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Was it a comet? Was it a shooting star? Do we have any clues as to the nature of the Star of Bethlehem? Jimmy Akin brings some fascinating speculations about what the star might have been.
Cy Kellett:
Is there any way to know what the Star of Bethlehem was? Jimmy Akin gives it a try next.
Cy Kellett:
Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding, and defending your Catholic faith. This time, a little bit of understanding. What exactly is the Star of Bethlehem? There’s been all kinds of interesting speculation, and you know what? You know who loves a good mystery? Jimmy Akin. As a matter of fact, he’s got his own mysterious world. So we posed him this question, “What is the Star of Bethlehem? Can you solve that mystery for us?” Here’s what Jimmy had to say.
Cy Kellett:
Hello and Merry Christmas, Jimmy Akin.
Jimmy Akin:
Merry Christmas, Cyril Kellett.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, very formal. Cyril.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, it’s Christmas.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, that’s right. And we’re going to talk about one of the features of Christmas, the Star of Bethlehem, this time.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, mm-hmm (affirmative).
Cy Kellett:
It’s fascinating to me how persistent this question is, what is the Star of Bethlehem? How did all this work? And we have a certain image. I just think I spoke with you about this the other day, off the air, that comes from the media. Once you get a media image in your head, even as a kid, the Star is a certain thing. But there’s a lot that we think is said about the Star in the gospels not said, but there are some things we can know about the Star.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
So go ahead.
Jimmy Akin:
So there are a number of possibilities that people have raised for what the Star could be. Oftentimes, you’ll hear a lot of people say, “Well, it must have been some kind of miraculous thing. It’s like not a normal star. because the Wise Men are following it, and normal stars don’t move around that way. I mean, even the planets, which do move against the background of fixed stars, they don’t lead you around by the nose.”
Cy Kellett:
No.
Jimmy Akin:
You know?
Cy Kellett:
Right, yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
And so, people have this idea that the Wise Men are following the Star, and that’s totally wrong.
Cy Kellett:
Wait, I thought it says right there in the gospel, “They followed the Star around.” No? It doesn’t say that? Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
And the evidence indicates that they weren’t following the Star, because if they were, if the Star was leading them around, then they would’ve gone straight to Bethlehem.
Cy Kellett:
Oh yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
Because that’s where the Star, that’s where the Christ Child was.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, that’s… I’ve never thought about that. Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, so they would’ve just gone straight there, but they didn’t. They went instead to Jerusalem and asked Herod, “Where is the newborn king?”
Cy Kellett:
I have a thought about that, though.
Jimmy Akin:
Okay.
Cy Kellett:
Maybe they were following the Star, but it was like Siri directions and it ended them up in Jerusalem. You know how that happens when you… I’m sorry, Jimmy. I apologize.
Jimmy Akin:
This is Divine Siri, in that case.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, all right.
Jimmy Akin:
So God’s not going to misdirect them.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, so if you’re actually following a star around, why do you end up going to Herod and going-
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Okay, good point.
Jimmy Akin:
This also causes complications like, well, people ask, “Well, if they saw the Star in the east, why did they go west?” Because they weren’t following it.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
They saw it rise in the east and they realized its significance, so they went west to go find the king whose birth had signaled. And they went to the normal place you’d expect, the palace in the capital, to say, “Where’s the new king?”
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
And then they’re told, “Oh, Bethlehem.” And they start going down to Bethlehem, and it providentially happens to be in front of them. And when they get to Bethlehem, it’s like providentially over the house from their perspective that they end up going to. But it’s not leading them, it’s just, it’s a divine coincidence that they recognize and rejoice that. But that’s a, so we really don’t have evidence that this is some supernatural light that God is moving around in the atmosphere. The normal word for star, we should understand the Star the same way we would understand any passage in scripture, by starting with the basic meanings of the words in the languages in which it’s written, and only proposing new, weird things if we have evidence that those basic meanings don’t make sense. But here, we don’t have that evidence. And so, we should stick with the basic meaning of the term “star” as it was used at the time. And that meaning was different than what we think of as stars. To us, a star is a very distant object that is a collection, it’s a very heavy collection of gases that has nuclear fusion going on and generates its own light.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
But that is a conception of stars that we’ve only had in the last century or two.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
That is not what the ancients understood stars to be the ancients understood stars to be. The ancients understood stars to be any light in the sky. So the Moon actually was a star, the planets were stars, meteors were stars, comets were stars, and what we think of as stars were stars.
Cy Kellett:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jimmy Akin:
So any light in the sky to the ancients was a star, and that can help us narrow down what the Star of Bethlehem would’ve been by thinking about, “Well, okay. So if you had this group of Magi and they recognized the significance of this star, they must have had some system that would let them recognize its significance. You know, some interpretive system.”
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
What we would call astrology or something like astrology. And so, we can think about, “Well, what kinds of celestial phenomena, what kinds of lights in the sky could people have used to predict the birth of a new king?”
Cy Kellett:
And then you… But you just named them all.
Jimmy Akin:
I named them all so we can start narrowing them down.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
So what we think of as a star, or what the ancients would refer to as “fixed stars”, they maintain the same position, from a human point of view, they maintain the same position in the sky relative to each other. So like, you look at the Big Dipper, the stars are all in the same positions relative to each other that they were last night and last year and 100 years ago, and things like that. They rotate around the north celestial pole, but they keep the same positions relative to each other. And that means that all of the fixed stars go through their cycle once a year. So unless you have a newborn Jewish king every year, which you don’t-
Cy Kellett:
Oh, then it can’t be a fixed star.
Jimmy Akin:
The fixed stars are not good candidates for what the Magi would’ve seen.
Cy Kellett:
Right. Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
Neither would constellations be. And sometimes in some ancient languages, the word “star” was used for an entire constellation, but the constellations all do exactly the same cycle every year.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, right.
Jimmy Akin:
And so, constellations are not what they were viewing. Also, you can eliminate some other things like meteors.
Cy Kellett:
Now, why? I mean, because that seems to me that a meteor looks to be a falling star, it might have some significance to somebody. But why? Why do you eliminate meteors?
Jimmy Akin:
Meteors last for seconds and then they burn out or blow up if they’re big enough.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
And so, you wouldn’t see a meteor in the east and then take this trip and go to Jerusalem and start heading to be Bethlehem and, “Hey, that’s that same meteor.” No.
Cy Kellett:
I see. Yeah, I hadn’t thought about that. Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
All right, so a meteor’s out.
Jimmy Akin:
So meteors are too transitory.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
Comets. So there have been proposals that what they saw was a comet. It is not impossible, but it is not probable. And there are two reasons for that. One is that we don’t have a comet on record in the right year, in the year of Jesus’s actual birth. There were some comets in earlier years and people who were using the wrong date for Jesus’ birth will think, “Oh, the comet was this.” One of the things you find out when you study the stars, you got to get the birth year right before you know when to look for it.
Cy Kellett:
Right, right.
Jimmy Akin:
And people who look in the wrong year, get the wrong things. Second problem, comets normally were taken as bad omens rather than as good ones.
Cy Kellett:
I see.
Jimmy Akin:
And so, comets, it’s not plausible. And you need to look in the astrological systems of the people who were plausible candidates for the Magi and see, what did they think of comets? And I’m not aware of anybody who’s found a good interpretation, and we just don’t have a comet in the correct year. So I would eliminate comets. Another possibility is new stars, and the Latin word for new is nova. So a nova is a new star. It’s a star that appears that wasn’t there before.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
And novas… And supernovas are big novas. But the problem with novas, and we do actually have some records of ancient astronomers noticing, “Hey, there’s a star here that wasn’t there before.” So we do have some records of that. The problem is if it’s a new star, it’s not part of your astrological system.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, so how would you interpret it?
Jimmy Akin:
It doesn’t have any significance.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
You have to see the thing in the sky first and then notice what it’s associated with down here on Earth to build it into your astrological system. So new stars had no meaning when they showed up, and you couldn’t use a new star to predict the birth of a Jewish king.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So not fixed stars, constellations, meteors, comets, supernovas. What is the Star?
Jimmy Akin:
Not the Sun or the Moon either, even though those were considered wandering stars.
Cy Kellett:
Right. But again-
Jimmy Akin:
They do the same thing all the time.
Cy Kellett:
Right. It’s not like the Moon did a new thing this week.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So what do you… Let’s narrow it down, then. What is it?
Jimmy Akin:
Planets. Planets is the last remaining category, and they were meaningful in various astrological systems in the past. And so, the question is which system and which event are we talking about? And in recent years, there’s a gentleman named Michael Molnar who proposed a horoscope for Jesus based on the date that he believes Jesus was born and how the Sun, the Moon, and the planets would’ve been understood on that horoscope. It’s called a nativity, and nativity doesn’t just mean Christmas, it’s any birth. And so, a birth horoscope is known as a nativity.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
And anybody can have a nativity horoscope drawn up. So he drew up one for Jesus based on the date that he thinks Jesus would’ve been born, and he interpreted it according to the Greco-Roman system of astrology, which we know a lot about, because sort of in the late first and early second century, there was a guy named Claudius Ptolemy who wrote a book on astronomy called the Almagest, and then he wrote four books on astrology known as the Tetrabiblos, or the Four Books.
Cy Kellett:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jimmy Akin:
And so, this was first-century inspired Greco-Roman astrology, we know a lot about it. And a lot of people have bought into Molnar’s version of this. I don’t, for two reasons. The first one, he’s got the wrong year. He’s too early. Jesus actually was born, the evidence indicates, and you know, I’m not going to… I mean, I’ll arm-wrestle someone over this, but I’m not going to fight to the death over it. But the evidence suggests that, and there’s a lot of evidence for this, that Jesus was born in the latter part of the year 3 BC or the first part of the year 2 BC.
Cy Kellett:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jimmy Akin:
But you hear lots of people who are thrown off and say, “He must have been born at least a year or two before 4 BC, because 4 BC is when Herod died.”
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
“So Jesus must have been born in 6 or 7.” No, that dating of Herod is wrong, and there’s a bunch of evidence that shows it’s wrong. And once you clear away the evidence showing it’s wrong, you then default back to the evidence showing from the gospels, and particularly the Gospel of Luke, and the Church Fathers indicating that Jesus was born in the 28th year of Augustus Caesar, which is latter 3, early 2.
Cy Kellett:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jimmy Akin:
And so, I don’t think Molnar’s version is right for that reason, because he’s got the wrong year. He’s also got the wrong system of interpretation. He’s using Greco-Roman astrology, but the Magi came from the east, so we should look to the east. Now, it’s not impossible that they could have used Greco-Roman astrology, but you wouldn’t expect them to, because they’re not from Greece or Rome. They’re from farther east.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
And it’s not like people in the east didn’t have their own systems of astrology. In fact, they did. I mean, the Zodiac, the constellations of the Zodiac were invented in Mesopotamia and then they spread to Greece and Rome. And we can even show, based on a variety of things, we can show when and where in Mesopotamia the Zodiac was invented because of the astrological correlations that are involved.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, how interesting.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Oh.
Jimmy Akin:
So we can tell it’s like within a couple of degrees latitude, longitude and latitude of this position, and it’s within this century, plus or minus a few centuries.
Cy Kellett:
Wow.
Jimmy Akin:
And that’s where it came from. So the Babylonians had been doing astrology longer than the Greeks or Romans, and they had their own system, and it worked differently than the Roman system. Before… And there has been some recent research done on the Star of Bethlehem from the perspective of Babylonian astrology.
Cy Kellett:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jimmy Akin:
Before we get there though, I want to talk about a documentary that everybody is constantly asking me about every Christmas.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, really?
Jimmy Akin:
That came out a few years ago. It was produced by an evangelical gentleman named Rick Larson.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
And it’s called The Bethlehem Star. And in it, Larson notes some phenomena that occur. First thing is he gets the date of Jesus’ birth correct.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
And he… So that’s a big plus right there.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
And he notes that in 3 BC and 2 BC, there were astronomical phenomena that are significant that could be an explanation for the Bethlehem Star, especially on the view that it’s a planet. And what he notes is that in September of 3 BC, Jupiter does something very unusual. Now, Jupiter has an orbit that is 12 years long, and you would think, “Okay, well then it’s going to do the same thing every 12 years.” But not really, because as Jupiter is orbiting, Earth is also orbiting, and we have a one-year orbit.
Cy Kellett:
So our perspective on Jupiter’s orbit is going to change constantly.
Jimmy Akin:
Exactly. So you’re not going to see Jupiter do exactly the same thing every 12 years.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
Normally, as Earth passes Jupiter, you will see Jupiter move, let’s say, with respect to a given star, let’s say Regulus, you’ll see Jupiter pass Regulus once. But if it so happens it’s one of those years where we’re in the right position, you’ll see Jupiter pass Regulus, then reverse its course, which is called going retrograde, and then pass it again.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
And so, you can see Jupiter encounter Regulus three… In some years, you can see Jupiter encounter Regulus three times. And that happened in September of 3 BC. And so, what Larson does is he says, “Well, Jupiter is the king of the gods, and Jupiter is thus the King Planet. And so, this is re associated with a king. And Regulus is Latin for “little king”. And so, it’s the King Star. It’s formal name, Regulus’ formal name is Alpha Leonis. It’s the brightest star in the constellation Leo.
Cy Kellett:
So Alpha Leonis, yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
But its name, Regulus, means “little king”. And so, it’s this King Star in addition to the King Planet, and you see them interacting and it’s three times, and it’s like, “King, king, king,” and it’s in the constellation, Leo, and Leo is a lion, I mean, Leo’s the Latin word for “lion”, and the lion in the Bible is associated with the tribe of Judah. And that’s where Jesus is from, is the tribe of Judah. So you’ve got this triple-king event going on with the King Planet and the King Star with the astrological sign that’s associated with the tribe of Judah.
Cy Kellett:
Ta-da.
Jimmy Akin:
It’s exciting. It’s exciting, isn’t it?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
He also then notes that on December 25th, 2 BC, Jupiter would have been in the sky as you proceed south from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. And it was at that point in its orbit where it stopped seeming to move temporarily, so that it’s what’s known as its halting point.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
And he would explain that as it is perceived as standing over the house, because it’s at its halting point. So all this sounds great. People love watching this documentary and they contact me about it and they say, “What do you think?” And I’m going, “I’m ambivalent, for a variety of reasons.”
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
One of them, the idea of they observed Jupiter to halt over the house at the exact moment it halted doesn’t work at all, because planets move way too slow for that.
Cy Kellett:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jimmy Akin:
And so, yeah, it’s true, on December 25th, it wouldn’t have been moving in the sky if you watched it for hours, relative to other stars.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
But they wouldn’t have visibly been able to observe the halting. Also, Leo is a lion, symbolically, and in the Bible, Leo is associated with Judah. Is that part of Greco-Roman astrology, though? Or is he making that up based on biblical symbolism?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. He’s introduced biblical symbolism into a world that didn’t use biblical symbols.
Jimmy Akin:
Exactly. And in Greco-Roman astrology, it’s not Leo that’s associated with Judah and Judea, the whole area, it’s Aries.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, okay.
Jimmy Akin:
And so, there’s a problem there. He’s actually got what I think is a very good candidate for what the Star Bethlehem was, he’s just interpreting it through the wrong grid.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
And also notice King Star for Regulus. It’s, again, yeah, it’s in Latin, it means “little king”, but not in Hebrew.
Cy Kellett:
But Latin is to the west of-
Jimmy Akin:
Of where the Magi came from.
Cy Kellett:
Right. Far, far to the west.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. So that means we ought to look at what could the Star of Bethlehem be from the perspective of the only system of astrology from this period that we know a lot about, from the east of Israel, and that’s the Babylonian system, because we have all these cuneiform tablets that document their system. And if you want to spend hundreds of dollars, you can get books like this. This is volume four of the Babylonian Planetary Omens series. Volume four covers the Jupiter omens.
Cy Kellett:
I never made it to volume four. One through three I found to be very thick reading, so.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, the books are not very thick. This book is about 200 pages long, and because it’s published by academic publisher, Brill, who constantly overcharges for everything, this 200-page book costs more than $200 to get.
Cy Kellett:
Wow.
Jimmy Akin:
And I need to, in addition to this one, I need to, for scholarship purposes, I want to pick up volume three, which includes the Venus omens, because Venus is involved in this. And that one is over $300. So scholarship, because the print runs are so small, not many people want Babylonian Planetary Omens: Volume Four.
Cy Kellett:
Really?
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
That’s not that big a-
Jimmy Akin:
The print runs are small, but Brill is just notoriously bad at how high they set their prices. So good on Brill for producing the book, bad on Brill for its outrageous overcharging constantly. Now, one of the things you find when you study the Babylonian astrology system is it’s omen-based. So you don’t calculate where everything is going to be in the sky at the moment of someone’s birth and put it on a chart like the Greeks and Romans did. That’s the Greco-Roman system where you make someone’s nativity. Instead, what you do is you watch what’s happening in the sky and you wait until something happens, and then you interpret its meaning.
Cy Kellett:
So you go back to the book, so to speak, and say, “What does that mean when that happens?”
Jimmy Akin:
You go back to the book. Well, so here’s an example. If Jupiter becomes steady in the morning, so it’s reached its halting point in the morning as opposed to at some other time of day, enemy kings will be reconciled.
Cy Kellett:
Oh.
Jimmy Akin:
That’s one of the things here. If Jupiter passes at the head of Venus, Akkad, that’s Mesopotamia, Akkad was the chief city there, Akkad will be conquered with a strong weapon.
Cy Kellett:
Wow.
Jimmy Akin:
You have other things going on, like there’s one Jupiter omen that if this happens, there are going to be wolves haunting the roads. So you better watch out if you’re on the road. There’s another one with Venus where if it happens, women are going to have a hard time giving birth to children.
Cy Kellett:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jimmy Akin:
And you have basically all of these, depending on what Jupiter does, where it is in the sky, what it’s interacting with, you then end up with a different prediction. And so, there have been people who have started looking at what would the Babylonians have possibly seen in the sky that would suggest they need to go visit a newborn Jewish king.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
And there’s a particular guy, he’s a Swedish author named Dag Kihlman, dag is D-A-G, Kihlman is K-I-H-L-M-A-N, and he’s got a book that you can read called The Star of Bethlehem and Babylonian Astrology or Astronomy, I forget which one he says. I can pull that up, but it’s a popular-level book where he explores these ideas. And that way, you don’t have to pay hundreds of dollars to get the original source material. But basically, Star of Bethlehem and Babylonian Astrology, and then the subtitle is Astronomy and Revelation Reveal What the Magi Saw. So I think he’s got a very promising theory, and I need to do more research on it, but I think it’s very promising. He has… His view is that Rick Larson has basically identified the right thing in the sky.
Cy Kellett:
Jupiter.
Jimmy Akin:
Jupiter, and what it did in 3 BC, but he’s interpreting it the wrong way. According to Kihlman, summarizing from the Babylonian text, it turns out that if Jupiter turns back out of the breast of Leo, which is where Alpha Leonis or Regulus is, this is ominous. It is written in the series of predictions as follows: “If Jupiter passes Regulus and gets ahead of it, and afterwards, Regulus, which it had passed and got ahead of it, stays within its setting, someone will rise and kill the king and seize the throne.” Okay, so you’re thinking about this as a Babylonian Magi.
Cy Kellett:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jimmy Akin:
At the time, you’re in Babylon, you’re a Chaldean, but you know who the king of Babylon is? You know who’s actually ruling Babylon?
Cy Kellett:
No.
Jimmy Akin:
The Parthians.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. The Parthians, yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
And they have not been treating you Babylonians well.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
So you might actually welcome it if someone comes along and is going to kill your king and take the throne.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, this is good news. Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
So what would you want to do if you knew someone was going to kill your king, who you hate, and take the throne?
Cy Kellett:
I would want to befriend that person right now.
Jimmy Akin:
Exactly. So they… Well, how would you know where to go? Well, some of the Jupiter Romans help answer that question. Now just like Akkad is a word that we’re not really familiar with typically, but it’s the capital city over there, or at least it is in the astrological documents, it’s how they refer to the capital city. There’s another word that they refer to, which is Amurru, and Amurru is the name, it’s the Babylonian name for the region to the west of Babylon. So Amurru includes Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, and Western Syria. Of those regions, there was only one powerful king, and that was Herod.
Cy Kellett:
Herod the Great, yes.
Jimmy Akin:
Because the Romans were ruling other stuff. They had governors and stuff, but not kings. So you have this Western nation, it’s in Amurru, it’s in the Amurru region, it’s the one with a king, and you had a series of predictions based on what Jupiter did on June 17th, 2 BC, where on June 17th, 2 BC, Jupiter and Venus got so close together that they appeared to be a single star. And as Jupiter and Venus get closer together, in Babylonian astrology, it triggers a series of predictions as they get closer and closer. When they reach a certain level of proximity, there will be a flood. When they get closer than that, brother will be hostile to brother. When they get closer than that, there will be a rule of destruction involving the king of Amurru.
Cy Kellett:
Oh.
Jimmy Akin:
So some kind of destruction involving the king of Amurru. Then, when they get really, really close, when they look like they’re one star or eat each other, it says, the king of Akkad will die and the dynasty will change. And either the enemy will send a messenger, or a soldier will be sent to the enemy, asking for peace. And so, knowing the king of Amurru is going to have a reign of destruction and that the king of Akkad is going to die and the dynasty is going to change, and you need a peace envoy, one way or the other, you might decide to be that peace envoy.
Cy Kellett:
Get the camels, we’re heading.
Jimmy Akin:
Exactly. So then, you get over there, perhaps in December of 2 BC, and this is before Herod dies in the early part of 1 BC, but you get over there in December of 2 BC. Maybe you get over there on December 25th. And it’s the morning, because you’re not going to go from Jerusalem to Bethlehem in the total dark of night. People often think, “Oh, they set out and they follow the Star all night.”
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, no. This is mountainous territory, it’s uneven, there are no street lights.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
You’re not going to be taken a dangerous mountain journey at night, but you might get up early in the morning and do it when the stars are still out.
Cy Kellett:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jimmy Akin:
And in the early morning hours, you would have seen Jupiter in the southern sky. As you’re proceeding from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, the road turns west. And because of the way the stars rotate, Jupiter’s going to be moving slowly to the west in the sky if you’re standing still. But if you’re taking a western curving road, Jupiter’s moving with you. It’s going to appear to remain in the sky in front of you, the whole six miles to Bethlehem, which is going to take a couple hours to get there. And when you get there, if you’re standing in front of the house where the kid is that you’ve heard about, and you look up in the sky, you’re going to see Jupiter right there. And it so happens Jupiter is, even though you couldn’t perceive this, they could have calculated the fact that Jupiter is at its halting point where it’s about to either go retrograde or come out of retrograde. And first prediction in the Jupiter Planetary Omens, if Jupiter becomes steady in the morning, enemy kings will be reconciled.
Cy Kellett:
Oh.
Jimmy Akin:
So you can imagine why they would rejoice greatly at seeing that omen in the sky.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
If they know it’s… “There’s the Star, there’s Jupiter, it’s at its halting point, and we’re about to meet the new king of Judea. This is good news for us. It’s bad news for the Parthians.”
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
“But it’s good news for us.”
Cy Kellett:
How fascinating, Jimmy.
Jimmy Akin:
And this is a very promising theory. More work needs to be done on it, but we’re looking here in the right timeframe and with a plausible astrological system to interpret it, and it makes sense. They could deduce, “There’s going to be this coming king out of Amurru, most likely out of the Herodian dynasty. According to their system, he’s going to conquer our territory and get rid of the hated rulers, foreign rulers we don’t like, so let’s make friends with him and keep in with the peace envoy prophecy. And when we do, we get a message of reconciliation.”
Cy Kellett:
Wow.
Jimmy Akin:
And all this was fulfilled, not in political terms, like was expected, because both Jews and others expected the Jewish Messiah to be a political ruler, but it got fulfilled spiritually. And so, Chaldeans. Today are Christians and like the rest of us Christians, they’re under the rule of the Spiritual King, Jesus. Merry Christmas.
Cy Kellett:
Merry Christmas, Jimmy. That was really cool. Very cool to hear all of that. Thanks. Thanks very much.
Jimmy Akin:
My pleasure.
Cy Kellett:
Seriously, Jupiter? Okay. Well, if that solves the problem, that solves the problem. And it seems perfectly plausible to me. Jupiter, Star of Bethlehem. That means that Elon Musk and some other folks probably going to visit the Star of Bethlehem at some time. Thanks for visiting with us. All year, we’ve been trying out new things here at Catholic Answers Focus. We’re glad you’ve stuck with us or found us or discovered us, maybe. And just want to say, this is the last episode of the year, but it’s not your last chance to go to YouTube and subscribe there and hit the little notification bell, and be our friend on YouTube, because we need more friends. Just this month, we moved from being part of the channel for all the Catholic Answers content to our own Catholic Answers Focus channel. So little by little, we’re growing, but we need your help. Visit us, will you? And become a subscriber over there on YouTube. If you’re maybe listening on one of the podcast services, also, it’d be a great time. You know, it’s the end of the year, everyone’s in a great mood. Why not that five-star review and a few nice words about us wherever you get the podcast? That’ll help us grow the podcast.
Cy Kellett:
And one other thing, it’s almost the end of the year and lots of folks make giving decisions at the end of the year, decide “Where shall we apply those funds that we have to apply to charities this year as it ends?” Maybe you’d consider us here at Catholic Answers. You can make your donation at givecatholic.com, givecatholic.com. Thanks very much for being with us. Send us that email if you want to get in touch, focus@catholic.com. And we’ll see you next year, God willing, all year, right here on Catholic Answers Focus.