Sunday, February 27, 2022

Notes from Aaron Adair, “A Critical Look at the History of Interpreting the Star of Bethlehem in Scientific Literature and Biblical Studies"

  

. . . 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)