Did the Star of Bethlehem Move Like Tinker Bell?

+ Discussion of Micah 5:2 (The Prophecy of Jesus’ Birth in Bethlehem)

Atheist and anti-theist Bob Seidensticker runs the influential Cross Examined blog. I have critiqued 82 of his articles, (no counter-reply as of yet). He was gracious enough to send me a free e-book copy of his new volume, 2-Minute Christianity: 50 Big Ideas Every Christian Should Understand (May 2022), which I critiqued point-by-point. His words will be in blue.

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This is a reply to portions of his article, “How did the Star of Bethlehem move like Tinker Bell?” (12-19-22).

Can the Star of Bethlehem be explained naturally?

Yes, there are very plausible, science-backed explanations of it. I have adopted one myself (similar to Rick Larson’s), which is included in chapter 13 of my soon-to-be-published book, The Word Set in Stone: How Science, History, and Archaeology Prove Biblical Truth.

Micah chapter 5 has the Bethlehem reference: “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel.” As usual with claims that see Jesus behind every rock in the Old Testament, when you look at the context, the prophesied ruler doesn’t sound at all like Jesus.

Sure it does; see my paper, Reply to Atheist Jonathan MS Pearce: Bethlehem & Nazareth “Contradictions” (Including Extensive Exegetical Analysis of Micah 5:2) [7-28-17].

Micah was written after Assyria had conquered the northern kingdom of Israel, and little Judah might be next. During these troubled times, Micah predicted that there would be a king from Bethlehem (since King David was born here, this may simply mean “a king in the line of David” rather than a literal birth in Bethlehem). God will abandon Israel, but then countrymen (presumably scattered Israelites from the aftermath of the conquest) will return to support the new king. With God’s renewed support, the king will bring peace to Judah, defeat any invasion by Assyria, and be celebrated worldwide.

This doesn’t sound like the career of Jesus.

To the contrary, it doesn’t sound like anyone else. The catch is the phrase, “whose origin is from of old, from ancient days” (RSV). The Hebrew word for “ancient days” is ʿôlām (Strong’s Hebrew word #5769): according to Brown-Driver Briggs, its range of meaning includes the following:

1) long duration, antiquity, futurity, for ever, ever, everlasting, evermore, perpetual, old, ancient, world

1a) ancient time, long time (of past)

1b) (of future)

1b1) for ever, always

1b2) continuous existence, perpetual

1b3) everlasting, indefinite or unending future, eternity

If Micah was referring to a current king or a soon-to-be-king, he would not have been “everlasting” or of “ancient time,” etc. This clearly refers to God. No one else can be described like this. See also this article of mine: Dual Fulfillment of Prophecy & the Virgin Birth (vs. JMS Pearce) [12-18-20].

And there’s no mention of the punch line to the Jesus story, the sacrifice and resurrection of mankind’s savior.

Who says that has to be included? It doesn’t. It’s simply predicting the location of the birth of the Messiah. The topic isn’t His redeeming death.

What actually happened was that the Babylonians conquered Judah in the sixth century, so Micah’s prophecy was wrong.

It wasn’t, because it was referring to Jesus, the Second Person of the Trinity, Who is eternal.

However, if magi from the east didn’t visit Herod or any other Judean ruler on their ascension to the throne, why (besides literary reasons) is it plausible that the magi would visit this time?

Because they saw what they believed were signs in the heavens leading to that conclusion.

If they were knowledgeable about Judaism, why did they have to be told about Bethlehem?

Technically, it’s not certain that they were told about it in the sense of not previously knowing it (according to Matthew). It was Herod who inquired as to where the Messiah was to be born (Mt 2:4), and was told that it was in Bethlehem (2:5), on the biblical basis of Micah 5:2 (2:6). Herod then “sent” the wise men “to Bethlehem.” The text doesn’t indicate whether they already knew about Bethlehem or not. They may have; or if they didn’t, they simply had an incomplete knowledge of Judaism (being likely adherents of Zoroastrianism), just as many Christians and Jews to this day have a lousy, inadequate knowledge of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament.

It may very likely have been that they thought (or “knew”) the event would be in Jerusalem or its environs. When they arrived, they asked, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews?” (Mt 2:2). They either didn’t know it was to be in Bethlehem, or they did, and were asking more specifically, “where exactly does he live?” It would be (under this hypothesis) the difference between knowing what city or township one lives in, and knowing their actual address, or at least street. We can only speculate about what the text doesn’t clearly spell out. And by this time, it was one-to-two years after His birth, anyway. The Holy Family could have moved somewhere else (in fact, they did eventually move to Nazareth). In my upcoming book, I wrote about this as follows:

My own educated guess, based on my own studies and research, is that the visit of the wise men occurred when Jesus was a year old and that they told Herod the star had appeared a year and three months previously (thinking he may have been born then), based on the conjunction of Jupiter (thought by ancient astrologers to be the  “king” of planets) and Regulus (the star of kingship, and brightest in the constellation Leo) in September, 3 B.C. Herod then decided to kill all children under two just to make extra sure that he killed Jesus.

Perhaps they only knew of a Jewish canon with no Micah, but the book of Micah would’ve been over 500 years old at this point.

Maybe they didn’t know of it, or they had a different interpretation of that verse: perhaps not regarding it as the prediction of this king or Messiah. The Jews argued amongst themselves about all kinds of issues. That’s what the Talmud is about. But the Persians knew about Jews and Judaism to some extent as a result of having freed them (after they conquered Babylon), and allowing them to go back to Israel and Jerusalem in the 5th century BC, due to the magnanimity of Kings Darius and Cyrus.

They might have been isolated from mainstream Judaism, but then we’re back to the question of why they would make the difficult trip to connect with a Judaism they were isolated from.

Again, because the stars suggested it (according to their ancient astrological knowledge). I wrote in my book:

It’s not rocket science (then or now) to know and understand that Jerusalem was west of Persia—so a star to the west having to do with a king (Jupiter and Regulus were associated with a king) and a lion (of Judah), the constellation Leo, provided that there was an existing familiarity with Judaism, would logically lead to Jerusalem, both geographically and in the context of the religions of that time.

I examined my own globe of the world and saw that Jerusalem is almost exactly due west from northwest Persia, where the Magi likely came from. In current maps, Baghdad and Amman, Jordan are roughly on the line due west from this area. Baghdad was built in the eighth century. Ancient Babylon lies about 53 miles south of Baghdad, but it was conquered by the Persians in 539 B.C. and was never the same again, eventually becoming a ruin and wasteland.

Amman (ancient Ammon, in the region of the Ammonites in current-day Jordan) was not religiously significant enough at this time, either, and after the fourth century B.C. it was conquered by the Greeks, Egyptians, and Romans. It was no extraordinary astronomical deduction, then, to conclude that some important happenings due west were to occur in Jerusalem.

Since God spoke to the magi directly when he warned them in a dream to avoid Herod on their return, why couldn’t he just have told them, “Go to Bethlehem, avoiding Jerusalem, by date X to visit the new king of the Jews”?

Who knows? Many things God does are mysterious, and we should fully expect this, if indeed He is omniscient, as Jews and Christians believe He is. But what is truly silly is to think that we can totally figure such a God out, and second-guess Him at every turn.

Why would the ambiguous motion of Jupiter be preferable?

Heavenly signs are important to many religions. The Bible stated:

Numbers 24:17 A star shall come forth out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel.

Joel 2:30 And I will give portents in the heavens . . .

Avoiding a visit to Herod would’ve also avoided tipping him off to the rival king, which caused the Massacre of the Innocents (not that avoiding bloodshed is much of a priority in the Bible).

We either have free will or we don’t. If we do, we are truly free, and God isn’t obliged to intervene every time human beings commit evil or plan to do so (I wrote about this very thing at great length, twenty years ago). The example I always use to illustrate the point relates to the Nazi Holocaust. Atheists and many others seem to want to blame God for that. For the life of me, I have never been able to understand or figure out why:

Atheist or other critic of God: ” why didn’t you stop the Nazis? You’re responsible for them and for the Nazi Holocaust!”

God: “I’m not! The rest of the world was perfectly capable of observing the German military build-up and stopping it before it got off the ground. But it preferred to close its eyes. John F. Kennedy wrote his book, Why England Slept about this. Knowing this propensity for head-in-the-sand irresponsibility, I did, however, send my messenger Winston Churchill, who warned vociferously through the mid-30s of the German build-up. No one wanted to believe him. So why do you blame Me for your own willful blindness and stupidity? You were amply warned of the great tragedy that was to occur. You could have fully prevented it. You chose not to. And so it’s just the usual human blame-shifting. You foolishly and vainly try to blame Me for your own blindness and wickedness. In a similar manner, Malcolm Muggeridge warned England and the west of the Soviet forced starvation of ten million Ukrainians in the early 1930s and no one wanted to believe him, either, preferring their own fantasies of good old ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin. How is that My fault?”

Of course, if we’re questioning God’s motivation,

What makes anyone think they are competent to do so in the first place: especially a person who doesn’t even believe in God?

we could ask why he celebrated the most important event on earth since Creation with a vague light show that would be understood by a few strangers rather than something grand that would alert the world. 

He does lots of unexpected things like that. God becoming a baby in a manger is perhaps the most inexplicable thing of all from our warped human perspective. We want kings coming from the heavens throwing thunderbolts around (like Zeus). That’s the kind of “god” we invariably manufacture. But the real God chose instead to come to earth as a baby in a stinky, lowly cave (I’ve been there, and it is indeed a cave), and for that matter, to be tortured and executed in one of the most painful ways known to man. Scarcely anyone could have predicted either thing.

But of course, when God does indeed do something grand like, for example, making the sun dance and have different colors, and immediately drying up the rain and mud, as happened at Fatima, Portugal in October 1917, with 70,000 witnesses, atheists simply blow that off, too. It’s what they claim they want (Bob expressed it above, again, and I’ve seen this demand a hundred times), but when it actually happens, they thumb their nose at it, as they do with every other miracle God has ever performed. Nothing is ever good enough for them. And that’s because they refuse to believe, not that they are unable to or that there isn’t enough reason to. It’s two different things (will vs. mind).

The real light show and universal manifestation will be the Second Coming, but by then it will be too late for those who refuse to believe and follow God. They will have had every chance to believe, and to choose to cease their rebellion, or continue in it all the way to hell, where they can finally be free from the “oppressive” God that they so despised, altogether, and forever.

But (just a trifle I should note), the star of Bethlehem phenomenon happened a year to two years after Jesus’s birth. The “light show” that actually happened at His birth was to the shepherds in the fields:

Luke 2:8-14 And in that region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. [9] And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with fear. [10] And the angel said to them, “Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people; [11] for to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. [12] And this will be a sign for you: you will find a babe wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.” [13] And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, [14] “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased!”

Note that this is not the star of Bethlehem. It’s the supernatural light of the “glory of the Lord.” The Star never shone down on the manger and the baby Jesus (it couldn’t have anyway because He and it were in a cave), despite 10,000 Christmas cards conditioning us to believe otherwise. We should get our theology from the Bible, not Hallmark.

God could’ve told everyone or he could’ve told no one, but instead he gave just a hint to a few men hundreds of miles away from the birthplace of Jesus.

Yes, and what of it? I see nothing wrong with it. See my next comment.

Apparently, God moves in stupid ways.

The story of both the wise men and the shepherds both made it into inspired revelation, which has now been read by several billion people. I think that’s a pretty good way to go about things. An event: even a spectacular one, is still confined to time and place, and those who come later can always find a way to dismiss it if they are determined to do so. But an inspired message in a book that can move souls and change lives goes on and on. God has His messengers, too: priests, pastors, evangelists, monks, nuns, teachers, catechists; even apologists like me! We spread the Good News. All of this is far more efficient than one “light show” at one point of time. That’s not “stupid.” But the objection is, if I may say so.

Finally, let’s consider how Jupiter “went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was.”

Yes, and when and how long did that happen? It was on the six-mile long journey from Jerusalem to Bethlehem (Mt 2:1, 7-9). A camel travels about 3 miles per hour on average (the same as a man’s walk), so it would have taken two hours to get to Bethlehem, either by camel or foot. That’s roughly the entire time the Bible refers to them (in non-literal language, I believe) following a star. In the language of appearance (non-literal language), it “went before them” not in perceived motion, but because it was always ahead of them on the way.

We know from the astronomical charts that Jupiter, in later November and early December in 2 B.C. was to the south from Jerusalem; therefore, it “went before” the wise men as they traveled south to Bethlehem—the journey that the text refers to. Jupiter wouldn’t have moved much on the way from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. This (I submit) is what the Bible (which habitually uses phenomenological language) means by saying that the star “went before” them.

In other words, it would always have been “ahead” or “in front of” or “before” them as they traveled: much as we say we are “following the sun west” or how American slaves (in folklore, at least, if not in fact) attempting to escape to the north followed the “drinking gourd” (the Big Dipper) north. Thus, one could say the Big Dipper or North Star “went before” the slaves, just as we say they “followed” it. The North Star would also lead anyone to the North Pole if he kept following it; that is, by our vantage point, it would “go before” him. It’s all phenomenological language, which we use all the time, just as the biblical writers also did.

“[The star] stopped over the place where the child was” is not something Jupiter could ever do.

That’s not true, and Bob himself concedes how it could do so:

Larson’s attempt to salvage his theory uses one of Jupiter’s switches between forward and retrograde motion (it switches directions twice a year) as a “stopping” point. Yes, Jupiter’s motion relative to the fixed background of stars would apparently stop for several days, but this does nothing to get us to “it stopped over the place where the child was.”

It explains how it could settle over Bethlehem for only roughly two hours of time (at a minimum). The ancients at this time actually knew about retrograde motion, and I believe this is how they described it in simple, observational language. Let’s examine more closely what the author may have been describing in saying that the star “came to rest over the place where the child was.”

First of all, the text (Matt. 2:9) doesn’t indicate that it shone specifically on a “house.” This is a common misconception. Matthew 2:11, just two verses later, simply says they went “into a house”—not that the star was shining on it, identifying it. We must be precise about what any given text under consideration actually asserts and does not assert. Two of the very best and renowned Protestant Bible commentators and exegetes of our time (R. T. France and ) agree:

R. T. France: It is not said to indicate the precise house, but the general location where the child was.

D. A. Carson: The Greek text does not imply that the star pointed out the house where Jesus was or that it led the travelers through twisty streets; it may simply have hovered over Bethlehem as the Magi approached it.

The Greek “adverb of place” in Matthew 2:9 is hou. In the RSV, hou is translated by “the place where” (in KJV, simply “where”). It applies to a wide range of meanings beyond something as specific as a house. In other passages in the RSV, it refers to a mountain (Matt 28:16), Nazareth (Luke 4:16), a village (Luke 24:28), the land of Midian (Acts 7:29), and the vast wilderness that Moses and the Hebrews traveled through (Heb. 3:9). Thus, it can easily, plausibly refer to “Bethlehem” in Matthew 2:9.

This is an important point because it goes to the issue of supernatural or natural. A “star” (whatever it is) shining a beam down on one house would be (I agree) supernatural—not any kind of “star” we know of in the natural world. But a star shining on an area, in the direction of an area (which a bright Jupiter was to Bethlehem in my scenario, at 68 degrees in the sky), is a perfectly natural event.

Matthew 2:9 is similar to how we would speak in English, “Where I was, I could see the conjunction very well.” “Where” obviously refers to a place. And one’s place is many things simultaneously. Thus, when I saw the “star of Bethlehem”-like conjunction in December 2020, I was in a field, near my house (in my neighborhood), in my town (Tecumseh), in my county (Lenawee), in my state (Michigan), and in my country (United States). This is my point about “place” in Matthew 2:9. It can mean larger areas, beyond just “house.” If the text doesn’t say specifically, “The star shone on the house,” then we can’t say for sure that this is what the text meant.

I have found eighteen other English Bible translations of Matthew 2:9 that also have “the place where” (Weymouth, Moffatt, Confraternity, Knox, NEB, REB, NRSV, Lamsa, Amplified, Phillips, TEV, NIV, Jerusalem, Williams, Beck, NAB, Kleist & Lilly, and Goodspeed). In all these cases, they are translating hou, literally meaning “where” but at the same time implying place (which is the “where” referred to). The Living Bible (a very modern paraphrase) has “standing over Bethlehem,” which bolsters my argument as well (because it doesn’t say “house”).

Remember the Bible’s cosmology. Stars weren’t light years away but were close enough to fall to the ground after the tribulation.

That was the initial Hebrew conception, yes (and we could delve into the philosophical, scientific Greeks and their ridiculous cosmology at the same time), and there is much non-literal poetic expression involved as well. But by this time, their pre-scientific knowledge (whatever they knew) was expressed phenomenologically, and God saw to it that it was accurate as far as it went (i.e., the words are in inspired revelation).

The author of Matthew could have easily imagined tiny stars moving like Tinker Bell (a fairy in Peter Pan who looks like a darting light) to direct the magi to the house where Jesus lived,

Yes, if he had seen Peter Pan on TV, but alas, he did not. And as I just proved at length, the text does not say that the star shone on a house.

but this doesn’t fit with magi supposedly knowledgeable enough to know how planetary motion actually worked.

No it doesn’t. The text as read, however, does fit in with a layman’s perspective of what retrograde motion produces: a seemingly stationary “star” (planet in this case). And we know that they had this knowledge at that time (whether Matthew and the Jews in general did or not), as ones who were stargazers and very aware of what was happening in the heavens.

So back to the title of this article: how did the Star of Bethlehem move like Tinker Bell? Answer: it didn’t. At least not with a natural interpretation, . . . 

I fully agree! It moved like Jupiter does, because it was Jupiter.

There is plenty of room to make a plausible skeptical case against Matthew’s nativity story.

And there is plenty of objective scientific data (from astronomical charts) for us to know where a bright Jupiter or conjunctions were in this general time-period. That can be determined. The much thornier question to work through is the year of Herod’s death, which gives us proposed chronologies of actual years. I get into that in my book as well (and elsewhere), but it’s too involved to enter into in this article.

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Photo credit: OpenClipart-Vectors (10-8-13) [Pixabay / Pixabay License]

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Summary: I elaborate upon several of the fascinating aspects of the story of the star of Bethlehem and interact with various (failed) objections from atheist Bob Seidensticker.