At Christmas this year I decided to entertain the local Association of Christian Writers group at their Christmassy mince pie do with a piece on the Three Wise Men. Hence, I did some research on the origins of the three wise men coming from Persia and found they were priests and astronomers.
I started to look into what the Star of Bethlehem could have been? A recent BBC 2 programme “Chris and Michaela: Under the Christmas Sky” shown on Boxing Day 2022 suggested that the Star of Bethlehem was actually a conjunction of the planets. There was a conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn three times in 7 BC. Mars joined Jupiter and Saturn in 6 BC. This is a very rare occurrence. It was recorded on a Babylonian clay tablet, the star almanac of Sippar dated to 7 BC. But this, although an unusual happening that could be taken as a sign, would look like points of light in close proximity, not something moving across the sky as the star was supposed to have done.
I then remembered Halley’s Comet, a well-known sign and quickly found that it has been proposed that Halley’s Comet was the Star of Bethlehem. But Halley’s Comet appeared in 12 BC – a bit too early to correspond to the birth of Christ, even if Jesus was born before 1 AD. And then I found Colin Humphrey’s article ‘The Star of Bethlehem’ published in Science and Christian Belief Vol. 5 in 1995. Colin Humphreys proposes that the phenomenon named the ‘Star of Bethlehem’ was indeed a comet.
I got my light-hearted speech done in time for Christmas, and then continued to write an article on this theme after Christmas comforted by the thought that the Three Wise Men only arrived in Bethlehem after Jesus was born, and we celebrate the ‘Three Kings’ at Epiphany on the 6th January. The three kings have been journeying around our church all through Advent, getting ever closer, arriving at the stable at midnight of the 24th December. They’ll be gone by next Sunday, but not before I finish writing this article.
Merry and True 