The story is so fantastic it might have leapt from the pages of the Da Vinci Code or the script of an Indiana Jones movie.
The plot tells of a second Bethlehem hailed as the true birthplace of Jesus Christ.
This is home to a secret Nazi sect waiting for the Second Coming in the heart of the Holy Land.
And behind it all is an anti-Semetic fantasy dreamed up by Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler to show that Jesus was born an Aryan, not a Jew.
It may seem stranger than fiction but it all really happened in Bethlehem of Galilee, nine miles west of Nazareth.
This is the place where one Israeli academic believes Christ was born two thousand years ago, as opposed to the West Bank town of the same name traditionally hailed as his birthplace.
Archaeologist Dr Aviram Oshri argues that it would have been far more realistic for the heavily pregnant Mary, mother of Jesus, to ride on a donkey to this nearby village rather than the 100 miles south to be counted in a Roman census.
“How would a woman nine months pregnant travel 175 kilometres on a donkey all the way to Bethlehem of Judea?” he asks.
“It makes much more sense that she would travel 14 kilometres.”
So the thousands of worshippers who sing carols in Manger Square each Christmas are in the wrong place, according to Dr Oshri, who says that during more than a decade of excavations he has found the remains of a large church from the Byzantine-era in the second Bethlehem.
“Underneath the church, where the holiest of holies usually is, there was a natural cave,” he adds.
Many early Christian texts refer to Jesus being born in a manger in a cave.
There were signs of an ancient two-story guesthouse – perhaps the place where there was no room at the inn?
Parts of a fortifying wall can also be seen, supporting historic records which refer to one built around the biblical Bethlehem.
No such wall has ever been found in the West Bank Bethlehem.
Dr Oshri is not the first proponent of this theory.
Early in the last century thousands of German Christians had settled in what was then Palestine.
One religious sect, the Templers, set up a colony in Bethlehem of Galilee in 1906, regarding it as a special place to prepare for the Second Coming of Christ.
The Templers – unconnected with the Knights Templar – had been expelled from Germany’s Lutheran Evangelical Church in the 19th century.
They thought living in the Holy Land would save them from sin and it would be theirs to inherit, not the Jewish people’s.
Many openly supported Hitler’s Nazi Party as it rose to power in the 1930s, setting up their own branches and flying the swastika over their Bethlehem.
David Kroyanker, author of a specialist book on the German colony, says: “Many of the young were easily influenced by Nazism.
"There were many young Templers who studied in Germany at the time and when they came back they were very excited about Nazism.”
They boycotted Jewish businesses, saluted the Fuhrer’s name and sent their children to join the Hitler Youth.
Their presence in Bethlehem of Galilee was significant when Hitler was trying to re-write Christianity.
There have been claims that he and Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, believed that, far from being king of the hated Jews, Jesus was born to Aryan tribes never driven out of Israelite settlements in Galilee.
Author Sidney Kirkpatrick, in his 2011 book Hitler’s Holy Relics, said Nazi scholars had also insisted “that Jesus was actually born not in Bethlehem in Judea but in another Bethlehem near Nazareth.”
In 1939 many Templers went off to fight for Germany.
Those who stayed in what was then Palestine, being governed under the British Mandate, were declared enemy aliens.
Bethlehem of Galilee was instantly sealed off and turned into an internment camp.
In 1941 more than 500 were deported to Australia.
Another 400 residents were deported before 1944, while others were sent to Germany in an exchange for Jews then being persecuted in ghettos and concentration camps.
By 1950, the last Templers, mainly old and frail, had left Bethelehem of Galilee.
But their European-style stone houses with scripture inscriptions still stand.
One has been converted into a Templer museum which draws a small number of visitors each year.
It’s unlikely that pilgrims will ever descend in droves to hail the village as Christ’s true birthplace because not everyone accepts Dr Oshri’s theory.
The Israel Antiquities Authority dismiss his claim as “worse than a joke”.
But he still believes he is absolutely right.
“As I dig deeper and deeper, I am more convinced,” he says.