. . . the tale we are told ought
to have been recorded for multiple reasons. According to the Gospel of Matthew,
King Herod had infants in Bethlehem murdered in order to root out the escaping
Christ-child. Something he did in part because of what he was told by the magi.
The appearance and announcements of the magi in Jerusalem were supposed to have
put the entire city in great fear (Matt 2:3), and yet the events of the
slaughter of the innocents go unrecorded outside of the gospel and derivative
literature. Even more problematic is that the coming of the magi should have
been an international affair involving the most powerful empires in the region.
Magi were a part of the Persian government, having a role as king-makers in
their own land. Had they come to a Roman-controlled territory to declare
someone else its king, usurping not just the authority of Herod the Great but
also of Caesar Augustus, there should have been a diplomatic showdown or even a
war between the Roman and Persian empires, as there were when similar disputes
over who was to control the satellite country of Armenia came up between the
ancient superpowers. But again, this Judean incident received no mention in any
historical accounts of the period, an implausible silence in the record.
Even comparing the story with the
records of other Christians show how problematic the tale is as history. No
independent account of the Star of Bethlehem exists in all of the Christian
sources we have. The other canonical version of the birth of Jesus comes from
the Gospel of Luke, and it contains well-known contradictions of the Matthean
version of events, most notably the time of Jesus’ birth. In Matthew, Jesus is
born before the death of Herod the Great in 5/4 BCE, while in Luke he is born
during the census of Quirinius in 6/7 CE, a disparity of at least a decade.
Luke recalls none of the major details of the star legend, including the magi,
the escape to Egypt and return to the Holy Land, the slaughter of the
innocents, or anything that would even have suggested that Jesus’ birth would
have been noticed by or threatening to local rules such as Herod. This
situation is even worse if Luke knew that Matthean Gospel, but considering that
this question would require addressing the literary relationship between the Synoptic
Gospels, an exploration that cannot be adequately undertaken here.
The haunting silence of the
historical silence of the historical record with regard to an event that would
have rocked the Roman world, the inconsistencies of what we know of the peoples
involved, the contradictions with other Christian narratives, combined with the
question of how reliable a source the gospel authors are, all make it impossible
to believe that this story is based on events from the time of Jesus’ birth. (Aaron
Adair, “A Critical Look at the History of Interpreting the Star of Bethlehem
in Scientific Literature and Biblical Studies,” in The Star of Bethlehem and
the Magi: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Experts on the Ancient Near East,
the Greco-Roman World, and Modern Astronomy, ed. Peter Barthel and George
van Kooten [Leiden: Brill, 2015], 67-69)
