The Great Christ Comet Read online

  Similarly, Palmer Lake in Colorado boasts a 500-foot-tall, 5-pointed, incandescent Star of Bethlehem on the side of Sundance Mountain.3

  Perhaps no people celebrates the Star of Bethlehem more than the Poles. To them Christmas is known as “Little Star.” Festivities formally commence around sunset on Christmas Eve, when the first star is spotted and is called “the Star of Bethlehem.” The Poles enjoy a “Star Supper,” during which a “heavenly Star” cookie might be served. Then, according to the tradition practiced in many parts of Poland, the “Star Man,” the Santa-like gift giver in Poland who represents “the Little Star” itself,4 appears, bearing presents from “Star Land.”5 He is accompanied by the “Star Boys,” carollers dressed up as the Magi or other characters from the Christmas Story, and who carry a Star lantern.6

  In parts of western Alaska, Orthodox believers with a Ukrainian heritage practice the yuletide tradition of “Starring”—carollers spin brightly decorated 8-pointed stars as they go from house to house, singing and giving gifts to children.7

  And we should not neglect to mention the people of Mexico, who remember the Bethlehem Star when they create (and then smash!) vibrantly colored, 7-pointed Christmas piñatas, and when they decorate their houses with poinsettias.

  The pervasive influence of the Star of Bethlehem can be detected in fields as diverse as horticulture and space astronomy. Many star-shaped flowers have been named after it, including one kind of orchid, two types of lilies, and five species of the perennial Ornithogalum. Moreover, the spacecraft Giotto, sent to investigate Halley’s Comet, was named after the artist who painted a magnificent fresco on the ceiling of the Arena Chapel in Padua, Italy, in which he portrayed the Bethlehem Star as a comet (see fig. 6.1).

  Popular Portrayals of the Star

  As famous and beloved as the Bethlehem Star is in the modern world, conceptions of it are surprisingly varied. Anyone leafing through carol books, collections of religious-themed Christmas cards, or nativity storybooks for children, or watching nativity plays or cinematic portrayals of the birth of Jesus will be exposed to a wide range of ideas concerning the Star. There is a consensus that the Star was an objective phenomenon, was beautiful and bright, and accompanied the Magi as they traveled westward to Judea; but beyond that, there is little agreement.

  With respect to Christmas songs, while some suggest that the Star was a new astronomical entity and one even claims that it was a tailed comet, most are content to leave the question of the Star’s identity mysterious. The object is sometimes presented as so bright that its light bleaches out that of the other stars, and indeed as visible not only during the hours of darkness but also during the daytime. As to color, some express a preference for its being silver.

  Christmas cards, children’s storybooks, and nativity play sets portray the Star as intensely bright, often rivaling the full Moon, as stunningly golden or silver, and as very beautiful. Sometimes it is presented as a curved-tailed comet, but most of the time it is an extremely bright, multi-rayed star with a particularly long downward ray. The Star is frequently depicted hanging over the manger, in which cases the downward ray is pointing down to Jesus below, with or without the shepherds and/or Magi in attendance. Of course, the Star is also included in scenes of the Magi traveling from their homeland toward Judea by camel.

  Over the last couple of decades, a number of popular computer-generated imagery (CGI) films have portrayed the Star. Two of them present it as a conjunction, or alignment, of planets and stars.

  The 2006 multi-million-dollar-budget movie The Nativity Story8 suggests that the Star consisted of the planets Jupiter and Venus becoming perfectly aligned with the star Regulus in the constellation Leo. As the Magi leave Jerusalem for Bethlehem, the three bright spots suddenly merge (at great speed, it must be said!), with the result that a long downward beam of light with an intensity approaching that of the Sun shines through a gap in the clouds into the cave where Mary is delivering Jesus.

  Similarly, according to the British four-part TV drama The Nativity, first broadcast on BBC television in 2010,9 the Star consisted of Jupiter, Saturn, and Regulus in perfect conjunction. When the Magi enter Bethlehem just as the child is emerging from Mary’s womb, Jupiter, Saturn, and Regulus are merging immediately above her, causing a brightness like that of the full Moon to shine forth.

  However, other CGI films have sought to portray the Star in more traditional terms. The 1999 Universal Studios made-for-TV movie Mary, Mother of Jesus10 shows it as a very large four-rayed, cross-shaped new star hanging over Bethlehem. This star is brighter than Venus, although not as intensely bright as the full Moon. Moreover, the popular 2013 live-action History Channel miniseries The Bible11 portrays the Star as an incredibly bright star with eight rays.

  It is clear, then, that in the modern world conceptions of the Star vary greatly.

  The Ongoing Mystery of the Star

  The diversity of contemporary portrayals of the Star is simply a reflection of the scholarly debate concerning it. As bright as the Star evidently was, for almost two millennia its identity has been enshrouded in a mysterious darkness.

  The phenomenon witnessed by the Magi was the subject of speculation in the first millennium, and fascination regarding it endures to the present. The modern debate began with Johannes Kepler in the early seventeenth century. Even now, in the twenty-first century, the number of theories offered to explain the Star seems to grow each year. Any interested party will have to sort through countless hypotheses—was it a planet like Jupiter, a star, a conjunction of planets, a nova or supernova, a comet, a miraculous phenomenon, or something else? It has justifiably been described by one respected astronomer as “the greatest of all detective stories”12 and “perhaps the greatest of all astronomical mysteries.”13

  Newspapers and magazines publicize any new hypothesis as though it might just be the critical breakthrough that enables us to identify the Star, no matter how profoundly and obviously flawed the theory may be. Whole books and DVDs are devoted to the task of identifying the Star. Some websites that promote particular theories get hundreds of thousands or even millions of hits. Internet discussion groups are weighed down with countless armchair experts sharing their hunches with the world.

  The multiplicity of views and extravagant claims made by some, coupled with the lack of any real progress in the debate, has naturally engendered cynicism among many regarding the whole task. Indeed people would be forgiven for doubting that any definitive explanation of the Star will ever be presented, and for approaching any new proposed solution to the age-old problem with a healthy degree of skepticism. The whole debate about the Star of Bethlehem, after all, has become disconcertingly speculative. All too often, scholars have put forward astronomical explanations of the Star that are only superficially rooted in Matthew’s account and, upon close inspection, fail to take seriously key aspects of the narrative.

  Moving beyond Futile Speculation

  Part of the problem is that academic interest in the Star of Bethlehem has been largely confined to the astronomical community, with relatively few contributions from the theological community. This has resulted in a scholarly debate that is heavy on astronomy but light on theology and history. Astronomer Mark Kidger has humbly admitted that “An astronomer may not be the best qualified person to take on such a task [the quest for the historical Star], particularly in areas where even the greatest experts have profound and fundamental differences, and where many of the agreed-upon facts are based on the penetrating and complicated interpretation of subtle clues.”14

  The history of literature on the Star bears out the truth of Kidger’s admission: the contributions of astronomers untrained in Biblical studies are all too often flawed in their treatment of the source material. They do not take sufficient account of critically important matters such as genre, subgenre, grammar, and historical background. Even the best astronomical essays on the topic have a tendency to discount cavalierly aspects of the Matthean account.
r />   It should surely go without saying that any quest for the historical Star must be built firmly on the foundation of a rigorous analysis of Matthew 1:18–2:18. Only when this text has been mastered and the profile of the Star fully laid out can one realistically hope to deduce the precise astronomical phenomenon in view. What the whole debate concerning the Star calls for, then, is input from Biblical scholars.

  Of course, just as astronomers contributing to the debate face the problem of being out of their comfort zone and area of specialization when they examine the pertinent Biblical and early Christian texts, so also Biblical scholars find themselves in alien territory when they move into the astronomical aspects of the task. What is needed, then, is interdisciplinary work and cooperation between the astronomical and theological communities.15

  By training, I am a Biblical scholar. I have therefore been forced to spend the last few years trying to come to grips with relevant fields of astronomy so that I could develop the implications of the Biblical data in the astronomical arena. Equally importantly, respected members of the international astronomical community, professional and amateur, have graciously and indeed sacrificially given of their time and energy to assist me on the celestial end of things.

  In this book I offer what I am convinced is the solution to the age-old mystery of the Star of Bethlehem. What I propose is rooted in a careful consideration of the relevant Biblical material and is, I believe, able to explain everything said about the Star in a natural and compelling way and in harmony with current astronomical knowledge.

  When it comes to claims of major advances in the understanding of long-debated Biblical mysteries, many people are naturally very skeptical. We have all seen too many television documentaries on mysteries of the Bible. A grandiose claim is made at the start of the program, and we wait patiently—or, more often, impatiently—through commercials and a long, drawn-out build-up for the narrator finally to unveil the supposedly great discovery. When the program does eventually get there, almost without exception we end up rolling our eyes and regretting that we have just wasted an hour of our lives. The most common, but by no means the only, problem is that key details of the Biblical text have been twisted or ignored in order to accommodate the featured hypothesis.

  Over against this tendency, my treatment of the Star of Bethlehem mystery will be driven by the Biblical data and will not play fast and loose with it.

  Surprisingly, many have dismissed any possibility that a straightforward reading of Matthew’s text is compatible with a natural astronomical phenomenon. R. A. Oriti has written, “Those who believe in a literal [interpretation] of the Bible may choose to believe that the Star literally moved and stood over the young child. Such an interpretation must rule out any astronomical explanation.”16 Even Mark Kidger has claimed that, if the Scriptural narrative is interpreted “literally,” any scientific explanation is impossible.17

  Certainly, if we were to judge the accuracy of Matthew’s text according to how well it matches the various proposals regarding the Bethlehem Star offered in recent centuries, we might be tempted to concur with these negative assessments. The respected New Testament scholar Raymond Brown made the following statement: “Really no one, including the astronomers, takes everything in the Matthean account as literal history. Matt[hew] says that the magi saw the star (not planets, not a comet) of the King of the Jews at its rising (or in the East), and that it went before them from Jerusalem to Bethlehem and came to rest over where the child was. In recent literature I have not found an astronomical proposal that fits that literally.”18

  Of course, we should not excuse a low view of the accuracy of Matthew’s narrative about the Magi and the Star on the ground that no astronomical hypothesis has yet succeeded in explaining all of its details.

  As we shall see in the following chapter, Matthew’s Gospel should be classified as an ancient Greco-Roman biography with a definite interest in historical accuracy. If Matthew, our major source regarding the Star, cannot be trusted in the little information that he gives us about it, then the quest for the historical Star is doomed to failure. Everyone in the debate should accept that the preferred hypothesis is the one that matches Matthew’s account most closely, and the ideal hypothesis is the one that fits it perfectly. Hence the more any hypothesis is in tension with the data in Matthew’s Gospel, the more it should be regarded as inferior. Only when we begin with Matthew’s account, interpret it straightforwardly and sympathetically, and resist the temptation to veer away from it in order to accommodate a pet theory can we rescue the discussion from the mire of endless speculation.

  Matthew’s Account of the Magi and the Star

  We must now turn our attention to the Gospel of Matthew’s account of the Nativity and, in particular, the Magi and the Star. We find this in Matthew 1:18–2:23. According to Matthew, an extraordinary astronomical phenomenon caused some magi from the east to make a long journey west to Judea in order to welcome the newborn King of the Jews. Remarkably, when they arrived at their final destination, Bethlehem of Judea, the Star pointed out to them the house where the baby Messiah and his virgin mother were staying:

  Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:

  “Behold, the virgin shall be with child19 and bear a son,

  and they shall call his name Immanuel”

  (which means, God with us). When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him: he took his wife, but knew her not until she had given birth to a son. And he called his name Jesus.

  Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, magi20 from the east came to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw his star at its rising21 and have come to worship him.” When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him; and assembling all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Christ was to be born. They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea, for so it is written by the prophet:

  ‘And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,

  are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;

  for from you shall come a ruler

  who will shepherd my people Israel.’”

  Then Herod summoned the Magi secretly and ascertained from them what time the star had appeared. And he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him, bring me word, that I too may come and worship him.” After listening to the king, they went on their way. And behold, the star that they had seen at its rising went before them until it came and stood22 over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy. And going into the house they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh. And being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed to their own country by another way.

  Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, “Out of Egypt I called my son.”

  Then Herod,
when he saw that he had been tricked23 by the Magi, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were in their second year or under,24 according to the time that he had ascertained from the Magi. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah:

  “A voice was heard in Ramah,

  weeping and loud lamentation,

  Rachel weeping for her children;

  she refused to be comforted, because they are no more.”

  But when Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, saying, “Rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child’s life are dead.” And he rose and took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there, and being warned in a dream he withdrew to the district of Galilee. And he went and lived in a city called Nazareth, so that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, that he would be called a Nazarene.

  So many questions fill the mind of the reader. What was this “star”? What was so striking about it? What convinced the Magi to make their trek westward? How could the star appear in the east, guide the Magi to Judea in the west, and then lead them southward from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, and finally pinpoint the very place in Bethlehem where the Virgin Mary and her holy son were? There can scarcely be any doubt that the Star, if it really did exist, was the most extraordinary astronomical phenomenon ever seen by humans.25 Moreover, if it occurred and coincided with the birth of Jesus, then it would constitute a dramatic corroboration of Jesus’s claim to be the Messiah.

  Overview of the Book

  In this book we shall first consider Matthew’s Gospel and its account of the Nativity, in particular the story of the Magi’s visit to Bethlehem (chapters 2–3). Based on this, we will draw up a suitable set of facts that candidates for the role of the Star of Bethlehem must be able to explain satisfactorily. Thereafter we shall consider the main hypotheses that have been put forward to explain the Star (chapter 4) and make our own case that one particular astronomical phenomenon lies behind the story of the Magi’s Star (chapters 5–6). Following that, we shall attempt to extrapolate a more precise picture of the celestial phenomenon witnessed by the Magi in their homeland (chapter 7) and on what basis they came to the conclusion that it signified the birth of the King of the Jews (chapter 8). Next, our focus shall turn to the task of building a profile of the particular celestial entity known to us as the Bethlehem Star, based on the Biblical text, and, in light of this, draw on modern astronomical knowledge to discover as much as possible about it (chapters 9–10). Finally, after considering the entity in relation to its astronomical counterparts (chapter 11), we shall conclude our study by telling the story of the main participants in the story of the Magi and the Star from the point at which the Massacre of the Innocents occurred (chapter 12).