Is this quote less ambiguous in the original Greek? I’ve seen a lot of folks interpret this to mean that the star (whatever it was) was in the eastern sky. On the other hand, I had always supposed that it meant that back when the wise men were in the East (where they came from), they saw a star in some unspecified place in the heavens.
Listen people!
The point is not that the wise men TRAVELLED, it’s that TIME passed. That’s my point. The point indeed is that those wandering magi could see the relative position of the conjunction CHANGE over a period of TIME(as the night passed). I’m not seriously arguing that the Magi’s change in position actually caused the change of the position of the star. Isn’t that just a little ludicrous. Unfortunately this song “We Three Kings” has polluted our minds and removed the actual story from the debate. In Matt, it is not saying necessarily that the star was sailing around the sky like some kind of super-luminescent kite!
As for the east thing…
The Greek has some problems. There are two words for east… roughly anatole and anatolai. While anatolai is strictly translated as EAST in Greek, anatolai has two meanings. One is EAST and the other is the Heliacal Arising. That is, the morning star. (This, of course, is not a star, but a planet, but the ancients didn’t make a distinction between celestial objects. They called them all “stars” so to speak. Thus we can talk about other possiblities other than mammoth balls of plasmatic fusion-powered in hydrostatic equilibrium). Well Matthew 2 is kind enough to give us the following… "Wise Men came from the East (anatolai)… said, “we saw his star in the East (anatole).” Now why would the writer of Matt. switch between anatolai and anatole as he did? One possibility is he’s tiring of the drudgery of writing gospel. The other possibility is he’s referring to the strict astrological definition of anatole in the second sense… actually contrasting it with the anatolai (East) of where the magi came from. I’m inclined to accept this explanation for the following reason. Why, if these wise men saw the star in the East… and they were from the East… did these Magi get so scared that they turn 180 degrees and march off to Palestine? Makes no sense, unless they’re looking at the prophecy that when the King Star (Jupiter) and the Birth Star (Saturn) were in conjunction in the Israelite Zodiacal sign (Pisces) there is something monumental happening in the Levant. So they head off to Jerusalem, and well, read the rest. I think it’s a pretty convincing theory…
Simple answer: Both you and Elucidator got it fairly much right. “So I suspect that the legend of following a star as a bright object in the sky derives from a misunderstanding. The “wise men” knew that something major was going to happen, likely suspected it was a birth. How they might have determined that Nazareth was the place to be? Not a clue, but there still remains any number of arcane astrological traditions for divining locations, directions, etc.”
This is fairly much spot on.
From Matthew 2:
In other words they knew that someone important had been born, probably because of a certain star in a certain place in the eastern sky. There is no mention at this stage of the Magi having followed a star anywhere. A star in that constellation was simply a portent of a noble birth in Jerusalem and they followed a map to get to Herod’s palace in that city. They probably assumed before arriving that it was Herod’s son.
So Herod now calls together all his wise men and they tell him that if the Magi are correct and the boy has been born then prophecy says he is in Bethlehem.
Herod finds out how old the child is by asking the Magi when the star appeared. At this stage he was probably 12 months or older. The Magi know from Herod and his wise men the child is in Bethlehem and set off in that direction. Notice it also doesn’t say that the star is in the east, rather that it is the same star that the Magi saw when they were in the east. At this stage they are travelling south from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. Only when they’re on the outskirts of Bethlehem does the star need to ‘move’ at all to point out a particular house.
So the star only needed to be apparent for 5 hours at the most and lead them no more than 10 kilometres (it’s only about 8kms from Jerusalem to Bethlehem). How low could it be then?
Since it led them to a specific house in Bethlehem it would have to have been hovering in the sky very much like a kite.
and the star they had seen in the east went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him.
Talk about into the ground, but here we go… place is not house. house is not place. place does and often will mean the general location (such as Bethlehem). Saying that the star rested above the house itself would be akin to saying that the object was no more than ten feet above the roof… otherwise an observer could circle the house and see this star above some other building. I know there are those out there that think there was this “MIRACULOUS” star that was above the house no matter where you stood in the whole town of Bethlehem. Believe me, if such a thing were to have happened, it would be a true UFO (esp. 2000 years ago). Wow! That must be it!
JESUS arrived via spaceship.
Virgin birth EAT your heart out!
i don’t think this really helps, but jesus wasnt born in the winter, he was born in the spring. Christmas is in december because of the pagan holidays. the missionaries to the pagens invented christmas to match the pagen…um… celebrations. and sence easter was already near christ’s birth they didnt need another christian holiday there so the made it in the winter.
Well, that would be an astrological ephemerides, a book, as I’m sure you know, that gives astrological data for any given time. Some years back, an ephermerides covering the years 2000 b.c.e. to 2000 c.e. became available. I began poking about over the years of Jesus’ presumed birth and came across a very dramatic astrological pattern in early spring of 6 b.c.e. Now, the cited conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn are not all that uncommon: unusual, to be sure, but not enough to get “magoi” to leap upon thier camels and start humping it to Palestine. And the pattern itself would mean little to someone not versed in astrological arcana. Were I to offer you a cite, most likely it would mean very little to you.
Cite?
And the months to plan is quite my point: the Babylonians had long since progressed from observational astronomy to calculated: they knew quite some time before the actual event that the event would occur.
Alas, I have other things planned for today, take nap, smell gardenias, pressing matters not to be postponed. Ordinarily, of course, I would leap to do the bidding of any self-appointed SDMB arbiter, but in this situation you will have to be content with my invitation to arbite me.
This is a repost from a previous SDMB thread about this, which was a response to a mailbag column:
Indeed, interesting, but is Uranus visible to the naked eye?
elucidator: right, Jupiter and Saturn conjunctions are not extremely rare, but when they occur in Piscese… that’s pretty rare. That’s what the interest was in… not just the conjunction but the zodiacal sign that it occurred in.
Uranus varies some in brightness, but at 5.7 it would indeed be naked eye, especially to astrologers before light pollution. Magnitude 6 is the traditional limit for naked eye observation. That particular constellation would have been analyzed and studied in great detail, too, and with Mars in the picture even more attention would have focussed upon it.
True, but at mag +5.7, Uranus is still a very difficult object to see. Being so far from the sun, Uranus moves slowly and does not dramatically change position agains the background stars like the inner planets. Basically, you have to know what to look for.
Although it might have been spotted (insert dirty joke here), Uranus was not officially discovered until 1781 by William Herschel using a telescope.
It’s less difficult in truly dark skies. And, as I said, that particular area is lacking in stars, and it would have been well-mapped even back then, and they would have been ovserving it closely because of the presence of Mars.
Uranus movement, even during retrograde, is significant. Even Pluto moves a minute a day.
Quoth elucidator:
What alignments actually occured is fairly easy to verify. The tricky part is showing that those alignments would have carried the significance attributed to them.
May I add, by the way, that JS Princeton’s comments about “east” in Greek clear things up greatly for me. It would make an awful lot of sense for the Wise Men to say that they saw a star at its heliacal rising. Of course, later generations of translators might not have been aware of the astronomical significance of the term.