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Only on Jesus websites. Ask a real Jew about Jewish astrology and you get a different answer: Judah = Aries. "One of the earliest, ancient Jewish texts called Sefer Yetzira correlates the zodiac signs with the months, tribes and 12 faculties as follows:
The sign of [the month of] Nisan is Tleh/Aries/Ram, corresponding to Judah and the faculty of Speech. This is the month the Jews overcame the Egyptian deity of the ram. Judah means “thanks”, related to speech and on Passover of this month the Pascal lamb was offered and we recite the haggada." – The Zodiac by Rabbi Yirmiyahu Ullman The Zodiac « Ask! « Ohr Somayach
and The Jewish Encyclopedia http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/15277-zodiac
Of course, it’s not Jewish astrology we should be considering, since the Magi were not Jewish, but more likely Zoroastrian astrology. Anyone have any idea which sign they’d associate with which nation?
Another problem is that even if we stipulate that Matthew was telling the story correctly as he knew it, his knowledge of the events would have been limited. The Magi were the only ones to follow the star, even though (short of an unexplainable miracle) they couldn’t actually see any more than any random shepherd (there were no telescopes or anything of the sort back then). That suggests that whatever they saw, it was something that needed scholarly interpretation, by someone learned in the techniques of astrology. But Matthew was not learned in astronomy, and was getting the story at absolute best second-hand from the magi, and more likely third-hand (I believe that the traditional answer is that he got most of his information from talking to Mary). So we’ve got a technical explanation as relayed to a non-technical writer, as relayed decades after the fact by someone completely uneducated, who was a teenager when it happened.
So the challenge is really to figure out what technical explanation, when passed through that game of Telephone, would result in the explanation we have in Matthew. One suggestion I’ve read, for instance, is that the phrase “we saw the star at its rising in the East” should actually be translated as “we saw the star at its heliacal rising”, that is to say, when it first became separated enough from the Sun in the sky as to no longer be obscured by its glare.
I’ve always been confused about “following the star in the East.” Presumably, following a star in the East means moving eastward, yet Bethlehem is only about 30 miles east of the Mediterranean coast. They wouldn’t have had to travel very far, but from the way the story is told, they traveled a great distance.
Translates equally well as, “We were in the East when we saw the star.” Especially if you consider that the logical place to look for Magi was in Persia—i.e., present-day Iran.
One thing to consider: The entire story was made up. The Latin word magi comes from the Greek magos which is from the name of the priestly cast in Zoroastrianism. These people were astrologers.
If you look at it this way, you’ll understand why no one else seemed to have noticed this amazing star – not even the king and his court. Only those versed in the highest levels of the sacred art of astrology would have known.
It’s not unusual for legends to have stars to predict the birth of famous people. Kim Jong-Il, the previous president of the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea had his birth not only heralded by a special star, but also by a double rainbow.
A double rainbow? That’s the best he can do? By that measure, there have been dozens of future presidents of North Korea born in Bozeman, MT in the last decade.
[Quote=the column]
There are two ways to approach the story of the star:
It was an actual astronomical event.
It is a purely symbolic story.
[/quote]
I disagree with #1. It should be:
It was a miraculous event created by God, which defies any scientific analysis.
Reason: I am prepared to consider the *possibility *that God exists, and that He sometimes sends miracles. I find it much harder to believe in astrology. I therefore reject any suggestion that a natural phenomenon accurately foretold the coming of a major figure in World history. Miracle, maybe. Fiction, maybe. Comet, nova or conjunction, certainly not.
Why? The story was written long after Jesus’ death. Any astrologer with the benefit of hindsight could make all sorts of correct “predictions” about, say, Napoleon or Hitler based on their horoscopes!
More or less notable celestial phenomena, like eclipses, conjunctions, comets and novae do occur now and then though. As nobody around AD 100 or so would have been likely to know even the exact year of Jesus’ birth, it wouldn’t have been too hard to point out one such occurence at about the right time as “the sign of Messiah’s coming”.
But then, there are different sorts of miracles, too. As an example, one miracle attributed to Jesus, and one which the Gospels regard as one of the more impressive ones, was causing a storm to calm on his command. Now, storms really do sometimes just end suddenly-- That’s not miraculous. The miraculous part is that it happened right when Jesus wanted it to happen.
Similarly, one might suppose that God miraculously caused a star to appear in the Middle Eastern sky, and that he did so by arranging for a comet or supernova or whatever to occur right then. The fact of the comet itself might not be miraculous, but its timing still might be.
But in any event, you’re right that we should also consider the possibility that it was an entirely miraculous event, completely unrelated to any natural astronomical phenomenon. That’s a possibility that the column didn’t mention. Of course, there’s not much more one can do with such a possibility beyond mentioning it, since by definition it would defy any further explanation.