You’re doing kinda good, now explain the star of Bethlehem. See if you can help me out.
The star of Bethlehem was either a conjunction or it was a nova.
When you read ancient texts and “myths” you see a lot of “supernatural” events that seem to “fit” prophecy.
I am not trying to mock your religion. I am a strong adherent to its message of love and redemption. Its a great message and everyone should follow it.
But a reliance on a supernatural being or supernatural “events” can make a person skeptical.
Yes, this is kind of involved and lengthy to write down, but the nubbin of it has to do with the precession of the earth's axis, the continuous year by year constant predictable decline of the Southern Cross heavenly configuration, the following of it further and further over the southern horizon by the magi, the astrologers from Paddan-Aram (Anatolia in the Greek text which means "The East"), a region now bearing the name Turkey.
At Jesus birth time, the brightest star of the Southern Cross, looking from Jerusalem, would have appeared just over Bethlehem's buildings to the south about five miles away and fifty to a hundred feet higher than Jerusalem's elevaton.
The way I reckon is that the magi were not coming to Jerusalem from the eastern direction from Babylon. (Even in Daniel's time 500-600 years earlier, the "wise men," the soothsayers, the astrologers came to Babylon from Sanliurfa, the city "Ur-of-the-Chaldee-mountains"). So, coming from that area, the Paddan-Aram, not far from Lake Van and the Mount Ararat where Noah's Ark beached, they came from the area north of Jerusalem, and had been following the appearance of the Southern Cross more to the south of Sanliurfa for hundreds of years.
That is the true, real star they were loking for, and in the Cross formation as a sign of the Savior's demise to boot!
The region Anatolia (= "The East") is called that by the Greciand because it is east of Greece! (Even by the Persians, though Anatolia is to the west of Iran.)
του δε ιησου γεννηθεντος εν βηθλεεμ της ιουδαιας εν ημεραιςThere are a lot of other crazy hypotheses , but they are of no consequence.
The but Jesus was born in Bethlehem of the Judea in the days
ηρωδου του βασιλεως ιδου μαγοι απο ανατολων παρεγενοντο εις
of Herod the King, behold, Magi from Anatolia they came into
ιεροσολυμα
Jerusalem
λεγοντες που εστιν ο τεχθεις βασιλευς των ιουδαιων ειδομεν
Saying where is he born, King . of the Jews? We have seen
γαρ αυτου τον αστερα εν τη ανατολη και ηλθομεν προσκυνησαι
For of him the star in the Anatolia and have come to worship αυτω
him
Sanliurfa (meaning "Glorious Ur) is the place where Abraham was born and lived, and from which God sent him to Canaan, to which he sent his steward to bring back a wife for Isaac, and to which Jacob went to eavde Esau and also get not A wife. but two, plus two other concubines. It is not the locality way further south and east near the Persian Gulf that the archaeologist Leonard Wooley dug and found another Ur bthere, back in the 1920s, I believe. His claim (wrongly) as Abraham's birthplace cemented his undeserved fame for his unscholarly Christian admirers, but not me. Moody's Bible Atlas confirms my conclusion on that observation.