An Apostolic Fellowship
Church of the Nativity
Pictures From Israel (Circa May 2005)
The caption underneath each picture describes the scene.
This is the entrance to the church of the nativity. If you look closely, you will see a larger entryway existed in the past. There is an even larger entryway that you can't see. It was made smaller to prevent invaders from riding their horses inside the church. The smallest door was installed so people would have to bow in order to enter the church.
Here you can see the size of the original doorway. At the bottom of the picture is the top of the middle sized door from the other picture.
This is a picture of our tour group inside the main section of the church. IIRC, we were looking at a mosaic down in a lower level of the floor. It was like a sub-floor, probably from an earlier incarnation of the church. As I understand it, it has burned down several times.
Here are the doors they use to cover the mosaic.
Here is the Mosaic
Here is the ceiling.
Please forgive the poor exposure. My little Camera didn't have much of a flash system. This is the seating area for the church services they have.
We are now down in the grotto area next to the " birth area" of Christ. Notice the black ceiling area. This was due to a very recent fire.
This is the spot they say..... that Christ was born. Obviously it didn't look (or smell) that good at the time of his birth.
I don't remember exactly what they said this spot was, but it is in the same grotto (hole) that Christ was supposedly born in.
We have more pictures than we will be able to put on the site with our current budget constraints. If you copy the picture to your computer, you will be able to blow them up considerably as they were taken with a 7.1 megapixel camera.
All pictures were taken by Pastor William Johnson, and all copyrights belong to him. These pictures may be freely copied and distributed as long as they are not sold for profit, and the pictures are attributed to Pastor Johnson.