With Christmas coming up on Sunday, a bit of planetary news related to Christmas caught our attention. The Star of Bethlehem that was seen by the Magi might not have been a star at all, but a rare planetary alignment.
That’s according to research by Grant Mathews, a professor of theoretical astrophysics and cosmology at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. He’s spent more than a decade working on the problem.
“On April 17, 6 B.C. there was a remarkable alignment,” he said. “Jupiter, the moon and Saturn were all in Aries, with the sun. Then at the same time, Venus was next door in Pisces. Mars and Mercury were on the other side, in Taurus.”
Scholars believe that the Magi described in the Bible were Zoroastrian priests of ancient Babylon and Mesopotamia. In their belief system, Jupiter and Saturn were significant.
“The alignment would have suggested that a new ruler, with a special destiny, was born in the region of Judea.”
Mathews points out that the alignment was not a spectacular visual event, which is why the court of King Herod had no idea it had happened. (The Magi had to tell them about it.) Mathews did a rough calculation and saw that this alignment is not supposed to appear again in the next 500,000 years.
Although Mathews is partial to his theory, he acknowledges that there are plenty of other reasonable ideas about what the Magi saw.
“There were several things that went on around that time that could be interpreted as having led the Magi to look for a new king in Jerusalem,” he says. “No one knows, I just like this one because there is a lot of anecdotal historical references that seem to line up with it.”