Star of Bethlehem: the New Discoveries and Solution
Dr. Bradley E. Schaefer (LSU)
RASC History Committee
As we gear up to observe the best "great conjunction" for centuries, popular seasonal speculation abounds about whether the Star of Bethlehem could have been a similar event. For millennia the status of that story—true event, pious fiction, or something in between—has generated keen and competing theories as to its nature. Could it have been an astronomical event? Recent work and a major gathering of scholars at Leiden has ushered in a major advance on the question.
Join us for the next RASC History webinar on the Star of Bethlehem, with our guest Dr. Bradley E. Schaefer, of Louisiana State University, who will review the various theories which have been advanced about the Star in the past, and the novel theory of Dr. Michael Molnar of Rutgers, which has received wide critical support.
Dr. Schaefer is a respected historian of astronomy, who played a role in the Leiden conference. In his work as an astrophysicist, he was a member of the Supernova Cosmology Project, which discovered the accelerating expansion rate of the universe, and the discovery of Dark Energy, for which he received a share of the Gruber Prize for Cosmology in 2007, and the Breakthrough Prize for Fundamental Physics in 2015.
Register for the Zoom Event HERE!
The event will take place on Friday December 18th, 2020 @ 8:30 PM EST
Abstract:
Star of Bethlehem: the New Discoveries and Solution
by Bradley E. Schaefer (LSU)
The nature of the Star of Bethlehem has long been a scholarly question posed by astronomers and planetarium shows. For this particular Christmas season, we have the spectacle of a very close Jupiter-Saturn conjunction on 21 December, harkening back to the claim that a Jupiter-Saturn triple conjunction in 7 BC was the Star. But Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions are rather common (once every 20 years or so), so it was not a sign for the birth of a Messiah. Further, Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions had no astrological meaning for the ancient Middle East, so the conjunction would not have motivated the Magi to make a long perilous trek. It turns out that all of the other prior claims for astronomical solutions (usually of spectacular events up in the sky) can be readily refuted. So it was startling in 1999, when Michael Molnar (Rutgers Univ.) came out with a completely new solution for the origin of the Star, and this convincing explanation has largely swept the scholarly world. (With the usual social-inertia, it will take a while for popular knowledge to catch up.) The solution is not astronomical (well, the event is with the planets up in the sky), but rather astrological. But this makes sense, as the only characters in the Bible that recognized the Star were the Magi, and they were, in part, Persian astrologers. So the Star must have been some planetary configuration up in the sky that indicated, with the astrology of the day, the birth of a very great king in Judea. Throughout the 1990s, I had been following Molnar's excellent work on the astrology history applied to various emperors and kings around the eastern Mediterranean, so I knew that he was the world expert on applying the relevant astrology. When Molnar finally turned to the birth of Jesus, he realized the convincing astrological solution, and it is not what any of us would have imagined…