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Christmas Star

John Dickson (Studio)

Hi. I know we’ve not. Quite finished season five, but I had to sneak in this brief single between episodes. It’s almost Christmas, and you can be sure that amidst all the fun and food and singing and Christmas cheer, there will be some good old-fashioned grumpy scepticism about the Christmas narrative itself. And one of the easiest, slow moving targets of the story is the so-called three wise men, the Magi, who apparently followed a magical star. To Bethlehem. It’s the stuff of myth, right? Well, a lot of people think so, and most of them are unaware that grownup Secular scholars at Grownup University conferences are still discussing. The ways that this story recorded in Matthew chapter two might actually be history. And to talk us through some of those recent discussions. I’ve got friend of the pod and career historian, Dr. Chris Forbes. Chris taught Greco-Roman history and religion for 30 years at Australia’s premier ancient history department at Macquarie University, and I caught up with him the other day at his home in Sydney.

John Dickson:
Chris, thanks for joining us again. Um, too many scholars to list have approached the so-called infancy narratives, um, the Christmas story in Matthew and Luke as either, uh, mythological, you know, like the Greek myths, uh, or midrashic to offer a reference to, uh, sort of Jewish storytelling to expound passages of scripture. So I just wanna ask, you know, how do you feel just in broad terms about those literary historical judgments?

Chris Forbes:
I think the gospels are far too Jewish to look very much like Greek myth at all. Their whole framework is Jewish. Um, what’s puzzling about Matthew particularly is though Matthew notoriously is forever quoting scripture and saying, this came about to fulfill what was foretold. And that’s a very raic thing to do in the birth stories. He doesn’t do that. Or at least he doesn’t do that about the star of Bethlehem and the wise men. Hmm. He doesn’t mention that. So it seems to me that he’s not working with a Midrashic framework. That is to say he’s not taking biblical ideas from the Hebrew Bible and developing thematic concepts from them. Because when he does that, he tells us. And he doesn’t tell us this time.

John Dickson:
Okay, I, I wanna drill down on the Star and the so-called three Wise Men. Um, Matthews Gospels is the only source that mentions, uh, the Star of Bethlehem. It, you know, this story doesn’t appear in any biblical or extrabiblical source. Is that suspicious for you?

Chris Forbes:
Well, that depends on what it was. If it was a comet, yes, it’s very suspicious. If it were a supernova, well, comets and supernovae are visible worldwide. And we’d expect some other culture, like the Chinese, for example, to have noticed it. But if it was something that was specifically astrological that only somebody trained in a particular tradition of astronomy and astrology would notice or understand, then perhaps it’s not strange at all. It really depends on what the style was.

John Dickson:
What are some of the theories, uh, out there, uh, about what the star could be, you know, just beyond just dismissing the whole story. And I wanna know what you find most plausible? So give me some of the theories and tell me what you think is plausible.

Chris Forbes:
Well, for centuries and centuries, early Christian writers simply presumed that it was a miraculous event and you couldn’t explain it. That was the view of virtually everybody down to the 18th century. Oh no. Down to the 17th century. At any rate, down to Johannes Kepler. There are three other basic categories of theory. One is it’s a comet. Now in favor of it being a comet is a comet can point a direction. And a comet can stand above as in point, straight down at something or can appear to, so that makes reasonable sense. And the earliest Christian writer to comment that it could have been a comment is Oregon of Alexandria in the third century AD. Though he still thought it was a supernatural one, he didn’t think it was just a natural comet. The negatives about it being a comet is that comets tend to be visible worldwide, and then it becomes more and more suspicious that only Matthew mentions it. Could it be a supernova? Or just plain a big nova? A new star? Again, puzzling if it wasn’t noticed by anybody else, but hey, maybe it’s an explanation. The third possible explanation is that it may not have been an item; it may have been the sort of thing that an astrologer would notice, a conjunction of stars and planets, perhaps, or a set of stars and planets rising in a certain configuration. Now, if it’s that, then only somebody with a trained mind and eye is going to notice, and so there’s a whole category of explanations that suggest it was some kind of astrological configuration. And those ideas start with a Jewish astronomer in the seventh century and some Islamic astronomers in the ninth century, and go through to the famous Johan Kepler, who argued that it was a particular conjunction of the rising of Jupiter in the star sign of Pisces, and he dated it to 7 BC. Now, astronomically, such a thing absolutely happened, whether it’s the star of Bethlehem, whether he’s identified it correctly is the question. Most recently, an American astronomer named Michael Molnar has proposed a revised version of the same idea, arguing that the star of Bethlehem was two related phenomena. Jupiter, again, because Jupiter is the planet of royalty, because Jupiter is king of the Gods, and we are told in Matthew’s gospel that the wise men said that they’d seen his star literally in the east. But the terminology could mean, and the NIV new version actually translates it. ‘We have seen his star at its rising bracket in the East’. Now, if Jupiter rises in a particular constellation, for example, the constellation that stands for the Nation of the Jews, Ares the Ram, then does that suggest something about a new king of the Jews? Add to that all the known visible planets rising in the same constellation, in the same period. Something that only happens about every 3000 years. Add to that, the moon then occluding. That is to say, eclipsing Jupiter. Put all those phenomena together. And in Greco-Roman astrological terms, you’ve got a big, big sign of something to do with Jewish royalty.

John Dickson (Studio)

I might need to chime in here because I think Chris assumes everyone knows that ancient astrologers associated each geographical region with one of the 12 traditional constellations – Aquarius, Pisces, Aries, and so on. And according to ancient records such as Ptolemy and others, the land of the Jews, Judea, was associated with Aries, the Ram. Now the royal planet Jupiter rising in the constellation of Aries, as we know it did in April six, BC, is very plausibly read as a portent of a great king being born in Judea, and with the other fancy astronomical gymnastics of Jupiter and the moon, at the end of that same year … we do have something that might intrigue ancient magi right around the time historians usually date Jesus’ birth between 7 and 5 BC.

Chris Forbes:
That’s only them seeing the star when it rose. What does it mean that the star stood above where the child had been born? Ancient astronomers don’t so much map the stars and the planets against the heavens in the abstract. They mapped them against the stars that have a regular pattern. In other words, all the unchanging stars, the stars that just do the 24-hour cycle, and they watch the way the planets and the moon move against that steady, constant background. And if you have all the preliminaries happening in April of 6 BC, then in December of 6 BC, Jupiter moves forward against the fixed stars, then stays still for a couple of days, and then goes retrograde. Now, if that happens directly above Bethlehem, most people aren’t going to notice it, but astrologers just might. And that’s the essence of Molnar’s theory that the Star of Bethlehem was two sets of related astronomical phenomena, both in the year six BC, one early in the year and the other very late in the year, to give the wise men time to travel.

John Dickson:
So I know you, you yourself, are a grown-up historian, but are other grown-up historians discussing, uh, these things, taking these ideas seriously?

Chris Forbes:
Various of them have been for quite some time and grown up to be astronomers as well. Um, but in 2014, a conference was held at Grogan University, and a 600-page volume of the proceedings of the conference was published by a major academic publisher. Yes, this is discussed by serious peopl,e and they don’t always come to the same conclusions. There are various views put forward, but the whole thing is treated as worth discussing.

John Dickson:
So let’s talk about the Wise Men, the Magi. Um, what’s the terminology in, in Matthew and, and what does it mean in. Ancient Greek.

Chris Forbes:
Well, in Greek it’s Margo. In Latin. It’s Maggi, but it doesn’t matter. We all know who we are talking about, or we think we do. How many of them were there?

Well, traditionally three, of course.

But you’re gonna tell me.

Who knows? We don’t know. Yes. What we know is they brought three different categories of gift, gold, frankincense, and me, but as to how many of them there actually were. There may have been a dozen, or there may have been two. We just don’t know.

Sure. But who are they? What are they?

How are they understood?

Margo come from Mesopotamia. Originally from Babylon and the region around about now from the kingdom of Paia, which is Paia, is Mesopotamia and AC encroaching on Syria through Turkey parts of Turkey. It’s that area, and in this period in the first century BC it’s ruled by a native dynasty who are known by the Greeks and Romans as the Ians and the Margay are number one religious scholars.

Particularly, quite a few of them are astronomers and astrologers, because in the ancient world, the distinction just didn’t mean anything. Both did the same calculations. They just took different meanings from them. But more than that, there’s a considerable amount of ancient evidence that Greeks and Romans knew, but the Margo were part of the ruling elite of the Ian Kingdom.

They weren’t just part of the embassies that the Ians sent out. They were also part of the elite who chose the Ian King. So they’re not just religious scholars, they’re political figures as well of considerable significance. So these are important people,

and we have good primary evidence of this, don’t we?

Actual sources that tell us this is what they were.

Oh, actually, absolutely. Plutarch’s Life of Surah, the great Roman commander, talks about the first clear case when a Roman embassy met with an embassy of the Ians. This is in 96 bc. And he tells us specifically that on the embassy there were included some Margi who noticed that Soah had a particular facial blemish.

Famously he had, um, a, a birthmark that was very obvious and got him laughed at quite a lot by his friends and his enemies, but more by his enemies. One of the Margi noticed this facial blemish and commented using the skills that he had as a Marus. That this was a man who would become a great leader. So Margo are those who are actually interested in foreign royalty and foreign leadership.

Along with everything else they’re interested in. Cicero, who fought against the Ians after they invaded the area. Comments on the same phenomenon. Philo of Alexandria writing in the early first century ad comments on the same phenomenon. The Greeks and the Romans knew that the Margi were not just religious scholars, they were part of the political elite as well.

So this is temporarily significant, isn’t it? I mean, um, paan Magi visiting Herod’s Kingdom, um, in this specific period.

Well, if it happened in this specific period, it’s highly significant. Because Herod only became king of the Jews because he helped to drive off a Ian invasion. He is no friend of the Ians, but he now has to be nice to the Ians because his master Augustus, the Roman emperor, has made a treaty with the Ians, and now we are all good mates.

So Herod can’t simply sniff and say, I don’t like talking with Ians, let alone Margi. He has to take them seriously. But he probably would take them seriously even if he didn’t like them, because they’re the elite and they’re famous for getting their astrology right. And Herod well, he was a religious and B, superstitious because the two often go together in the ancient world, and he would take such people very seriously.

Josephus tells us that he was very much into signs and omens, including the one that prophesied his own death.

So I guess what I’m getting at though is if Matthew writes in the, you know, let’s say seventies or eighties, no one really knows, I mean, he could have just made this story of the Magi up in the seventies and eighties.

Does it fit as well in that period as it does in the period of Herod the great. 80, 90 years earlier.

The short answer to that is no, it doesn’t fit very well in the seventies and eighties at all because in the seventies and eighties there’d been another downturn in Roman and Ian relations, particularly under the Flavian emperors.

That’s Thespian. Titus and De Mission things had gone badly downhill, and we know that the Roman elite were much more negative about the Margaret I than they used to be. Pliny the elder, for example, makes very rude remarks about them and their Margi care. That’s where we get the word magic from, and he uses it in the negative sense.

They’re Tom foolery, they’re trickery. So A, the attitude to Margi seems to have changed in that later period. And B, in that later period, politically, it would’ve been much harder for wise men from the east to come to Herod’s Kingdom or what had be what had been Herod’s kingdom. It’s really only in the period from 20 BC down to about 15 AD that relationships were really positive.

And that’s precisely where Matthew says they were traveling to Herod’s Kingdom quite possibly more widely as well, quite possibly through Roman, Syria. But that’s the period when it was possible for Ian Ingenia and political elites to travel. In the east of the Roman Empire without it being a problem.

So we have in Matthew comments about, you know, how Herod reacted to this. Um, but we do, we have a historical sense from the other sources, how King Herod might have responded to such a visit from Ian.

I think. Both at a religious level and at a political level, it’s going to give Herod a severe case of nerves.

Now, there are several reasons for this. The first reason is that Herod is currently outta favor with the Emperor Augustus because he’s fought a war against the Naans, the Arabic kingdom that’s based in Petra, and he wasn’t meant to fight independent wars. That wasn’t what a good Roman client king was about.

A good Roman client, king kept the peace, not started warfare. And Augustus had told Herod in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t going to do that in a hurry again. So Herod is feeling edgy about the Roman Empire’s view of him then to have Patian ambassadors because that’s what he would probably have taken them to be.

Turn up and say, we’ve heard there’s going to be a new king of the Jews. Oh, that is going to really help. That’s going to help his paranoia enormously. And to say that they’ve seen a star in the heavens, that they’ve seen celestial proof. All of this is going to put Herod very much on edge, and really what I think it means is politically and religiously.

Herod is going to feel deeply uncomfortable but not be able to do much about it, which is going to make him even more uncomfortable.

So you are not saying we can prove the star or the magi, and I know that’s not your style anyway, um, but are you at least saying that the story of foreign magi visiting Judea because of a weird astronomical phenomenon isn’t as dumb as our skeptical friends often say?

It’s not as dumb for several reasons. Number one, the reasons they claim it’s dumb. Don’t apply. The fact that it’s not mentioned by any other ancient writer might just mean the ancient writer wasn’t a Persian margas, a ian with a training in astronomy. It’s not dumb because it’s placed by Matthew’s Gospel precisely in the time span when it could have happened.

Whereas earlier it couldn’t have happened because there were wars between the Romans and the Ians and b. Later, it’s most unlikely to have happened because though they weren’t at war, they were difficult relationships. So in that period, under the Emperor Augustus, and while King Herod is still there, the story at the very least makes historical sense.

So no, it can’t be proven and it’s still puzzling why only Matthew knows it. It’s actually quite puzzling to know how Matthew knows the story. But it’s not ridiculous.

Chris, thanks for joining us again. May you receive many gifts. This Christmas, why thank you. Gold, frankincense, and mer would be fine. We’ll see what we can do with the interceptions budget.

An under Deceptions podcast.