On December 7, Pope Francis attended the opening of Nativity of Bethlehem 2024, a nativity scene exhibition in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. One scene featured olive wood sculptures of Mary, Jesus, and Joseph designed by Johny Andonia and Faten Nastas Mitwasi, two Palestinian artists from Bethlehem. Nestled between a genuflecting Mary and standing Joseph was Jesus swaddled in a keffiyeh, a black-and-white scarf symbolizing Palestinian heritage and resilience. He lay below a circular mother-of-pearl starburst symbolizing the Star of Bethlehem, inscribed with the words “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill to all people” in Latin and Arabic.
After photos of Pope Francis visiting the nativity scene circulated online and a flood of outrage ensued, news outlets reported this week that the manger and keffiyeh-swaddled baby Jesus have been removed from the Vatican’s exhibition. Keffiyehs themselves have similarly garnered widespread support and been the target of censorship over the last year amid what human rights organizations have deemed a genocide in Gaza. Some social media users on platforms including X decried the nativity scene as “outrageous” and a “blasphemous” insult to Christmas, disparaging it as little more than a political stunt.
To decry the nativity scene, however, is to deny the centuries-long history of artists depicting the Holy Family in Bethlehem — located in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in Palestine — as marginalized, forcibly removed, and diasporic peoples.
The location of Jesus’s birth and the people present became deeply meaningful in early Christian paintings by Byzantine artists depicting baby Jesus with a donkey and ox under a “turugium,” or tiled roof structure inside the Cave of the Nativity in Bethlehem, such as Duccio di Buonisegna’s “The Nativity with the Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel” (1308–11).
However, Renaissance and Baroque artists began to situate Jesus’s birth among Greco-Roman ruins — the same ruins, scholar Andrew Hui explains, of religious and political systems into which Jesus was born and would doctrinally overturn.
Similarly, the ethnicities of the Magis, the three kings who follow the Star of Bethlehem to adore Jesus and bring three gifts, and the clothing and behavior of shepherds reflected Christianity’s increasing ubiquity through colonialism and forced conversion. And over the last century, artists have often used both the Magis and the shepherds as tools to reimagine the nativity in times of war, bigotry, and genocide.
During World War I, artists reimagined the nativity in the contexts of nationalism and large-scale destruction — soldiers as shepherds in military uniform and Jesus, Mary, and Joseph taking shelter in bombed-out stables or trenches. German artist Sella Hasse’s linocut “Kriegsweihnacht” (1914) reimagines the Nativity as a scene of mourning, explains Claudia Siebrecht in her 2013 book The Aesthetics of Loss: German Women’s Art of the First World War. A Medieval knight bows his head to Mary’s left, as the naked bodies of dead soldiers rise to an afterlife behind them.
World War II likewise saw displaced artists, including Polish artist Stanisław Przespolewski, reimagining Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in their traditional folk costumes. Przespolewski crafted his 1943 Nativity scene with a Mary clothed in Polish folk patterns and a winged hussar, a 16th-century Polish soldier clad in armor, protecting the family. A contemporary World War II Polish soldier also stands with a rifle at the ready on the outskirts of the manger.
In 1968, a group of American artists led by Joey Skaggs constructed a Vietnamese Nativity scene in Central Park, with a Vietnamese Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus in a manger covered with bamboo shades and a nearby paper pig adorned with a police hat, gun, and badge. While dressed as American soldiers, they attempted to burn the pig to the ground in protest of the war. Skaggs and several other protesters were ticketed for the “Vietnamese Christmas Nativity Burning.” Skaggs told the New York Times, “I want to make it clear that it’s not a beautiful Christmas in Vietnam.”
