Posted on 12/09/2008 11:28:16 AM PST by Free ThinkerNY
Astronomers have calculated that Christmas should be in June, by charting the appearance of the 'Christmas star' which the Bible says led the three Wise Men to Jesus.
They found that a bright star which appeared over Bethlehem 2,000 years ago pinpointed the date of Christ's birth as June 17 rather than December 25.
The researchers claim the 'Christmas star' was most likely a magnificent conjunction of the planets Venus and Jupiter, which were so close together they would have shone unusually brightly as a single "beacon of light" which appeared suddenly.
If the team is correct, it would mean Jesus was a Gemini, not a Capricorn as previously believed.
Australian astronomer Dave Reneke used complex computer software to chart the exact positions of all celestial bodies and map the night sky as it would have appeared over the Holy Land more than 2,000 years ago.
It revealed a spectacular astronomical event around the time of Jesus's birth.
Mr Reneke says the wise men probably interpreted it as the sign they had been waiting for, and they followed the 'star' to Christ's birthplace in a stable in Bethlehem, as described in the Bible.
Generally accepted research has placed the nativity to somewhere between 3BC and 1AD.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Oh, Foolish Man!
They are dimension hoppers.
That is why they seemingly exhibit such incredible accelerations, as the leave: they are turning 90 degrees away from everything else!
“And wasn’t the current Christmas observance superimposed over a former pagan holiday?”
The festival of Sol Invictus, the unconquerable Sun.
Now, if the NYT can get something right, they might not go into the crapper.
Nah...
5.56mm
Nope. He came in as a Lion, but went out as a sacrificial lamb. In like a lion, out like a lamb. That's March.
And what symbol did early Christians use to recognize one another, the same symbol used to this day? The fish.
This is the dawn of the age of Aquarius. Christ was born at the dawn of what age?
Pisces.
He's a Pisces...
Really? The space station orbits at 190 miles. Someone better tell them...
Which brings me to one of my hobby horses:
We already agree that our calendar is wrong, off by anywhere from 2 to 16 years, depending on who’s doing the reckoning, and further in error because of the absence of a year zero.
The more fundamental point is that God did not intend us to mark His years by the birth of Jesus.
If He had intended this we would have a Biblical fixing of the date.
Further, the day of Jesus’ birth is unremarkable as all men are born.
However, very few return from the dead, that event is remarkable, and it is the defining moment of Christianity, the very moment of proof that his sacrifice was not in vain. And the Bible gives a precise reference for when this happened!
Clearly this was the date the calendar was supposed to start!
For extra points, this makes our calendar off by anywhere from 17 to 30 years. That makes this something like Holy Year 1978 to Holy Year 1991, giving us anywhere from 9 to 22 years to get our affairs in order before the real end of the millennium...
One can hope.
A modern day example would be the Queen of England who has official birthday celebrations throughout the many commonwealth countries and they are not the same as her actual birthday.
I hate this sort of speculation,
Here’s why:
From time to time you might run across a National Geographic Channel program titled something like
“Who was the REAL Jesus?”
or
“How did Jesus REALLY die?”
The titles of the shows seem to promise that we will get new insight beyond what is commonly known about Biblical events. What always seems to happen though is some Phd. authority is tapped to contradict what the Bible says but that individual has only their own conjecture and no evidence at all to support their version of history.
What we discover in these shows that the learned experts do not believe in the Virgin Birth. They doubt the need for any flight from Herod’s slaughter. They don’t believe in Jesus’ miracles during his life or the resurrection. Their tendency is to explain away the miraculous as exaggeration during the creation of myths and legend or some form of mass delusion by the simple superstitious folk of the day.
Anything miraculous is singled out as something that needs to be contradicted or explained away.
Throughout the Bible, the miraculous was the calling card that God tended to use to prove who He is. When the disciples of John the Baptist were sent to ask Jesus:
“Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?”
Jesus replied,
“Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor. “
Jesus here cited five different instances of miracles as proof that He was the promised Messiah. Throughout the Gospels and the entire Bible, instances of the miraculous appear as demonstrations to people that they are dealing with the Living God.
Since the supernatural is important, those who want to attack the Gospel and the Kingdom of God will usually try to discredit al the miraculous events described in the Bible. The Six Day Creation, The burning bush, the plagues on Egypt ,the Red Sea crossing and manna have all been explained away by learned men who don’t want to believe that the Bible is a true account of events.
The present War on the Miraculous is actually a war upon belief in God and faith in who He is.
There is one miracle cited in the Bible that most Christians don’t realize was a miracle and therefore they don’t recognize that the non miraculous explanations of it are attacks on the truthfulness of the Bible.
The Star of Bethlehem has been commonly described as a natural astronomical event. All such interpretations are at least erroneous if not outright deceptive. A careful reading of the Biblical account pretty well rules out anything but a miraculous event for the star. The key passage that eliminates comets, supernovae and planetary conjunctions is found in Matthew Chapter 2:
“9 After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen in the east [e] went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. 10 When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. 11 On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him.”
Every English translation is essentially identical: The star led them to the place where Jesus was. By clear implication that place was the house mentioned in verse 10.
If the star didn’t lead them directly to the house then how did the Magi find the right house in a sleeping town of 5000 without raising a ruckus? The star was stationary in the sky and low enough that people on the ground could identify a particular house. One has to wrest the scripture to interpret the account otherwise.
I should caution the reader here from restricting the meaning of the word star to a huge superhot mass of plasma. The Bible uses the word star to denote any point light source in the sky.
Any starlike object that could lead the Magi to a house where Jesus was HAD to be very close to that house.
It is traditional to depict the star of Bethlehem as an unusually bright star that hung over the stable where Jesus was born. This is especially true since the Gospel according to Hallmark now holds sway. Some secular commentators have speculated that there was perhaps a planetary conjunction or some other impressive astronomical event like a super nova, which gave rise to the biblical account of the star.
What the scripture indicates is something that doesn’t agree with tradition or with any possible attempt to explain away the star as natural phenomena. Also embedded in the Bible narrative is subtle testimony that supports the miraculous and factualness of the story.
The persons identified as wise men or Magi were probably members of the religious and scholar caste in Persia called Chaldees. How they knew the significance of the star is not known for sure. Possibly through the prophet Daniel’s influence on the Chaldee culture, they were familiar with the Hebrew scripture and Balaam’s prophesy that a Star and ruler would come out of Jacob. ( NUM 24:17-19 ) It could also be that they held the Zoroasterian belief in a coming deliverer and king. Perhaps the timing of the star’s appearance was astrologically significant to them. The fact that the Magi are later warned in a dream not to return to Herod implies that they were open to divine revelation in the same sense that Daniel was. Since the Bible doesn’t say, how they knew the meaning of the star any thing we offer is conjecture.
The magi were familiar with forms of divination like astrology. They were the scholars and philosopher scientists of their day. The occult sciences and natural sciences blurred together at that time so that who we see described in the Bible were the equivalent to today’s astronomers. The import of this is that they would be very familiar with what went where in the sky and would be the ones most likely to notice anything new or different.
Implicit in the Bible account is the fact that the star was not especially noteworthy to the common man. There is no mention of anyone even seeing the star except the magi. Herod was apparently unaware of the star until he spoke with the magi and he had to ask them when it first appeared. At the Nativity, the shepherds who were nearby watching their flocks had to be told by angels that the Christ was born in Bethlehem. There is no mention of the shepherds seeing a bright star or using a star to find Jesus. Apparently the star was so ordinary that only professional stargazers noticed it! The most probable novelty of the star of Bethlehem was not that it was especially bright but that it appeared stationary relative to the earth!
Imagine these learned men back home in Persia, studying the sky as was their custom and one of them noticed something strange. As he looked at a familiar piece of sky he noticed that a new star had appeared. He also saw that its position relative to the other stars was slowly changing. This behavior would make it a planet or wanderer. A new planet would be a significant event in the lives of professional astrologer/astronomers. This probably caused quite a stir among them that evening. As the night progressed it became obvious that the star was not truly a planetary wanderer but instead seemed to hang motionless above the western horizon as the rest of the star filled sky continued to rotate normally.
The star faded from view with the sunrise but the story circulated and the next evening probably every astrologer in town wanted to see this mysterious new star. Since the star wasn’t especially bright it wasn’t the first star to appear. The eastern sky darkened first but the western sky is where the star appeared night after night. This probably caused quite a commotion. Some of those gathered shouted and carried on and the assembled great minds tried to understand what they were seeing.
I have an idea of the nature and magnitude of their excitement since I worked for the TV branch of NASA. The following scenario is an example that typifies scientific enthusiasm.
A dozen scientists at Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute wait for the first image of comet fragment impact sites on Jupiter to appear. They are gathered around a computer workstation and as the image data is slowly built up on the screen their expressions change from anxiety to joy. They clap, they hoot and jump up and down, they pound each other on the back. Someone opens a bottle of Perrier and pours it on the chief project scientist’s head. All this over a temporary blemish on the atmosphere of a planet 400 million miles away. Like the scholars in Athens described in the Bible, “they lived to learn some new thing”
The long term presence of the star of Bethlehem almost certainly caused a lot of excitement among the Chaldee stargazer community. Northern and Southern observers would eventually compare notes and discover that the apparent position of the star changed with the position of the observer. Ultimately some clever individual would deduce from that fact that the star had to be located above a certain point on the earth. Cartography and trigonometry were advanced enough at that time so that the star would be fixed at a point above Jerusalem.
Once the nature of the star was understood, possibly many months later, the magi began their thousand mile journey to Jerusalem. As they traveled they would lose sight of the star by day and find it again by night. As they approached Jerusalem the star would appear higher and higher in the sky.
On some nights it may have been extremely hard to locate one lone star that doesn’t move in a sky full of stars that do move. Perhaps they lost the star one overcast evening and couldn’t find it again. This sets the stage for their emotional reaction when they see the star again later. They continued on to Jerusalem because that was where the star seemed to be above before they lost track of it.
In Jerusalem they asked Herod, “Where is He that is born king of the Jews ?” Herod had to ask his scribes for what the scriptures said about the birth of the messiah. The scripture indicated Bethlehem, a small town five miles south of Jerusalem. Herod asked the magi when did they first see the star and then sent them on their way.
As the magi left Jerusalem it was evening and they saw the star again but this time it was nearly overhead. How they knew it was the same star isn’t given. I bet God made it easy for them and had it show up obvious and out of place in the sane constellation where they first saw it in the western way back in Persia. However they identified it, the Bible says that “When they saw the star they rejoiced with exceeding great joy.
As they traveled south toward Bethlehem they observed that the star showed an apparent southerly motion that clearly led the way. Eventually the star came to rest over the house where Jesus was. The magi worshipped Jesus, gave their gifts and left.
For the star to come to rest over the house where Joseph, Mary and Jesus were staying would require the star to be a point light source at most a few hundred feet above the ground. This is contrasted with the fact that the star would have to be at least hundreds of miles high to be seen from Persia where the Magi were when they first saw the star. Perhaps when the magi again see the star after leaving Herod, the star began a slow descent creating the apparent motion southward that the magi observed. Of course the star would also have to diminish in brightness as it got closer to the ground in order to keep the same apparent brightness.
Again remember that the only people on record as having seen the star were the magi. It may have been very dim and unremarkable to the untrained eyes of the average Judean.
No natural phenomena can explain the star of Bethlehem. A nova, comet and even retrograde portions of a planetary conjunction would appear to travel across the sky with the rest stars and point to nothing in particular. The altitude of this object most likely varied over time. It had to be visible from the home country of the magi and later it had to be low enough to allow the house were Jesus was to be localized. The behavior of the object can only be interpreted as supernatural..
The corroberative but incidental detail that’s included lends weight to the factual nature of the account. Rather than sounding like some fable concocted by Jesus’ disciples, it has the ring of truth. Close examination of truthful testimony will always tend to increase the cohesiveness of the testimony and that is what we see in the Star narrative. The Star of Bethlehem account helps prove that the Bible is historically accurate.
Buried within this simple narrative are subtle interlocking details which tend to validate what is described.No one made this stuff up and wrote it down with so much reinforcing detail so casually thrown in that nobody saw it til now.
The appearance of the star was so ordinary that no one near Jerusalem even noticed it. This is consistent with the fact that Jews were forbidden from using any form of divination including astrology and were probably fairly ignorant of what went where in the sky. The ones who did notice the star were scholar/astrologer scientists from another land. They were uniquely prepared to notice a subtly different new star that didn’t rise and set.
The magi took quite a while to arrive. It took them a long time to mount and expedition. Herod felt that all children under two years old needed to be killed in order to properly protect his throne. Mary and Joseph were no longer in the stable by the time the magi arrived but were living in a house.
The star’s behavior is sufficiently described to eliminate any naturalistic explanations for the star. It’s supernaturalness is in keeping with the virgin birth, the angelic visit, the prophetic dreams and the rest of the miracles associated with Jesus life and ministry.
The magi knew they were seeing a miracle and reacted in character. Their emotional state when the saw the star after leaving Jerusalem was more noteworthy and worth describing than their reaction upon seeing Jesus. The gospel account strings three superlatives together to describe how excited and happy the magi were when the see the star again after leaving the presence of Herod. In their extreme and manic delight over seeing a new phenomenon they acted just like the scientists they were.
Elsewhere in the Gospel’s it’s apparent that Mary was the historian of record for Jesus’ early life and she was the source that the disciples had to draw on when they got around to writing the gospels. I can imagine Mary keeping one or more of the Magi up late asking them about everything they saw and experienced and then “treasuring those things in her heart”.
Joseph was warned in a dream to flee from Herod with Mary and Jesus. The Magi were supernaturally warned also and they all probably took off that very night.
With all the supernatural events that are recorded as part of the Bethlehem narrative,why look for a natural explanation when only a miracle is in keeping with what is described?
“pillar of smoke by day and fire by night”
As I have posted elsewhere, my hypothesis (based on a lot of volcano research I have been doing for a book in progress) is that this was a volcanic event east of Egypt, possibly the path across the sea could have been caused by a volcanic process called “inflation”, whereby magma builds up under ground, elevating the ground, until it is erupted somewhere, upon which the ground subsides again. I have seen pictures of a recent eruption in Japan near Usu (sp?) where the ground inflated almost 300 feet.
When I was in high school I read that Jesus was born in April of 3 AD.
The line in one of the tracks of “Jesus Christ, Superstar” goes, “Israel 4 BC has no mass communication”. Wow, those lyrics suck. But anyway, the calendar start date was figured out a bit wrong, it’s just that it is never settled (and perhaps never will be) just what the real theoretical start date is (I say theoretical because it was put together ad hoc), other than the one we’ve been using for 1600 years or so.
It would be nice to have the major holidays spread out a little more.
Jesus would have been born in the springtime, say some.
I've seen a lot of speculation in the past that Jesus was born in the springtime with the other lambs.
And who CARES what His zodiac sign might have been?
I think the writer was trying to be cute.
And wasn’t the current Christmas observance superimposed over a former pagan holiday?
None of this, of course, diminishes in any way the Miracle of the Nativity of our Lord.
Agreed.
I think it's wonderful that we've been able to, as a society, pick a single day to note his birth. Doesn't matter when the actual birth was on the calendar (especially since calendars have changed a lot over the centuries - I think one pope declared that a month be dropped some time in the middle ages because the existing calendar had drifted out of sync so much). We celebrate his birth together. Calendar dates are much less significant.
I can't help but think of Genesis 1:14-19 the fourth day.
link?
I read somewhere that one "star," representing royalty, and another "star," representing the House of David, aligned at the time of Jesus' birth, which is why the Magi came to Judea looking for the new king of the Jews.
That's my memory of what I read, anyway. This sounds similar.
But I guess what we're supposed to take away from this is that the traditional date of Christmas doesn't correspond to the actual date, thereby discrediting all traditional Christian beliefs and doctrine. < /liberal thought>
You may want to do a search here on FR, or check the UFO ping list at the top of the FR page.
Or just google.
He was conceived in December, and actually born in Spetember.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.