The Father Who Went to Cut Wood: A Baptism and a Death, Bethlehem 1761

On 20 September 1761, the vice-parish priest of Bethlehem, F. Joseph Maria a Vergl.mo, baptised a child born six months earlier, around 22 March. The register names the parents within the entry itself:

In one sentence, the entry states three things: the child is born, the father is said to be steeped in the schism of the Greeks, and he is already dead on the day of the baptism. The priest does not stop there. Beneath the entry, he adds a paragraph to explain what he has just written:

He then recounts that Sliman Barbara had left the Greek rite for the Latin rite, remained in it for some years, then returned to the schism of the Greeks, where he had been back only about three years before he died:

The priest even states where the traces of the fighting he mentions could still be seen:

The priest writes his note as a demonstration: God is admirable in his works, and the man who went back to the schism of the Greeks after some years in the Latin rite dies killed by Turks while going to cut wood. This is his theology, set out in his own register; the register provides no other witness, neither for the death of Sliman Barbara, nor for the repelling of the Turks he places the previous year, on 27 August 1760. The priest recalls that day as a settled fact of parish memory; no other text in this collection reports it to date.

What the register keeps as certain, apart from the priest’s interpretation, holds in few words: a child baptised six months after his birth, a mother already widowed on the day of the baptism, a man dead on a 9th of September while going to fetch wood, and ruins still pointed out, in 1761, near the Greek and Armenian convents of Bethlehem.