More thinking about the Star of Bethlehem
Chip Davis
Hello, and welcome to lecture 12.
It just so happens that I love astronomy. The Christmas star is an enduring symbol of this holiday.
Everyone knows it was a star that led the Magi, or wise men to the East, to the Christ child. And like most amateurs and even professional astronomers, there's one special question that crosses my mind every Christmas. Exactly what was that star of Bethlehem, and who were those wise men? In Biblical times, most of the people living in the Near or Mid-East believed that the stars influenced human behavior, and they also believed that certain unusual stellar events announced the birth of people who would rise to greatness, like a future king.
And so, kings and rulers, always needing good advice, appointed learned men. Wise men, if you will, because then as now, knowledge is power. These so-called wise men were the equivalent of today's professors and scientists.
Wise men studied the world and nature. They studied history and ancient manuscripts, and some studied the stars. Back then, the science of astronomy didn't yet exist, but astrology did.
And so the wise men, at least the ones in the Biblical Christmas story, were probably some of the very earliest astrologers, the advisors to the king. In Luke's Gospel, he says that these wise men lived in the East. Okay, east of where? It would have to be somewhere east of Israel, and the most probable country east of Israel 2,000 years ago would have been ancient Babylon.
And where ancient Babylon was then, today is known as Iraq. The same Iraq where thousands of U.S. servicemen and women are stationed. That seems to answer the question of who they were and why they were looking at the sky.
But what were they looking for? What was the star of Bethlehem? Through the centuries, all kinds of theories have popped up. Perhaps it was a gigantic stellar explosion of a very distant and dying star. That's called a supernova.
Or perhaps it was a bright comet. Some have speculated that it even could have been a UFO. And maybe it was none of the above.
Perhaps it was strictly a supernatural event, and in that case, it can't be explained by science at all. The truth is, we can never absolutely know for certain, because the most important and basic piece to the puzzle is simply missing. We don't know the exact year of the birth of the Christ child.
Most scholars believe that in using our current calendar, it was probably in the year 7 BC. Still, no one knows for sure, but we can come up with some very real and tantalizing possibilities. We start by ruling out certain theories.
Comets are the first to go. To ancient civilizations, comets were believed to foretell some coming disaster, so it's not likely that the ancient magi would think that a comet could herald any good news. And if the star was a bad omen, why would they go looking for it? Next, we can rule out a supernova, the giant explosion of a distant star.
Ancient astronomers kept very accurate records when unusual events occurred in the sky, and a bright supernova would have been seen from all over the world. And records show that the Chinese didn't see one at that time, and neither did the Arabians, nor the Romans, nor the Greeks. So the supernova is out too.
Our choices are getting limited, and we have to wonder, could the Star of Bethlehem have been a natural celestial event? This is an exciting possibility, because the motion of the stars and the planets are so predictable that it's easy for astronomers to trace them back or forward in time. And for this, nowadays, we can use even an inexpensive computer astronomy program that runs on home computers and plots the night sky for any date in the past or future, at any point on Earth. And what we see echoes a theory that was proposed by a famous German astronomer, Johannes Kepler.
Long before computers, in the year 1599, Kepler speculated that the Christmas star wasn't really a star at all. He believed that the so-called Star of Bethlehem was actually what's called a conjunction of three bright planets. Now a conjunction happens to be when two or more objects in the sky, they can be stars or planets, appear to us here on Earth to be very close to one another.
And by hand-calculating the movement of the planets backwards in time, Kepler found that there had indeed been a conjunction of three of these brightest planets right around the time of the birth of Christ. But there's more. It wasn't just one conjunction.
It happened three separate times, all within one year. Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn drew very close to each other on the nights of May 22nd, October 5th, and December 1st. All right, triple conjunctions are very rare, and that it would happen three times within one year was quite a celestial event.
You can bet that something like this would catch the attention of anyone who studied the night sky, especially the magi. So does this solve the question of the star? Not quite. There are many who believe that the star was a supernatural event of great religious significance.
For them, no other explanation is necessary. And perhaps, after all is said and done, not knowing the exact answer is part of the miracle of Christmas itself. We could debate these kinds of questions for a lifetime, and in so doing, we could also lose sight of the real meaning of this holiday, in not knowing we are given the freedom to believe as we each choose.
And in this, we are brought together, united under the central message of Christmas itself.
Peace on Earth, good will to us all.
Chip Davis is an American musician and composer. He is best known as the creator and leader of the “Mannheim Steamroller” musical group.
The essay on this page is one of four such pieces read by Davis on his 2001 album, “Mannheim Steamroller Christmas Companion.”
