For about 1500 years, the story of the Star of Bethlehem was accepted as historically accurate because it was divine truth. Miracles were not questioned. With the Renaissance, a new way of looking at the world evolved.
The scholarly tradition of explaining the Star of Bethlehem with scientific evidence apparently began with Johannes Kepler who identified a triple conjunction as the likely event.
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| 13 December 2020 scale drawing |
In 1604, he published The New Star in the Foot of the Serpent (De stella nova in pede serpentarii: et qui sub ejus exortum de novo iniit, trigono igneo…). In that tract, he examined a triple conjunction, as well as a nova, which he identified as the cause of the conjunction. He was not alone in that kind of a belief. Others expected the conjunction to cause a comet. Reviewing the facts in 1614, Kepler said that the Star of Bethlehem was a nova in 4 BCE caused by a triple conjunction in 7 BCE. (See “Common Errors in ‘Star of Bethlehem’ Planetarium Shows,” by John Mosley, The Planetarian, Third Quarter 1981.)
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| 19 December 2020 Scale drawing |
In science, a good problem takes us far beyond the results of a single observation. The Christmas Star has been debated on many levels. The International Planetarium Society website (www.ips-planetarium.org) lists over 100 citations to the Star of Bethlehem. Some of those articles and letters were part of a multifaceted decades-long argument among at least five astronomers and one editor. Writing in Archaeology Vol. 51, No. 6 (Nov/Dec 1998), Anthony F. Aveni cited 250 “major scholarly articles” about the Star of Bethlehem.
The sciences here are psychology and sociology, not astronomy. People want to believe. The need for religion derives from a more basic need for certainty. I like it when my own plans come together. Beyond that, I observe that most other people do not find freedom in the unknown, the unplanned, or the spontaneous response to unforeseen events. As with a spontaenous choice, an effective response is based on a rational understanding of experiential circumstances. For myself, an invention is a kind of discovery. Right now, my instrument is a telescope. But I also own two microscopes. For myself, the Christmas conjunction is no more or less special than the structure of a poinsettia, something I have not investigated at all, but which is pretty easy to find. Conjunctions happen all the time. And they happen at all only because of our inertial frame of reference. Standing on the spinning Earth orbiting a focus of an ellipse, we see arrangements come and go with -- I confess -- comforting predictability.
PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS
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