By Pauline Masson
If you look up in the southwest sky this evening you’ll see a very bright star just above the horizon. That’s the planet Venus. And at this time of year it is the brightest star in the evening sky that can be seen with the naked eye.
Venus keeps blinking at me each evening, as a teaser, a reminder of another star that we celebrate every December. The star of Bethlehem: The star that told the Wise Men, or Magi, that a king had was born in Israel.
We know about the Bethlehem star and the Wise Men from the Gospel of Saint Matthew. He tells us that the wise men saw the star and followed it to the place where Jesus was born.
“The star, which they saw in the east, went before them till it came and stood over where the young child was.” Matthew 1:12.
The Wise Men were the astrologers of Babylon who advised their ruler on world events and one of their most constant tools was what they could see in the heavens. They were the first astrologers, who knew that everything in the sky kept moving. They mapped the stars by date, providing the groundwork for modern day astronomy. They knew every planet, every solstice, every constellation and comet.
Skeptics and non-believers have pooh poohed the ‘star in the east’ legend from the Bible story of Christ’s birth. But astronomers have gotten smarter and smarter. And they have better equipment.
With their giant telescopes and computerized planet systems astronomers can tell us exactly what those Wise Men in Babylon could see in the sky in the months before Christ was born.
One amateur historian and Bible history buff like me has made a study of Star of Bethlehem story. Lawyer and law professor Rick Larson says what the Magi likely saw was an astronomical conjunction that took place between August of 3BC and June of 2BC. As one planet passed beyond another they lined up creating the brightest star anyone alive at the time had ever seen.
The planet Jupiter in its orbit was passing behind the planet Saturn. The planets were millions of light years apart but appeared to be together. The conjunction seen from earth with the naked eye looked like one giant star. And for nine months, night after night, the pair of planets eased across the night sky toward the planet Leo.
The Babylonian astrologers identified Jupiter as the symbol fatherhood, or king and the constellation Leo as the nation of Israel. So when they saw the king star as an explosion of light making its way toward Israel, its easy to surmise that they foresaw that a grand king was coming there.
This conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn occurs every 20 years and can be seen from somewhere. The next alignment of the two planets visible from our area is set to occur on March 15, 2080. The most recent alignment occurred only last year in December 2020, giving astronomers a field day of speculating that this was the Biblical Star of Bethlehem that St. Matthew wrote about. Not everybody is buying it.
Some pundits say it is only guess work that the conjunction of the two planets was St. Matthew’s star of Bethlehem, but admiring Venus’ light show this week as the anniversary of Christ’s birth approaches, it’s a lot easier to believe than not believe.
Look up.
