Christmas has widely been believed as the time for miracles, so intriguing revelations can hardly come as a surprise.

Axar.az reports citing foreign media.

As the conventional Christmas story goes, the Nativity scene was set in Bethlehem near Jerusalem, where the Virgin Mary gave birth to her son, it has now been proposed that Jesus was born 100 miles away, also in Israel and in a town likewise called Bethlehem.

Near the Lebanese and Syrian borders, the town seems to find itself totally excluded from Christmas festivities, as thousands flock to the conventional Biblical Bethlehem in the West Bank to celebrate the grand Christian holiday.

However, several historians claim the location was undeservedly disregarded in the context of biblical history.

The biggest question that has been raised is why Mary and Joseph would travel such a long distance from their home town of Nazareth to the Bethlehem in the West Bank instead of heading to the Bethlehem that is just a stone's throw away from them.

There is a wide-spread belief that the supposed misidentification of Bethlehem may have occurred at St Helena's hands.

Helena, the empress of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, ordered the construction of the Basilica of the Nativity in the West Bank's Bethlehem, on the site where it was believed at the time, that Mary gave birth to Jesus. The error may have been the result of pilgrims mistakenly travelling to the wrong place for almost two millennia.

The Bible refers to Mary's son as Jesus of Nazareth and also says he is from Galilee, which for some qualifies that he was born in this other Bethlehem, contrary to what is written in black and white in the Bible, as geographically, it seems clear that the Bethlehem that is mentioned by Matthew and Luke is the one near Jerusalem.

Dr Aviram Oshrim, an archaeologist at the Israel Antiquities Authority who has been looking into the controversy since the 1990s, has said he is "positive" that the authentic birthplace of Jesus is near Nazareth.