Bethlehem has remained remarkably untouched.

However, the church is not a pretty building, a lumpy block with haphazard additions and three tackily illuminated crosses on the roof. The doorway has been reduced to a serving hatch that a single person has to double up to pass through. How they are going to get a million pilgrims in and out is a mystery, but then so much about this place is a mystery. Inside, I was under whelmed by the grandeur and venerability of the place – a timeworn barn with fat pillars and course tiles, and bituminous eastern votive paintings of boneless, agonised saints daubed onto fraying alligator skin by nameless jobbing artists. Very ornate beaten silver, icon-encrusted and oil, that trail a contradictory confusion of wires and ropes.

The reason for the contradiction in design and indeed lighting, is that the church is held by three competing sects: the Greek Orthodox, the Armenians and the Roman Catholics. Welcome to God’s car-boot sale. They have spent the last 2,000 years tit-for-tatting each other into an uneasy non-speak. At this point, I should admit that I am a believing (as opposed to a practicing) Christian, but of the Protestant and low-church variety. We don’t go in for this sort of thing, this fixation on lumps of rock and pilgrimage and the argy-bargy of sites. Any smugness on my part, though, must be tempered by the admission that if it were the Bible that you were talking about, then we’d be in there swinging to get hold of Ezekiel before the Methodists or the born-agains.

There is a strict rotation in services, each ancient church’s monks waiting in the wings to clear the airwaves to God after the last heretic lot. Each has their own changing room and kit locker. This is made all the more complicated because the real holy of holies is not in the church but in the cellar. Downstairs, in a dank dungeon the size of a coal hole, is the exact spot (honest) where Christ was born, marked by a 14-point star to represent each generation back to King David. Next to it is the place (honest to God) where the manger stood. In the Stygian blackness everyone has their own set of lamps that hang like a 13th-century Transylvanian interior decorator’s showroom and have to be blown out and relit for each service.

Ah, but that’s not all. The Armenians and the Greeks share the altar and its painting. But the Catholics have their own, so the canvas has to be removed and replaced with something equally tatty and glaucous. The Catholics also have the exclusive right to the manger – an area the size of a small lift – where the priest and his helpers all cling together chanting, waiting to be transported. As the Armenian bishop, who actually turned out to be Australian, set up his stall for early communion, I sat on a low stone bench trying to summon up some sense of spiritual peace and awe, a sense of place. A troop of Ukrainian pilgrims shuffled their way downstairs and then crawled between the bishops’ skirts to get under the altar and kiss the star. They came up crossing like ticktack men. A scowling cowled monk hissed at me. I looked blank. “Your legs! Uncross your legs! Don’t you know you’re in church!” Leg crossing is obviously some ancient eastern mortal sin. Defeated, I escaped back up into the crepuscular fug where the Romans were grouping in their 4-2-4 formation, chanting their Tridentine haka. The Greek Orthodox priest, big lads with full beards and stiff black chefs’ hats, bided their time by barking at tourists, harrying them, keeping them moving. If the Lord’s my shepherd, then these blokes are his huge sheepdogs.

The one thing all the chanting prelates are united by is a fierce, barely contained irritation with the pilgrims. There’s no congregation for any of these endless rounds of services, and loitering is firmly discouraged, with flapping hands and a shove in the back. Run-of-the-mill vanilla Christians are an irrelevance or a sacrilege, flies in the communion wine. I watched an American pilgrim hold a towel round his waist because he’d come all this way without realising that entering an Orthodox church in shorts was likely to upset people.

Just down the newly paved Norwegian road, but away from the general tourist beat, is the Milk Chapel. I must admit, I’d never heard of it. But then veneration of Mary doesn’t come with my lot’s hassocks. The Milk Chapel is supposed to be where Mary went to lactate before the flight to Egypt. It’s a cave built into chalk. Which came first? The milk or the chalk? Only a Catholic could tell you. Inside is an illuminated case of mum with her tsitskeh out for baby Jesus, surrounded by roses and fairy lights. It is of a transcendent level of kitsch, unsurpassed in any votive shrine I’ve ever seen.

The crumbly white walls have been blackened by oil lamps and candles, but holes gave been scooped out all over it by desperate women who believe that to eat this holy rock will bring nourishment to their barren breasts. The monk in charge sternly discourages this practice. Of course, that sort of animistic superstition is hardly in keeping with a modern church. Oh, silly me. I’ve misunderstood. He has a supply of chalk out the back that he’d rather sell to the women. A group of Irish ladies kneel in the pews chanting an endless round of “Hail Mary, full of grace… Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death,” over and over and over, as if God were hard of hearing. I escaped again, into the hot, mechanical sunlight. I don’t want to piss on anyone’s candles, and there’s quite enough competitive religion here, but frankly, selling blessed chalk as ex-vitro fertilisation to despairing women is beyond me.

Bethlehem is a place that attracts extremists. The government has just cleared out a number of the more frothing millennial revolutionists. But in the desert hereabouts there are still pockets of fundamental Americans in beards and loincloths begging a little honey to go with their locusts, smiley in the knowledge that they only have a couple of weeks to go. And the local overworked psychiatrist specialises in come-again Christs. In fact, there’s rumoured to be a special ward for them in the hospitals: “I am the second coming.” “No, love, you’re the thirteenth this month.” And John the Baptists waiting in outpatients for their medication: “You think I’m mad, you should see he who comes after me.”

Back to Jerusalem, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Birth to death in a single day. The old town of Jerusalem is quite picturesque, huddles behind Suleiman’s curtain wall, built to keep Christians out. It has eight gates, from the evocative Dung to the bricked-up Golden Gate that will only open for the true second coming. And the Damascus Gate, famous as a home pitch for Palestinian-Israeli needle matches. Inside, the old town wiggles and winds in on itself, a labyrinth of narrow alleys and high walls, hiding dark courtyards.

It’s segregated into four quarters: the Jewish, Christian, Arab and Armenian. The Jewish quarter has had a lot of money spent on it. It’s neat and rather soulless. A small boy stops me in the street and says: “Welcome to Israel.” The Armenian quarter is perhaps the saddest, containing the prettiest church in Jerusalem. The Armenians have had a miserable time of it. They are the oldest Christian church in the world and they’ve needed to be. Set in a particularly volatile march between East and West, they’ve been roundly slaughtered by absolutely everyone. A menu in the Armenian restaurant gives a potted history of the troubles they’ve seen. It’s unremitting and quite puts me off dinner, almost as much as dinner puts me off dinner. I really expected it to end up with: “But we had a good day in June 1370. The sun shone and we went on a picnic.” The walls of the Armenian quarter are plastered with gruesome photographs and explanatory maps mourning their genocide. It’s a measure of their continuing bad luck that they are forced to do this in Jerusalem, not a place to try to elicit sympathy for your pogroms. “Holocaust? Don’t talk to us about holocaust.”

The Arab quarter is the liveliest; a huggermugger market of fruit and meat and clothes and cupboard shops selling videos and plastic toys and garish sweets, blaring with Arab pop music and dodgy archaeological coins, the window’s mite pendant or 30 pieces of silver as a necklace. The little bureaux de change, with a nice biblical turn, call themselves moneychangers. And there’s a bric-a-brac of religion. Everyone is catered for here. Crucifixes hang happily with Stars of David and Fatima’s Hand. Dimpled pink baby Jesuses lie among the worry beads and rosaries. Fezzes steeple the side piles of yarmulkes, mezuzahs nestle in checked Palestinian headscarves, T-shirts crawl up the wall, Yasser Arafat’s face overlapping a picture of a machine pistol with the embarrassing slogan “Uzi Does It”. And it strikes me that for all its crassness and exploitation, you can’t deny that the free market succeeds where ages of argument and bullets have failed. It makes short work of theological and political differences. You may struggle for a thousand, two thousand years over the minutiae of dogma, but here business makes all religions one big, dollar-friendly, happy family. I toy with the idea of buying a crown of thorns. There are dozens in various sizes at very reasonable prices. But I can’t decide who to give it to. Maybe they only seem funnily ironic here.

The Via Dolorosa, Christ’s last trip as a mortal, is, like everything else, not what I expected. A narrow, circuitous route, it starts outside the city wall by Golgotha and then traipses past the Arab souvenir shops, with the stations of the cross marked obscurely on the wall, competing with adverts for barbers and pirated videos. There used to be eight stations of the cross, but in the Middle Ages they became so popular in Europe that market forces added a few more. Now there are 14. Christ fell here for the first time, here for the second time and way over here for the third. You can hire a lightweight, half-sized cross from the Holy Sepulchre and do it yourself, like hiring a scooter in Sk‏íathos, or a bicycle in Penrith. It’s a novel way to get around, by crucifix. I get caught behind a confused group of Filipino Catholics who swapped over at each station. “I’m No 8, the woman wiping the brow,” “No, you’re No 9, falling for the third time.” Anyway, they were going backwards. I noticed that nobody had volunteered to be the two thieves. That would be real humility.

You come to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre almost by accident. It has no vista. It’s almost swallowed up by the Arab warren and, again, it’s not a beautiful building. Big and bulbous and cavernous. “In my fathers house there are many rooms,” has been taken literally. Chapels and alters burrow into the darkness. The fractious bad temper of the Church of the Nativity is multiplied. Here, six, or is it eight, separate pre-Reformation sects vie for supremacy over the holy of holies. A platoon of ancient Egyptian Christians are actually squatting on the roof. Nobody agrees on anything. The brass lamps proliferate like an arms race, spreading ever more gloom.

And it’s here that I realise what these churches, and indeed Israel, remind me of – it’s the way-out-there, end-of-the-universe, lawless, freebooters’ planet from Star Wars, a votive frontier town mining spiritual gold from dross, a federation of disparate and weird aliens in funny hats and exotic robes, with obscure and ancient ceremonies, tortuous languages and bizarre habits. Here, along with the orthodoxies of Rome and Greece and Russia, Armenia and Serbia, the ancient Copts and Ethiopians, the Falashas, Black Christians from Zanzibar and Angola, there are wimpled Carmelities, cassocked Cistercians, Franciscans, Benedictines and free-range, born-again ecstatics. Outside, there are Ashkenazi Jews, Sephardic Jews, the Chassidim, the Hezbollah, PLO, and there are migrants from Hungary, Russia and Poland, from Morocco, Alexandria, Slovenia and Slovakia, the Carpathians. There are Baptists from Alabama and Methodists fro Michigan. There are Catholics from Macáu and Hyderabad, and everybody, everybody, is drawn to this barren lump of sun-cracked rock that produces nothing more than avocados, miniature machine pistols and olive wood salad serves. But in this dusty rock is the world’s largest deposit of crude religion and the natural gas of intolerance. It’s in the air. In the dust. You can feel it prickle your skin in the heat.

The first thing you see in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is Christ’s morgue slab, a polished piece of marble on the floor, guarded by the inevitable squadron of hanging lamps. It’s kept wet. Pilgrims prostrate themselves like flocks of thirsty sheep to kiss it, dipping their fingers to genuflect. Next to it is Golgotha. The sights in the Holy Sepulchre come like rides in some ethereal Disneyland. Golgotha, the Hill of Skulls, is up a windy staircase, a small room packed with various denominations of professional and amateur pilgrims, gunning their Instamatics at a large cut-out stuttering flash. Again the X that marks the spot of the cross is under the altar, so they crawl between legs to get a snog. And it was here that I saw the only example of real ecstasy. A nun from some exotic denomination, with a pointy hat and a medieval wraparound headscarf affair that looked like a linen wet suit, was transported; her pretty, virginal face a Flemish picture of pity and pain and adoration. It was a fleeting glimpse as the crowd of collected supplicants with their umbrella-waving guides pressed us on the very heart of the Christian faith – the resurrection.

Without a resurrection, there is no Christianity. Everything else we can and do argue about, but this is the peg on which all the rest hangs, the central, death-defying act of faith. The tomb is housed in yet another marble Wendy chapel. It’s falling down and is supported by RSJs as an unfortunate metaphor for the state of organised religion. The room itself can hold perhaps a dozen people, so the pilgrims queue four-deep for hours to get a look in where they can click a shot to ascertain that, phew, indeed, there isn’t a body. The line is hot and bothered. It sways and bulges. A lot of people have come from cultures where orderly queuing is not in their natures. There’s a babble of bad-tempered muttering. Monks harry and shoo and elbow the crowd.

This being Sunday afternoon, it’s time for evensong. A flying picket of Roman Catholic brothers, fit lads, start to manhandle the crowd without explanation. The volume of complaint rises in a dozen languages. The queue dissolves into a pushing, shoving throng. Those at the front have been waiting for hours to look in at an empty room, and they’re not taking this on the other cheek. They’re probably not even Catholic. The brothers get stuck in. Old American women begin spinning into the outer darkness. A Spanish tour group starts shoving back. The monks call up reinforcements. A flying wedge splits the pilgrims in half with some premier-division high-elbow work. In the distant gloom, a choir starts chanting Latin, the monks redouble their efforts and are joined by a Palestinian guard. Everyone’s shouting now. The guard gets to the door of the tomb and I notice he is wearing a revolver. I can’t imagine any other holy place in the world where it would be acceptable to allow a man with a gun. And certainly not here, where the Prince of Peace passively accepted crucifixion. The choir enter the fray, fronted by a chap swinging a censer like a tear-gas canister. The pilgrims retreat, an angry, confused mob. The monks face them like riot police. A bishop arrives, looks in at the tomb – phew, still no body – and chants evensong. The organ pipes up.

Off stage, another choir starts. That sonorous, sad, dusty descant that is Russian, or perhaps Serb, or Armenian. For a few minutes, the two sects compete in a discordant counterpoint. Then the Romans retreat to a side chapel and the eastern Orthodoxes, led by an imposing bloke in a duvet beard and a hat that looks like Darth Vader’s bed cap, takes his place at the tomb and has a look inside – phew. He does his thing. The Catholics may have retreated, but they’ve regrouped and they’re not giving up; they’ve still got control of the organ. An Orthodox monk produces a mobile phone from his sleeve and has a muttered conversation – probably with the archangel Gabriel. Snatch squads of prelates manhandle stray lambs. This is a schoolboy vision of the Middle Ages, and it makes Life of Brain look like a documentary.

The most poignant and distressing thing about all of this is that there’s no congregation. Nobody’s listening. Visitors are dis-invited. This is between God and the professionals, as opposed to the merely faithful. Faith is a fugitive and difficult thing. One moment you’re full of it. The next you can barely find a vestige. If you look for it straight on, it vanishes. You only glimpse it out of the corner of your eye. However annoying and bovine and crass the tour groups of retired American born-agains and Irish single mothers’ clubs are, they have been brought here by faith. They haven’t come to Israel for the view, or the relaxing luxury, or the food, or that famous Israeli hospitality. They’ve come to a troubled, dangerous corner of the world because this is where faith began. They’ve come with their own troubles to allay, with terrible sadnesses, with guilt, with fear and with hope, often at the end of their lives, on pilgrimages they have promised themselves and saved for over years. They don’t have the luxury of a monk’s vocation, the glorious lack of responsibility that a life in holy orders gives you. And at the one place where they should find solace and conviction, they are treated like idiotic cattle, as an irrelevance and a nuisance. But still, they leave, not just with their olivewood nativity sets and their rosaries, but with their faith. And that’s nothing short of a miraculous. God works in mysterious ways.

Here at the spiritual meridian of the millennium, like everything else, nobody can agree what day of the month it is. There’s the Roman calendar, the Julian and the Gregorian. The Muslims think it’s the 15th century. So the great irony is there’s going to be hardly anyone here celebrating the millennium anyway, and oh, January 1st is a Saturday, so the Jews can’t make it either.

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