The Bethlehem Star, by Dr. Aaron Adair
About two centuries ago, there was a major transition in the way scholars were approaching the stories of the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments. There was a greater attempt to look at the historical context and formation of the holy book and its stories, and the tales of Jesus were a major issue for critical scholars and theologians. It was also at around this time that the acceptability of wondrous stories was not palatable, at least for the educated where a deistic god was more ideal, one that did not perform miracles and was consistent with the universe of Newtonian mechanics. A naturalistic understanding of the world, inspired by the success of the physical sciences, along with inspiration from Enlightenment thinkers, changed the way people looked at the world, and that caused for a significant reassessment of the spectacular stories of the ancient world. What was one to do with the miracle stories of Jesus if miracles don’t happen? The solution was a series of rationalizations, none seen as terribly plausible but preferable to claiming a miracle or a myth. For example, Jesus walking on water was a mistake on the part of the Disciples, seeing their master walk along the beach shore on a foggy morning and not actually atop the water. Even the resurrection of Jesus was so retrofitted into scenarios that are unlikely, to say the least, but at least they weren’t impossible.
This sort of reconfiguring of the stories of the New Testament is significantly less common among modern biblical scholars, but a major strand of this project exists in the sciences today: an astronomical (or astrological) explanation for the Star of Bethlehem as described in the second chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. This Star, which rises in the east, leads the Magi (‘Wise Men’ in the King James Bible) from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, and then stops over a particular locale where the infant Messiah rests with his family. For centuries the story was interpreted by Christian theologians as a story involving a star that does the impossible, as was the opinion of as varied a group as Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and John Calvin. Even astronomers of the early modern period, including Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, said the Star was truly out of this world. But in the early 19th century, the Christmas Star, like the other amazing tales of Jesus, was forced from its context to fit into the modern square hole of what made sense to modern readers, no matter the actual shape of the tale.[1]
Now, it is not necessarily the case that this is a poor way to approach the Bible. After all, there have been excellent scholarly works to show how the strange and weird tales of ancient peoples can be explained by completely natural phenomena and observations. The best example is perhaps the discovery of fossils, often from ancient pachyderms and dinosaurs, and various ancient sources tell us that they were thought to have been the bones of giant humans or fantastical creatures. For example, to the untrained eye an elephant thigh bone looks much like a human thigh bone, just amazingly large.[2] So perhaps some event in the sky was misinterpreted by ancient sources that made it into the Gospel account or we need a more charitable reading of the story of the Star.
However, there are two major points to consider that make this way of approaching the story of the Bethlehem Star problematic. First is the issue of finding anything that can fit the description of the Star in the original Greek text. There have been over 200 years of hypotheses trying to fit this, and the success is less than stellar, as will be shown below. Second is the problem that, unlike the case of the discovered elephant bones, we have good reason to doubt the events happened in the first place. Not only might we be trying to fit a scientific theory to something not scientific, but we might to trying to fit to something that never happened nor was written to say what did actually happen at around the time of Jesus’ birth. While many have argued in recent years that the genre of the Gospels is that of Greco-Roman biography,[3] there is the issue that this era produced biographies of people that never even existed, such as the founder-king Romulus. Too often the questionable arguments about genre[4] seem to bypass the fact that the stories in the gospels, canonical and non-canonical, are theological first and perhaps completely so. Treating the books that happened to get into the Bible as true biography and automatically carrying historical information is to privilege the texts and potentially do apologetics rather than critical history. In fact, the entire project of the Star of Bethlehem seems to be largely motivated by the preservation of the Bible as a historically reliable document and source of faith traditions. For example, astronomer David Hughes writes: “If Matthew invented the star, what else did he invent? Is his whole gospel full of mistruths? I do not think so. To me, the Gospel of Matthew rings true. All of it.”[5] Others are even more explicit that their project is apologetic, attempting to prove the historicity of the entire Bible (see below). From statements like this, an all-or-nothing stance exists, that if one part of the story is shown to be invention the whole thing falls apart, and what seems to ‘ring true’ is all in the mind. However, resting the approach to this story based on what is the affect fallacy (it feels real, so it must be true) promotes bias to evidence. While some in biblical studies try to promote the Gospels as attempting to write the history of Jesus,[6] our document in question looks far more like a piece of theological writing than a sober, critical account once we place the tale into the context of how stories were written in antiquity (see below).
This is hardly a new point; it was argued back in 1835 by the young Bible scholar, David Strauss, and his way of approaching the Gospels as works of theology first and not history has been pretty much the mainstream for the last century and a half among critical scholars. This isn’t to say that everyone in New Testament studies is skeptical of all that is written in the Gospels, and at the recent conference on the Star of Bethlehem at the University of Groningen a diversity of such views in the field were seen. The results of that conference are included into this chapter, though much of it is consistent with my previous work on the subject. One key point is that comparing the nativity story in the Gospel of Matthew with other such accounts, along with literary practices of the period, does not bode well for the historicity of the tale. The nature of what kind of story the natal account is, should force us to realize that we might as well be trying to use science to explain the origins of the lightning scar on the forehead of Harry Potter—you just have to ignore all those magical parts. If that sounds like an odd way of doing history, then you are not alone. In this chapter, these two points will be made: no astronomical or astrological event or configuration can fit what the Gospel of Matthew describes, and the story cannot be historical and likely was not intended as history in the first place.
The details of the arguments about the myriad attempts to explain the Star I have covered in my book, The Star of Bethlehem: A Skeptical View, and many of those details about ancient astrology and Zoroastrian priests and more were consistent with what was said by the various experts at the Groningen conference, not to mention given additional detail and discussion, but the primary theories and their problems can be discussed more tersely. The story that needs to be explained is this: during the final years of King Herod the Great of Judea (c. 6 BCE), Magi from the East came to find the newborn king of the Jews as indicated by the rising of “his Star”. Herod tries to figure out what he can about the birth of the Messiah, inquires of the Magi, and he sends them to find the child in Bethlehem with the ultimately hope to destroying his infant rival. The Star then, after apparently not being visible, “goes before” the Magi until it arrives and stops “over where the young child was.” The Magi then prostrate themselves before the Christ child, give expensive gifts, and then leave by another route because of an angelic dream message. What could fit the ways of this Star?
The major ideas presented over the years have been a comet, a supernova, the conjunction of planets, or a particularly auspicious horoscope. One way or another, these stellar circumstances signaled to the Magi, living in the Persian Empire (the East, Matt 2:2) that a king of the Jews had been born. Then the Star had to “go before them” and then stand “over where the child was” (Matt 2:9). With ancient records and modern computer models of the solar system, we can reconstruct what was in the skies on any given night; our confidence in the positions of the Sun, Moon, and planets is very high, and our records of notable comets from this period is reasonably good, primarily coming from China. For example, we know there was a comet in 5 BCE, not long before the death of King Herod and thus fitting the basic timeline indicated by the Gospel of Matthew. There is no record of a supernova around this time, and given their rarity it is probably the case that no such event happened in the skies around this time unless a lost record comes to light. There were many different conjunctions of the planets in this period, and the most discussed ones in the scholarly literature are those between Jupiter and Saturn three different times in 7 BCE. As for a horoscopic approach, the most thorough attempt at this looks to April 17th of 6 BCE.[7]
From what we know about how comets were viewed in antiquity, the comet makes for an implausible hypothesis for the Bethlehem Star. With very few exceptions, they were seen as omens of disaster, especially for a king. There are only two historical records from the ancient world where they were used as a more positive sign, but there were political motivations for those interpretations. The comet seen at the funeral games of Julius Caesar was at first not even thought to have been a comet by the supporters of Octavian (later known as Augustus), and instead it was seen as a star and the soul of Caesar rising to heaven; when it could not be denied as being a comet later on, it was still used as a sign of Caesar’s apotheosis and divine favor for his adopted son, Octavian. The enemies of the Julian dynasty who eventually lost out did their best to say it was an ominous sign, but failure to win control of Rome also meant failure to control the narrative as Augustus would mint coins with the Julian star on them, saying Divus Julius, and a temple to Caesar with a star on his forehead was established in the Eternal City. It was more politics than prophecy that made the comet into a favorable sign.[8] The same can be said for the only other case in the historical record with an auspicious tailed star, the comets of Mithridates VI of Pontus.[9] From Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian, and later Arabic works, as well as antique Jewish sources, no examples of fortuitous comets have been found, and it is from this broad time and place that the Magi are supposed to have come from. On top of comets almost always being found to be ominous, they are relatively common, so it is hard to understand how such a celestial sign was seen this one and only time as the birth of a Jewish king and inspired a trek to the Holy Land. There does not seem to have been any belief that a comet was to herald the birth of the Messiah or any king for that matter, as indicated by the ancient Christian writer, Origen.[10] Usually then the comet hypothesis rests on other astrological theories, especially the most common one mentioned below.
As for supernovae, there is no indication from the historical record that astrologers distinguished between such stellar explosions and comets, and some Chinese records of certain comets may be novae or supernovae. At best we don’t know how novae would have been interpreted, and more likely they might have been viewed in the same way as comets, making them no better a candidate for the auspicious Star of Bethlehem. These objects also do not move against the background of stars in the sky, so it is even harder to explain how a nova could have “gone before”, stopped, and then “stood over” anything. This along with a lack of a record of such an event from the time of Jesus’ birth makes this a faulty premise to hang a scientific hypothesis on when explaining the Star.
As for conjunctions, they received the greatest amount of interest in the literature explain the Star with papers and books speculating on how ancient astrologers would have interpreted them. One thing to first note about conjunctions is that they are relatively common. The conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn, for example, happen about every twenty years, though the triple conjunction in 7 BCE is much more uncommon. However, the question of rarity is only a part of the equation when it comes to explaining the Star; the astronomical or astrological circumstances need to be uncommon enough to make sure the Magi were not running around the Middle East every other year, but we also need some reason to think that these or any other conjunctions would have indicated a king was born, Jewish or otherwise. Extant Assyrian and Babylonian records provide no indication of how Jupiter/Saturn conjunctions were interpreted, so astronomers have looked to disparate sources from a much later time. In particular, some look to what an Iberian rabbi in the 15th century had to say about what constellation represented the Jewish people,[11] even though around that same time other rabbis contradicted each other.[12] Worse, the astrological theory that we do know of that gives high importance to these sorts of conjunctions was not invented until centuries after the time of Jesus.[13] Out of speculative desperation, other conjunctions have been cited, perhaps the most common secondary candidate being those of Jupiter and Venus in 3 and 2 BCE, even though they are outside the time of Herod the Great’s life in most modern chronologies of Judea.[14] No ancient astrological evidence is cited for this and it rests merely on the imaginative exegesis of the Old Testament. We simply have no ancient evidence to indicate what conjunctions would have been seen as particularly auspicious and indicative of Jewish royalty. In fact, we have no reason to think anyone even should have had such an idea in mind in the first century; the speculations about what was auspicious to ancient stargazers is built upon even more unjustified premises run by modern Christian bias, that what is important to a contemporary believer was important to non-Jews and non-Christians in the beginning of the era. This is a dubious way to do history, to say the least.
Horoscopes, on the other hand, have the advantage that we possess many Greek and Latin books about how a given configuration of the planets could be interpreted. The best recent attempt to do this focuses on the works of the influential astronomer and astrologer Claudius Ptolemy (2nd century CE), especially for arguing that the constellation (or more accurately, astrological sign) that was indicative of Judea is Aries the Ram. On the other hand, a broader look at the given reconstructed horoscope, along with other ancient sources on natal astrology, shows there is nothing less than a sea of contradiction. Depending on your source and interpretation of a given writer’s geography, either Judea is not mentioned at all or it is within some other territory (such as Syria province or Phoenicia) under the influence of some other constellation. No two sources can agree.[15] Moreover, the reconstructed horoscope for Jesus, while possessing several features that can be said to be auspicious and similar to those found in the horoscopes of emperors Augustus and Hadrian, there are other features which would indicate the newborn should have been a sex slave with elephantiasis-like symptoms and epileptic seizures.[16] In actual fact, any given horoscope can have “good” and “bad” features just by looking for them. Perhaps it is no wonder to the scientifically literate that modern astrologers to predict any better than chance the outcomes of personalities of people based on their horoscopes, but more astonishing is that they fail to agree on what any given horoscope means little better than chance.[17] Ancient sources agree that interpreting a horoscope is extremely difficult and highly prone to error, as expressed by the most influential of the ancient Hellenistic astronomers and astrologers, Claudius Ptolemy.[18] If professional astrologers like Ptolemy cannot tell you what a given horoscope means, then how could any modern historian do any better? Conversely, if a horoscope could potentially mean anything, how were the poor Magi supposed to have known about the birth of Jesus any better than lottery-levels of chance? On top of this unavoidable ambiguity of interpreting a horoscope, they are not used to predict births, but instead the time and place of birth are used to construct the horoscope. In other words, using a star chart to predict when someone will be born is doing astrology backward. At this point, such a method of explaining the Star might fall into the category of ‘not even wrong.’ In actual fact, that was the opinion of Albert Schweitzer, the famous scholar and philanthropist, when discussing the same approaches to rationalizing the Star of Bethlehem a century ago.[19]
The main problem with all of these attempts to say what would or would not have been auspicious to a sky watcher in antiquity is that, without explicit indication from someone in that period, we really don’t know. As the expert historian of astrology, Franz Boll put it a century ago, trying to find what was auspicious to the Magi in order to search for the Messiah is like trying to solve the equation A = x + y with x and y unknown—an impossibility no mathematician would consider.[20] The only instance where we can guess with confidence is in the case of comets, but not in a favorable way. Along with this matter of any interpretation of ancient skies by modern astronomers being speculative at best, the fact is we do not have a historical precedent of such signs making anyone think that a king had been born, let alone one of such importance that it was worth trekking for untold miles in order to worship an infant. Unless we get amazingly lucky in the future and discover the testament of the Magi themselves or other astrologers of the period telling us about auspicious conjunctions at about the time of Jesus’ birth, there is no way to justify any astrological theory for the Star of Bethlehem. Without the ability to establish anything with positive evidence, that would make the project untenable, though we may always be left wondering and considering it just possible something happened even if nothing can be proven. However, what is the most damaging to all of these attempts is the simple fact that they fail to conform to the description of the Star in the Gospel account.
The first detail about the Star is that it rose up (Matt 2:2,9). The exact meaning of the Greek phrase is debated, but no matter which is best there is nothing implausible about stars, planets, comets, etc., rising in the east as do all stars except those close to the celestial poles (i.e., Polaris). There is more difficulty, however, getting the word ‘star’ to mean a planet or comet without additional philological evidence; on its own, especially when referred to as “his Star”, this does not suggest a planet, let alone a conjunction or horoscope, and instead it is more like the a special and personal star, something all souls had their own assignment to according to classical sources.[21] Yet this is a quibble compared to other issues. The details as provided in verse 9 of the story are where the true problems lie. What is said there is that the Star “went before them”. The verb used by the author is one that in classical usage is one of leading forward or being in the front of a procession (cf. Matt 21:9), and that is an astronomical problem. The Magi see the Star leading them to Bethlehem from Jerusalem, which is towards the south. All stars in the sky do not move south but from east to west, so already the Star is doing something unnatural. Then the Star stops as it arrives at its destination. There is no way for a normal star to have come to rest in the sky. The straight-forward, literal meaning of the words paints a picture of something contrary to astronomy.[22]
To avoid this, various attempts have been made to have the Greek words mean something else. However, in no case is anyone able to competently show that anyone in antiquity talked about the motions of the heavens in the way the author of Matthew does. Moreover, the inventive readings have to ignore important details in order to work. For example, some have tried to argue that this “going before” and “standing” of the Star was about retrograde motion and stationary points of planets, totally normal motions the planets appear to make in the sky. However, the measurable change from retrograde motion to station cannot happen in a single night but instead takes at least several and are imperceptible to the naked eye; the story implies the trip took little more than the walking time from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, a distance of a several miles and perhaps two hours of walking or riding. Also, the context is rather clear that the Star is going before and standing relative to the Magi and objects on the ground, not the stars in the sky. The text says the Star “went before them”, and the only ‘them’ mentioned before were the Magi.
Another way of trying to understand the movements of the Star is to say that the light was simply in front of the path of the Magi (“before them”) and it was above the town of Bethlehem as seen by an observer in Jerusalem (or perhaps even over a particular house in the little town from a certain point of view). In this way, the Star was “before them” and it “stood over” the appropriate locale. However, the Gospel verse says that the Star “went before”, indicating motion, not merely being stationary. That is reinforced by additional verbiage saying how the Star arrived and stopped. Moreover, the Star went before the Magi “until” a certain point in time. That means the Star cannot be ‘before them’ and ‘stood over’ the place at the same time; one happened and then the other. Since no Star can move and then stop in place in a matter of hours, let alone in a moment as the context of the story would suggest, this interpretation also fails.
However, this is still not the worst part of such re-readings of the tale. The most problematic point of the description is the last bit of the verse, where the Star is said to stand “over where the child was”. There the preposition and grammar used is that of close proximity rather than up in the sky. The same sort of wording is used for the angel that sat upon the stone door to the empty tomb (Matt 28:2), and there was the sign that was nailed above Jesus on the cross (Matt 27:37). Astronomical and astrological texts never used the same language for describing stars in the sky above the ground. Perhaps then it is no wonder why the many ancient and medieval commentators on this story all agree that the Christmas Star was not a part of the natural world but instead a light that came down, guiding the Magi to a particular house and standing right above it as an ancient GPS unit as some modern Bible scholars put it.[23] Unlike the case of the misidentified elephant bones, this belief about the Star was not out of ignorance of the science of astronomy and astrology. Augustine, for example, was well-versed in astrology since it was a part of the religion of Manichean that he was in before converting to Christianity. So he is of considerable authority when he says the Star was not of the natural order but a special creation of God, divorced from astrological speculations or calculations.[24]
On the other hand, there is one naturalistic object that could move and stop in the way described: an alien spacecraft. This has been soberly proposed by several people, including one educated theologian.[25] We may wonder why the Magi would have referred to a spaceship as a star rather than a ship, and we have to speculate how they connected a flying saucer to Jewish royalty, but the most obvious problem with the extraterrestrial explanation is the fact that we don’t even know if such creatures exist, let along visited the Earth, let alone would have buzzed around the Palestinian countryside to guide a few Persian scholars around. The alien explanation is little better than the miraculous explanation, a modern deus ex machina to make any story possible.
However, the E.T. hypothesis is in a way the uncovering of the id (or unconscious drive) behind these sorts of speculations: miracles are seen as implausible to the modern thinker; even a fundamentalist Christians will initially doubt the claims of the paranormal from another religion (and perhaps even of just another denomination). However, any sort of naturalistic explanation has two features in its favor: it already comes across as more plausible, and it now has the authority of science behind it. The idea that a Bible story can be scientifically proven is indeed a powerful tool for an apologist, and one such apologist has admitted just that in the case of using natural events in the sky as explanations for the Star even if the Star is supernatural.[26] Other scientists may be interested in the subject because of their own curiosity in explaining the ancient world by scientific means, but my own survey of the literature finds neither secular nor non-Christian writers on the Star of Bethlehem favoring an astronomical hypothesis. Far more then, this approach to the Bible is Christian apologetics rather than secular history.
This begs the question: can we say the events of the story didn’t happen? For many, that the tale is about a miraculous Star is enough to make it just as doubtful as the stories of impossible trips to the heavens on the backs of flying animals. Some will look for any way to rationalize things, including impugning the intelligence of the author of the story for not understanding what happened. For those that accept supernatural tales, additional reasons to doubt the story are demanded. To which there are several. For one, there is no independent corroboration of this tale by any source, Christian or otherwise. Our only source, the Gospel of Matthew, comes from an unknown author writing at least a full lifetime after the described events, and the author provides no details about how he knows about what he writes or that he even has a source, let alone a reason to believe such a source is reliable. By the time of composition, all of the characters in the story are long dead; father Joseph is already gone and presumably dead by the time Jesus’ ministry begins in the Gospels, Jesus is obviously dead (and undead but gone nonetheless), while Mary was likely dead by the middle of the first century; the Magi returned to their own land and would have been deceased by the time ink reached parchment. Not only is there no living witness to the story when it was written down some time in the late first century or so, but the only other canonical nativity story from the Gospel of Luke contradicts key points of the story. In particular, the census mentioned in Luke 2:2 that brings the Holy Family to Bethlehem where Jesus is then born takes place at least a decade after the time depicted in the Gospel of Matthew (during the reign of Herod).[27] Luke also fails to mention anything about a Star, Magi, or an attempt on Jesus’ life. He either knew nothing of such a story (in which case the source for Matthew is all the more mysterious and unverifiable) or didn’t think the story belonged in his attempt to tell the story of Jesus (in which case it is seen as a dubious tale).
Even on its own, the story is filled with details that make neither logistical nor contextual sense. Consider these points of character when looking at the Magi and the king of Judea. The paranoid Herod, believing he is threatened by an infant, completely trusts the people that undermined his authority (the Magi) to report to him after finding the child. One spy tailing them would have been enough to change history, and yet Herod does not do what would have been expected by a ruler desperate to hold onto power. While Herod is perhaps overly-concerned about a baby, the interest of the Magi is contrary to history. These people would have been a part of the Zoroastrian priesthood, so they would not have been worshipping a Jewish king. In fact, later inscriptions showed that the head of the magi gladly persecuted Jewish and Christians in the lands of the Persian Empire.[28] This is highly unlikely if several members of this priestly caste went and literally worshipped at the feet of the founder of Christianity. The Magian interest in the stars is also anachronistic; while Hellenistic authors erroneously believed that the magi were astrologers and Zoroaster was a founding figure of the practice, in actual fact there is no evidence the magi were methodological astrologers at the time and significant evidence against it. Only centuries later do we begin to see any Persian interest and influence in astrological methods.[29] What this shows is that the author of the story is building a narrative built upon a common Greco-Roman stereotype and not what would have been accurate for the Magian priesthood, a classic sign of crafting fiction.
Perhaps the most glaring problem with this story is that not only is there no independent attestation of the tale, but there certainly should have been because what is described is an international incident. The magi were a part of the Persian government, both in the sphere of religion as well as in who controlled the empire. One Christian source even says the Magi were “almost kings”.[30] This means having magi coming into Judea, a Roman territory administered by Herod the Great, means that not only are the Magi usurping the authority of King Herod but also Caesar Augustus. This should have been a major event in east-west relations, similar to other cases where the Romans and Persians wanted different people in control of territories between them. In particular, disagreements about who was the appropriate king in Armenia led to diplomatic showdowns and wars in the first century CE, recorded by several Greco-Roman historians, including the Jewish historian, Josephus.[31] The complete lack of any mention of an even more brazen dispute of who controlled a Roman satellite territory is exceedingly implausible, as if the communist takeover of Cuba never even made it to the newspapers, let alone never having a response by the US president.
On the other hand, instead of looking at the story of the Bethlehem Star as a poorly sourced biographical account that fails to conform to what we know about history, it is far more productive to see if it fits into a different category of tales from the ancient world: the birth of the legendary hero. It has been noted that the Jesus story, especially the nativity, fits amazingly well to the general archetypal structure of the birth of the hero, from the miraculous conception, to his father being a god, to the attempt on the life of the child but is spirited away to safety.[32] By the first century this sort of narrative was well-known and worn out, and in particular the Jesus nativity in Matthew’s account has many similarities to the natal account of Moses as retold by Josephus (around the same time as Matthew wrote). That story included angelic dreams on the part of Moses’ father, a prophecy to the pharaoh that a Jewish leader was to be born, and an attempt to kill the infant and future rebel by slaughtering all male Hebrew babies. [33]
As for guiding stars, there are literary precedents for that. The most important is the story of the blazing star of Aeneas. After Troy had been destroyed by the victorious armies of Greece, Aeneas and other survivors of the city plan to find a new home, and prayers for a sign are answered by a great star, flying over at treetop level, and acting as a guide to their new kingdom in Italy. This story is told by the poet Virgil,[34] and his blazing-tailed star is to make it more like the comet, seen at the Caesarean funeral games, believed by many to have been the soul of the Julian dictator rising up to heaven. The star is thus a guide and a sign of the greatness of Rome and its divine leader. This was an extremely well-known epic throughout the Roman world, and commentaries provide other interesting details. In particular, the star that guided Aeneas and company was said to have been Venus as the morning star (lucifer),[35] which is not unlike the Bethlehem Star which may also be described as a morning star when it rose (Matt 2:2). We can now make sense of the Christmas Star story with this context; the adoption and transvaluation of this powerful symbol of the Roman Empire by the author of the Gospel of Matthew tells the audience how Jesus is the true king and son of God, that the great morning star leads to him and not to Rome and its founding figure.
Along with the Aeneas story, there is an equally important text that likely influenced the nativity story: the Star Prophecy from the Old Testament (Num 24:17). This was a well-known and widely-cited prophetic passage, found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Talmud to that end. The messianic claimant Simon bar Kochba was said to have changed his name to fit this prophecy, his name meaning “son of the star”. Early Christian commenters widely cite the passage from Numbers as prophecy for Jesus’ stellar birth—the messiah was supposed to have been or heralded by a star. We can see then why it would have been so potent to have Jesus in his birth story fulfilling this important prophecy in the eyes of Jews and Christians. Additional exegesis of the Old Testament can explain other details of the story of the Star. For example, Isaiah 60 talks about kings coming to the rising light of Israel, bringing gifts of gold and frankincense—two of the gifts of the Magi, brought to the new king in Jerusalem via a rising light. This sort of reading of the Old Testament and creating new interpretations and narratives was common practice among Jews and Christians of the time, so categorizing the Jesus nativity story along with this sort of writing is far more logical than acting as if it were a historical account, either of good or poor quality.
There is considerable precedent for this sort of creating exegesis from the Scriptures even in stories about the birth of Jesus that are found in later sources.[36] The most interesting of those sources must be The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, written in Latin along with a forged letter from St. Jerome to give the fake gospel significant authenticity. This document adds many details to the original Nativity story, such as how an ox and donkey were beside the manger holding the Christ child, a common feature in modern nativity scenes. The additional information is not mere window-dressing but supposedly there to fulfill prophecy about how the ox knows its owner, the donkey its master’s feeding trough (Isa 1:3) and that between two animals the Lord is made known (Hab 3:2) as explicitly quoted by the author of this gospel (Ps-Matt 14). Such citations of the Old Testament are following the style of the Gospel of Matthew itself which often cites a verse from the Scriptures to say how such-and-such was in fulfillment of prophecy. This goes to absurdity in the pseudo-Matthew gospel where Jesus is able to tame dragons (Ps-Matt 18), fulfilling the prophecy of Ps 148:7 that dragons will praise the Lord. Even though it seems fantastical, this gospel proved to be influential in the medieval period, finding it tales retold in the Golden Legend (13th century), Christmas carols, various works of art, and other apocryphal infancy gospels, all influencing the modern version of the Nativity. If this author was able to concoct fanciful stories about Jesus by inventive renovations to the Old Testament and be believed, then so could the author of the Gospel of Matthew. The Star of Bethlehem looks far more like a product of borrowed tales and/or theology, quite unlike a product of biographical inquiry.
Putting this all together, the weight of the evidence strongly favors that the tale of the Star of Bethlehem was deliberate theological fiction. The stellar object is described as something astronomically impossible, as recognized by all of the ancient commenters, and none of the scientific rationalizations of the story can find a plausible way to make it conform to ancient descriptions of astronomical or astrological situations. Our story, told to us by someone who fails to provide any reason to think he has done a careful retelling of history, makes little sense when put into the context of what we know of the Zoroastrian priesthood, King Herod, and Roman-Persian relations. In general, the story is highly improbable with all sorts of legendary embellishments, from the attempt on the life of the infant to angelic announcements and virgin births. On the other hand, the story is in great conformity with antique legends of heroes and standard literary practices by Greek-speaking writers, especially Jewish authors practicing theology with creative writing not unlike the various Jewish novels contemporary with early Christianity. When the Star fits so well within the category of ancient fiction, while fitting so poorly to history and astronomy, continuing to explain Christmas with science can only be as dubious as trying to explain how the magic words “Open Sesame” unsealed the cave door in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.[37]
But what if someone wanted to be forceful and not accept that Matthew could have ‘just’ made up the story, that there had to have been a source. Could there be something to the claim that there is something else behind the tale? Perhaps so, but it is not as expected by anyone looking for a historical event. Consider that there are other texts that connect a star with Jesus, but in a different way. Three times in the New Testament (2 Pet 1:19; Rev 2:28, 22:16) we find that Jesus is called a star, specifically the morning star. Note that this is not the same as there being a star at Jesus’ birth but that Jesus is actually some sort of celestial light. This is also found in the second century writings of the bishop Ignatius of Antioch (Eph 19) in which Jesus is said to be a bright star. Ignatius’ letters are figured to be independent of the Gospel of Matthew, and Revelation and 2 Peter are not using Matt 2 as a source either. In which case, perhaps there is a common source, but one that has Jesus as a star rather than a star at the Nativity. In particular, the Jesus-as-star idea seems to be related by Ignatius to his resurrection, and the morning star has been so interpreted by early Christian commentators. There is also the larger dying-and-rising god mytheme starting with the Sumerian goddess, Inanna, later changing into the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, both deities related to the planet Venus, the morning star. This may suggest then that the Star of Bethlehem was originally about the resurrected Jesus.[38] While this is somewhat speculative, this line of inquiry has far more going for it than the last 200 years of Star of Bethlehem astronomy. In the end, if we must continue to dig into the story, we will find myth, not history.
[1] Aaron Adair, “The Star of Christ in the Light of Astronomy”, Zygon: Journal of Science & Religion 47, no. 1 (March 2012): 7-29.
[2] Adrienne Mayor, The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
[3] Cf. Richard A Burridge, What are the Gospels? A Comparison with Greco-Roman Biography (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004).
[4] Compare the work of Michael E. Vines, The Problem of Markan Genre: the Gospel of Mark and the Jewish Novel (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2002), who argues that the Gospel of Mark bests fits into the category of ancient novel, specifically Jewish novels. Correct or not, the end of debate about the appropriate genre for the Gospels is not over and the potentially biographical nature of the stories of Jesus hardly mean they are historically trustworthy; after all, fake gospels such as the other infancy narratives seem to fit the biography genre just as well as the canonical Gospels do, yet we don’t even consider it plausible that they contain reliable information about Jesus.
[5] David Hughes, “Astronomical Thoughts on the Star of Bethlehem”, in Peter Barthel, George van Kooten, The Star of Bethlehem and the Magi: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Experts on the Ancient Near East, the Greco-Roman World, and Modern Astronomy (Boston: Brill, 2015), p. 105.
[6] Cf. Colin R. Nicholl, The Great Christ Comet: Revealing the True Star of Bethlehem (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015).
[7] Michael Molnar, The Star of Bethlehem: The Legacy of the Magi (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999).
[8] John T. Ramsey, A. Lewis Licht, The Comet of 44 B.C. and Caesar's Funeral Games (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1997), 135-53.
[9] John Ramsey, “Mithridates, the Banner of Ch’ih-yu, and the Comet Coin”, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 99 (1999): 197-253.
[10] Origen, Contra Celsum 1.59.
[11] David Hughes, The Star of Bethlehem: An Astronomer’s Confirmation (New York: Walker, 1979), pp. 68, 96, 184-6; Roy Rosenberg, “The ‘Star of the Messiah’ Reconsidered”, Biblica 53, no. 1 (1972): 105-9.
[12] Cf. Azahiah ben Moses dei Rossi, Joanna Weinberg, The Light of the Eyes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 548-50.
[13] David E. Pingree, “Historical Horoscopes”, Journal of the American Oriental Society 82, 4 (Oct-Dec 1962): 487-502; “Astronomy and Astrology in India and Iran”, Isis 54, no. 2 (1963): 229-46.
[14] Ernest Martin, The Star that Astonished the World (Portland: ASK Publications, 1991).
[15] Stephan Heilen, “The Star of Bethlehem and Greco-Roman Astrology, Especially Astrological Geography”, in Peter Barthel, George van Kooten, The Star of Bethlehem and the Magi: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Experts on the Ancient Near East, the Greco-Roman World, and Modern Astronomy (Boston: Brill, 2015), pp. 297-357 (esp. 330-2).
[16] Aaron Adair, The Star of Bethlehem: A Skeptical View (Fareham, UK: Onus Press, 2013), p. 78.
[17] John McGrew, Richard McFall, “A Scientific Inquiry into the Validity of Astrology”, Journal of Scientific Exploration 4, 1 (1990): 75-83; Rob Nanninga, “The Astrotest: A Tough Match for Astrologers,” Correlation 15, no. 2 (1996): 14-20.
[18] Cf. Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos 1.2 (6-7); Firmicus, Mathesis 1.3.2.
[19] Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, trans. John Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), pp. 464–5.
[20] Franz Boll, “Der Stern der Weisen”, Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde des Urchristentums 18 (1917/1918): 40-8 (paraphrase comes from p. 48).
[21] i.e., Plato, Timaeus 41E-42A; Republic X.614-621; Pliny, Natural History 2.6.
[22] Not only is this the view of all pre-modern interpreters of the tale, it is the one found among critical Bible scholars. This can be seen in the discussions of the Star of Bethlehem by Antonio Panaino (philologist and Iranian studies expert), Annette Merz (renowned historical Jesus scholar), and Stephan Heilen (philologist and ancient astrology expert) from the 2014 Groningen conference on the subject, all published in Peter Barthel, George van Kooten, The Star of Bethlehem and the Magi: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Experts on the Ancient Near East, the Greco-Roman World, and Modern Astronomy (Boston: Brill, 2015). Merz in particular favorably cites my own discussion on the grammar and semantics of the Greek text.
[23] Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, The First Christmas: What the Gospels Really Teach about Jesus’ Birth (New York: Harper One, 2007), p. 182.
[24] Augustine, Reply to Faustus 2.6f. On Augustine’s former interest in astrology, see Augustine, Confessions 4.1-3; 5.3; Leo Ferrari, “Astronomy and Augustine’s Break with the Manichees”, Revue des Études Augustiniennes 19 (1973): 263–76.
[25] Barry Downing, The Bible and Flying Saucers (New York: Avon, 1970), p. 134.
[26] Robert Newman, “The Star of Bethlehem: A Natural-Supernatural Hybrid?” Interdisciplinary Biblical Research Institute (2001): 1–16.
[27] Paul Tobin, “The Bible and Modern Scholarship”, in John W. Loftus, The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010), pp. 148-80 (esp. 160-3).
[28] Philippe Gignoux, “L’Inscription de Kartir à Sar Mashad”, Journal Asiatique 256 (1968): 387-418.
[29] Gerard Mussies, “Some Astrological Presuppositions of Matthew 2: Oriental, Classical and Rabbinical Parallels”, in Peter Willem van der Horst, Aspects of Religious Contact and Conflict in the Ancient World (Ultrecht: Faculteit der Godgeleerdheid Universiteit Utrecht, 1995), pp. 25-44.
[30] Tertullian, Contra Marcion 3.13.
[31] War in Armenia: Tacitus, Annals 13; Dio, Roman History 62; Suetonius, Nero 57. Diplomatic situation concerning Armenia: Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 18.96-105; Tacitus, Annals 2.58; Suetonius, Caligula 41.3; Vitellius 2.4; Dio, Roman History 59.27.3-4. Also close to the time of Jesus’ birth, a near-war because of a changing in control in Armenia: Dio, Roman History 55.18; Velleius Paterculus, Compendium of Roman History 2.100-2.
[32] Robert A. Segal, In Quest of the Hero (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); Richard Horsley, The Liberation of Christmas: The Infancy Narratives in Social Context (New York: Crossroad, 1989), pp. 162f. See also Robert J. Miller, Born Divine: The Births of Jesus & Other Sons of God (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 2003).
[33] Cf. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 2.9, §§ 2-3.
[34] Virgil, Aeneid 2.687-711.
[35] Servius, In Virgilii Aeneidos 1.382.
[36] Annette Merz, “Matthew’s Star, Luke’s Census, Bethlehem, and the Quest of the Historical Jesus”, in The Star of Bethlehem and the Magi: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Experts on the Ancient Near East, the Greco-Roman World, and Modern Astronomy (Boston: Brill, 2015), pp. 465-6. Merz also cites me on this point (p. 466 n. 8), saying how two scholars noting the similarity between Matthew’s story and the pious inventions in other infancy gospels “probably indicates that it forces itself on the historically minded as an illuminating comparison!”
[37] This was in fact done by the quintessential ancient astronaut proponent, Erich von Daniken in his Chariots of the Gods? This is all the more humorous considering the Ali Baba story was likely invented in the 18th century by Antoine Galland.
[38] I propose this as an avenue of future research, along with other pieces of supporting evidence, in Aaron Adair, “A Critical Look at the History of Interpreting the Star of Bethlehem in Scientific Literature and Biblical Studies” in Peter Barthel, George van Kooten, The Star of Bethlehem and the Magi: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Experts on the Ancient Near East, the Greco-Roman World, and Modern Astronomy (Boston: Brill, 2015), pp. 74-9. This is something I plan on publishing on more in the future.
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